War on Poverty

177 results back to index


pages: 332 words: 89,668

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

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

David Torstensson, “Beyond the City: Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in Rural America,” Journal of Policy History vol. 25 no. 4 (2013): 587–613, at 593. 42. Ibid., 603. 43. Bailey and Duquette, “War on Poverty,” 360. 44. Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 57–58. 45. Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, “Combating NEED: Urban Conflict and the Transformations of the War on Poverty and the African American Freedom Struggle in Rocky Mount, North Carolina,” Journal of Urban History vol. 34 no. 4 (2008): 639–664, at 658. 46. Bailey and Duquette, “War on Poverty,” 367. 47. Bailey and Duquette, “War on Poverty,” 351; Robert Dallek, “Medicare’s Complicated Birth,” American Heritage vol. 60 no. 2 (2010): 28. 48.

Ultimately, federal expenditure on health, education, and welfare tripled.47 Finally, Congress and the Johnson administration in 1966 also expanded the scope of the minimum wage so that for the first time it applied to workers in industries doing more than $250,000 in business and to agricultural workers.48 ASSESSING THE WAR ON POVERTY Objectively, the War on Poverty was a success in the short run. The poverty rate in the United States declined from 19 percent in 1964 to its lowest point ever, 11 percent, in 1973.49 But while some of these programs were successful, they cost more than the public was willing to pay.50 The maximum tax rate for the highest earners was dropped from 91 percent to 70 percent, placing more of the burden of both the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War on the middle class.51 Johnson’s Great Society programs were also undermined by persistent racial divisions in the American working class.

By the 1960s, a concern with “pockets of poverty” in inner cities and Appalachia revived the discourse about inequality. Despite the expenses of a war in Vietnam, Democratic administrations pursued a “War on Poverty” that led to another period of policy experimentation. Medicare and Medicaid expanded the social safety net, and a number of community action agencies sought to involve poor people in providing their own services, but the characterization of the War on Poverty as a failure helped to stigmatize the poor. During the Nixon administration, the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance recommended a basic income guarantee for low-income Americans, the Family Assistance Plan.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Department of the Treasury, 253 Utah, 178 Vasquez, Mary, 180–181, 182–183, 292 Veterans, 86 Victoria, Queen, 70 Village Academy experimental high school, Pomona, California, 20–22 Wage protection, 12 Wages, low, 180–183, 292–294. See also Earned Income Tax Credit; Living wage; Minimum wage Wagner Act, 83 Walker, Scott, 180 Wallace, Ginny, 18, 20, 126 Wallace, Henry, 73 Wallis, Jim, 121, 196 Walmart, 180–183, 295–296, 297 War on Poverty, 75, 77, 78, 81, 86, 101 failure of, 205–213 War on Poverty, new, 121, 196–197, 198 Warren, Elizabeth, 88, 325 Washington, D. C., 103, 127 Washington State, 149, 250 Wealth accumulation of, 64–65 concentration of, 26–27, 32–34, 53–54 and tax cuts for the wealthy, 207 and tax increases on the wealthy, 39–40, 82, 287–288 Weber, Max, 64 Welfare, 12, 44–45 barriers to accessing, 105 (see also under Social programs) and benefit cuts, 117 and benefit levels, decline in, 105–110 See also individual social programs; Safety net; Social programs Welfare system, history of, 66–82 Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (King), 79 Williams, Mark and Theresa, 169–170 Wisconsin, 180 Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative (WWBI), 253 Women, 25, 82 Work trust fund, 201 Workers’ compensation, 71, 201 “Workfare for Food Stamps?”

But it did reflect a confidence in America’s innate sense of possibility; in an era of space travel and antibiotics, computers and robots, poverty was just one more frontier to be conquered, one more communal obstacle to be pushed aside. When it turned out to be an order of magnitude more complicated, Americans quickly grew tired of the effort. In 1968, four years after the War on Poverty was launched, Richard Nixon won election to the White House, in part by stoking popular resentment against welfare recipients. Twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected president on a platform of rolling back much of the Great Society. Today, after four decades during which tackling economic hardship took a distant backseat to other priorities, one in six Americans live below the poverty line, their lives as constricted and as difficult as those of the men, women, and children who peopled the pages of The Other America in the Kennedy era.

“The most important accomplishment of this period was the elimination of purchase prices as a barrier to participation,” wrote the social scientist Dennis Roth in a history of the food stamp program commissioned by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.8 LYNDON JOHNSON’S UNFINISHED WAR Although far from perfect, at its acme this inelegant safety net developed in the first three quarters of the twentieth century and, given a peculiar impetus by Johnson’s War on Poverty, did serve to limit hunger’s reach. In the early 1930s, when real per capita income in America had fallen by a third and when tens of millions of people had literally no income, New York City reported more than one hundred residents a year dying from hunger and related causes.9 Elsewhere, similar tales of starvation could be easily found.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Epperson, “Administering a Federal Policy: The Case of the Pittsburgh Poverty Program” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1975), 57; Ferman, Challenging the Growth Machine. 69. “The War on Poverty in Pittsburgh,” p. 14, box 126, folder 2, RHWPA. 70. Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, vol. 1, 106; Tracy Neumann, Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Epperson, “Administering a Federal Policy,” 155–157; “The War on Poverty in Pittsburgh,” p. 37, box 126, folder 2, RHWPA. 71. Snow, “Dreams Realized and Dreams Deferred.” 72. Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 270–301. 73.

And across the entire deindustrializing world, a wave of welfare state expansion followed in the immediate aftermath, as governments responded to these demands and sought to manage the appearance of new forms of poverty amid the postwar plenty.36 In the United States, we have not understood this political phenomenon as a single event but rather know it as a sequence: the War on Poverty, the Great Society, the urban uprisings, the welfare rights and Black Power movements, the Young Lords, labor’s rank-and-file rebellion, the fiscal crisis of the state, and stagflation. As displacement widened from a phenomenon confined to African Americans and Latinos across northern cities and white people in discrete pockets during the 1950s and 1960s to a general malady of the working class in the 1970s and 1980s, the problem expanded gradually from one of impoverished areas to a full-blown macroeconomic crisis.

They struggled persistently, but they struggled for inclusion within the structure of the postwar liberal order—seeking Black men’s admission to a blue-collar breadwinner status that was itself entering crisis. Black workers’ movements were thus confined by the same material limits as the liberal state itself, requiring a healthy industrial economy generating jobs whose distribution could be contested. Mobilizing for Survival When Pittsburgh’s War on Poverty began in 1965, it was a top-down affair. The mayor’s office had begun preparation for the program months ahead of the passage of federal legislation. As resentment about the high-handedness of the urban renewal program had grown, the influx of federal funds seemed an opportunity to rebalance but preserve the city’s Democratic machine by incorporating neighborhood-level leadership.68 Administrators selected a group of neighborhoods to target—some of them largely Black neighborhoods like the Hill and Homewood, and others more racially integrated, such as Hazelwood—and began implementing their diverse agenda: job training, day care, home and family aid, and more.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Martin Luther King Jr. being jailed in Alabama. The same month, September 1958, the devout Irish Catholic turned devout American socialist Michael Harrington would begin the US tour that inspired his searing exposé of the hidden poor, The Other America, which helped drive the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. After getting married, my father went to work as a writer and an editor at the nation’s oldest and largest Catholic textbook company, William H. Sadlier (cofounded by novelist Mary Anne Sadlier, who wrote novels to instruct and uplift Irish Catholic immigrants and was considered an Irish American counterpart to Harriet Beecher Stowe).

The latter would turn out to be the road not taken, in any of the major attempts to address poverty and exclusion (black or otherwise) during the next fifty years. Lyndon Johnson would largely deliver on the first demand with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but his War on Poverty played at the margins of the labor market. At first, a strong and growing economy seemed to make concerns about jobs passé; unemployment was dropping. What few people noticed, though, was the decline in jobs for people without higher education, the result of automation and off-shoring. Johnson’s spending on the war would also make a big jobs initiative fiscally impossible.

Harrington and Moynihan proposed a public works program, which Wirtz supported. But the Labor Department’s public works jobs proposals all carried price tags of $3 billion to $5 billion; Johnson couldn’t spend anything like that, with war spending climbing. In fact, the budget he submitted for 1965, the year he launched the War on Poverty, actually contained a slight cut to poverty programs. Instead, he chose Sargent Shriver’s approach—”a hand up, not a handout”—with programs such as job training and education, legal services, and Head Start, intended to ready the poor to take advantage of opportunity, rather than creating opportunities for them.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

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

During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, which were boom times for the rich, the poverty rate in cities grew.”35 The goal here is not to solely criticize Reagan or Republicans. It is to chart the War on Poverty’s timeline and pinpoint the myopic moment when anti-poor rhetoric and subsequent legislation turned stereotypical, vicious, and punitive. Reagan was more than the general who waved the white flag of surrender in the War on Poverty; he actually initiated the “War on Welfare.” He was also the architect of “trickle-down” economics—a theory based on the false notion that tax policies that benefit the wealthy will magically lift the poor.

In the Census Bureau’s history of tracking poverty statistics, the Great Recession marked the fourth period of consecutive annual increases in 52 years. POVERTY TIMELINE Year Poverty Percent 1959 22.4 percent Official tracking of the country’s poverty rate begins 1964 19.0 percent President Lyndon B. Johnson declares “War on Poverty” 1969 13.7 percent Johnson’s Great Society efforts help reduce poverty 1973 11.1 percent National poverty rate at an almost 20-year low 1979 12.4 percent Vietnam War, Conservative backlash, poverty ticks up 1983 15.2 percent A recession from mid-1981 to late 1982 takes its toll on the poor 1989 13.1 percent Economy steadies, poverty rate drops in Ronald Reagan’s 2nd term 1992 14.5 percent Reagan drastically slashes government benefit programs, poverty rises 1993 15.1 percent Ten-year gains reversed; Poverty back to 1983 level 1994 14.5 percent Economy perks, poverty level slightly reduced 1996 13.7 percent Poverty rate drops, Clinton introduces drastic welfare reform efforts 2000 11.3 percent Poverty rates fall dramatically due mostly to the opulent 1990s 2007 12.5 percent Poverty ticks up, 37.3 million in poverty before the recession begins 2008 13.2 percent Another 2.5 million fall below the poverty line 2009 14.3 percent 6.3 million more in poverty since 2007 2010 15.1 percent The largest percentage of long-term poor in five decades Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959 to 2010 The biggest blows to the already shrinking middle class were record unemployment and a housing bubble that burst, resulting in the foreclosure of nearly 4 million homes.

Michael Harrington’s classic The Other America (1962) forced many Americans to grapple with the conundrum that a country celebrated for its opulence had such glaring income disparities.13 Harrington’s landmark study of poverty in America has been credited as the motivation behind President Johnson’s Great Society policies. Although it was President John F. Kennedy who first came in possession of the book, it was Johnson who used it as a guide for his self-proclaimed “War on Poverty” after Kennedy’s assassination. Harrington’s book was so influential that the Boston Globe and other newspapers wrote that Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and the expanded Social Security benefits were all traceable to The Other America.14 The number of families who earned enough to rise out of poverty peaked at 68 percent in 1969.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

In his first State of the Union message, on January 8, 1964, President Johnson declared his now-famous “unconditional War on Poverty in America.” The most important thing to understand about the War on Poverty is that it reduced poverty. Victory was not complete, unconditional, or even sufficient, of course, and poverty remains real and scandalous. The War on Poverty stalled in the late 1970s, and poverty has worsened in recent years, as it always does following economic downturns. But the War on Poverty’s core achievements have more or less endured, including in the face of rising economic inequality. Even in the shadow of the Great Recession, poverty is by any measure both narrower and shallower than in the past, and abject poverty remains unrecognizably less broad or deep.

Fisher, “Estimates of the Poverty Population Under the Current Official Definition for Years Before 1959,” mimeograph, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1986. By one estimate: See Christine Ross, Sheldon Danziger, and Eugene Smolensky, “The Level and Trend of Poverty in the United States, 1939–1979,” Demography 24, no. 4 (November 1987): 589. War on Poverty: See, e.g., “Johnson State of Union Address Provides Budget $97.9 Billion, War on Poverty, Atomic Cutback,” New York Times, January 9, 1964, accessed August 11, 2018, www.nytimes.com/1964/01/09/archives/johnson-state-of-union-address-provides-budget-of-979-billion-war.html. Thorstein Veblen: John Patrick Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 33, 135.

Values follow facts, and the new elite self-consciously embraces industry and understands itself as hardworking. Today, it is Bertie Wooster’s unapologetic unemployment that is difficult to imagine. Furthermore, economic inequality’s center of gravity has moved up the income scale. At midcentury, an urgent crisis led President Lyndon Johnson to declare a War on Poverty. Today, even as inequality increases, poverty is both rarer and less severe (although it of course endures). And whereas in the past, including at midcentury, inequality centered on the wretchedness and social exclusion of the poor, it now centers on the extravagance and privilege of the elite.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Dauphin – the town with no poverty – was one of five guaranteed income experiments in North America. The other four were all conducted in the U.S. Few people today are aware that the U.S. was just a hair’s breadth from realizing a social safety net at least as extensive as those in most Western European countries. When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “War on Poverty” in 1964, Democrats and Republicans alike rallied behind fundamental welfare reforms. First, however, some trial runs were needed. Tens of millions of dollars were budgeted to provide a basic income for more than 8,500 Americans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Indiana, Seattle, and Denver in what were also the first-ever large-scale social experiments to distinguish experimental and control groups.

Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.46 Futile, Dangerous, and Perverse “It Can Be Done! Conquering Poverty in America by 1976,” Nobel Prize winner James Tobin confidently wrote in 1967. At that time, almost 80% of Americans supported a guaranteed basic income.47 Years later, Ronald Reagan would famously sneer, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia).

Any further necessary funds can be raised by taxing assets, waste, raw materials, and consumption. Let’s look at the numbers. Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, according to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations.48 That’s roughly a quarter of U.S. military spending. Winning the war on poverty would be a bargain compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which a Harvard study estimated have cost us a staggering $4–$6 trillion.49 As a matter of fact, all the world’s developed countries had it within their means to wipe out poverty years ago.50 And yet, a system that helps solely the poor only drives a deeper wedge between them and the rest of society.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Obama and, 25, 38, 81–84, 91, 96, 127, 175n12 poll taxes and, 58, 65 Reagan and, xii, 22–23, 35, 38, 44, 53, 83, 95, 104, 129, 142–143, 171n27 Republicans and, 19 (see also Republicans) Senate and, 19, 52–53, 59, 62–66, 72, 74, 80–84, 96–97, 107, 123 shopping and, 67–69 Southern Strategy and, 15, 27, 35, 81, 117, 142 state legislatures and, 19, 62–63, 95 Truman and, 81 Trump and, xii, 66, 81–82, 92, 154, 174n11 War on Drugs and, x, xv–xvi, 15, 27, 37–38, 53, 55, 104, 106, 110, 132 War on Poverty and, 17, 27, 126 Poll taxes, 58, 65 Pollution, 84 Popular vote, 62, 96 Poverty children and, 157 cross-country comparison and, 149 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 15 growing, 116 inner cities and, 13, 131–132 low-wage sector and, 27, 35, 39–40 persistent, 44 public education and, 116–117, 123–124, 126 War on Poverty and, 17, 27, 126, 168n2 Powell, Lewis ALEC and, 19 memo of, 83 neoliberalism of, 21 Memo of, 17–18, 77, 169n6 Nixon and, 27 U.S.

Reluctant to raise taxes soon after the Kennedy tax cut of the previous year and lacking congressional support as well, he overheated the economy and put great pressure on the value of the dollar, fixed at that time by the Bretton Woods system that regulated international commerce after the Second World War. The postwar dollar shortage turned into a dollar glut.1 President Nixon set himself up in opposition to Johnson. He won election to the presidency through a Southern Strategy that appealed to Southern racism and opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. He abandoned Johnson’s War on Poverty and declared a War on Drugs in 1971. He also abandoned the fixed exchange rate of the Bretton Woods system to deal with the strain on the dollar exerted by the expanding war in Vietnam.2 Nixon switched the United States to a floating exchange rate, transferring responsibility for the domestic economy from the federal government, which controls fiscal policy, to the Federal Reserve System, which controls monetary policy.

They were the heirs of slave owners who resorted to Jim Crow policies after Reconstruction ended to preserve their political power. Their policy was to maintain African Americans in the South in a subordinate position.1 The low-wage sector—like the FTE sector—was born in 1971 as President Nixon replaced Johnson’s War on Poverty with a new War on Drugs and appointed Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. As the War on Drugs expanded in subsequent decades, it was enforced far more strongly for African Americans than for whites, becoming, in Alexander’s widely used term, the “New Jim Crow,” revamping and renewing the racist intent of the repressive old anti-black Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction in the South.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Dylan Matthews, “Poverty in the 50 Years since ‘the Other America,’ in Five Charts,” Wonkblog (blog), Washington Post, July 11, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts. 89. Robert Samuelson, “How We Won—and Lost—the War on Poverty,” Real Clear Politics, January 13, 2014, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/13/how_we_won_--_and_lost_--_the_war_on_poverty_121197.html. 90. David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp, 6–7. Chapter 5: Geography of Inequality 1. Encyclopæedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Vidal de La Blache, Paul,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/627886/Paul-Vidal-de-La-Blache. 2.

Dylan Matthews, “Poverty in the 50 Years since ‘the Other America,’ in Five Charts,” Wonkblog (blog), Washington Post, July 11, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts; Mark Hugo Lopez and Gabriel Velasco, “Childhood Poverty Among Hispanics Sets Record, Leads Nation,” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, September 28, 2011, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2011/09/28/childhood-poverty-among-hispanics-sets-record-leads-nation. 12. Robert Samuelson, “How We Won—and Lost—the War on Poverty,” RealClearPolitics, January 13, 2014, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/13/how_we_won_—_and_lost_—_the_war_on_poverty_121197.html. 13. Glenn Hubbard, “The Unemployment Puzzle: Where Have All the Workers Gone?” Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2014. 14. Eurostat, “Euro Area Unemployment Rate at 12.0%,” news release, January 31, 2014, http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-31012014-AP/EN/3-31012014-AP-EN.PDF; Eurostat, “Labour Force Survey Overview 2012,” http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Labour_force_survey_overview_2012; Max Tholl, “Home Is Where the Hardship Is,” European, May 7, 2014, http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/max-tholl—2/8433-europes-lost-generation. 15.

The emergence of a “politics of happiness,” as one British author puts it, has proven a boon for the public sector and those parts of the private sector that work with government.24 Just as the Second World War sparked the growth of federally funded science for defense purposes, the onset of the Great Society two decades later gave birth to what the socialist writer Michael Harrington would dub “the social-industrial complex.”25 Harrington, whose writings, notably The Other America, helped usher in the “war on poverty,” lived to witness the extraordinary expansion of the social welfare state. Between 1950 and 1980, social welfare spending grew twentyfold, ten times the rate of the population increase. Such spending may have ameliorated some of the worst results of poverty and discrimination, but Harrington perceived that the largest beneficiaries were not the poor but those—both inside and outside government—who serviced them.26 In essence, the private sector increasingly sought to make addressing social problems “the new business of business,” as one top IBM executive put it.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

In 1932, he thought that “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and … the arena of the heart and head will be occupied where it belongs, or reoccupied by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.”51 No longer did leaders accept the ancient nostrum that the poor will always be with us. Poverty was especially deviant in an affluent society. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which launched Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty, aimed to eliminate “the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty.” Affluence was as much an ideology as a description of U.S. society. Politicians and academics forgot that the non-poor included many who were non-rich. Workers’ incomes had dramatically increased after the war. The median family income for 1968 was $8,632, when it had been $3,031 in 1947.

And, only the first two parties have a Presidential candidate in the coming election. Millions of patriotic Democrats were disenfranchised in the takeover of their convention.”41 If Nixon knew he must fish in Democratic waters, McGovern floundered. He had replaced Eagleton with the popular Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of President Kennedy and former head of the War on Poverty. Shriver was an able campaigner, a Chicagoan, and friend of Mayor Daley, but the stench of the Eagleton affair could not be removed. The conscientious Larry O’Brien, even though denied his spot at the DNC, continued to work for the McGovern campaign. As if to confirm Reagan’s analysis, O’Brien noticed that nowhere did the word Democrat appear in McGovern’s campaign literature.

Congressman Ford had represented the area around Grand Rapids, in western Michigan. Well-liked by his peers in the Congress, he defeated Indiana’s Charles Halleck for minority leader in 1965, gaining the votes of liberal Republicans. Ford was more conservative than these backers. He had opposed the War on Poverty and supported the war in Vietnam. Nixon had wanted him to be his vice president in 1968, but Ford preferred to work instead toward becoming a future Speaker of the House. Nixon named him vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned.37 When Ford became president in August 1974, reducing inflation was at the top of his agenda, even though the rate had been falling the whole year while unemployment was rising.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Voltaire W Wachovia wage-and-price controls wage incentives wages minimum wage wage subsidies proposal Wall Street The Wall Street Journal Walras, Leon Walton, Sam Wang Laboratories Wanniski, Jude War Labor Board War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) War Production Board War on Poverty Warsh, David Washington, D.C. Washington Mutual WASPs The Way the World Works (Jude Wanniski) wealth and the rich, attacks on material progress and mobility and wealth effects The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith), wedge effect of taxes Wedgewood Benn, Welfare, demand reduction and fraud growth of history of housing ideology of inflation and recipients of in Massachusetts proper goal of reform of war on poverty and work requirement for welfare culture Welfare (Martin Anderson) West Africans West Indians Westinghouse, George White House widows Wildavsky, Aaron Wilshire Associates Wilson, David B.

Of course,” he notes, rather impatiently, “there are still exceptions,” but “their small number [as if exceptional riches could ever be commonplace] only proves the rule” of economic sclerosis.6 This mode of thinking also sometimes afflicts conservatives when they have been sufficiently trained in the social sciences. In the late 1970s, Martin Anderson, an economist who wrote speeches for both President Nixon and Ronald Reagan, began his book Welfare by declaring, “The ‘war on poverty’ that began in 1964 has been won.”7 He quoted the conclusion of Alice Rivlin, head of the Congressional Budget Office, that the combination of expanded welfare payments and in-kind benefits had effectively lifted all but a very small proportion (6.4 percent) of Americans above the poverty line.

Income distribution may indeed be skewed, conservatives could sing, but what other system in the history of the world—what system that continues to admit immigrants in huge numbers, what system that embraces some 300 million souls across a giant continent—could ever have succeeded in raising its lowest ranks of earners above a line of poverty that exceeded the median family income of the Soviet Union by perhaps $1,000 a year? Blacks may still be low on the pole of earnings, it is said, but even they have made great progress since the massive social programs of the 1960s were put into place. The war on poverty, we are to believe, has been won by income redistribution. Yet here again we see the blindness of the social scientist to realities that are blatantly evident to the naked eye. What actually happened since 1964 was a vast expansion of the welfare rolls that halted in its tracks an ongoing improvement in the lives of the poor, particularly blacks, and left behind—and here I choose my words as carefully as I can—a wreckage of broken lives and families worse than the aftermath of slavery.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Had the leading economic policy makers of the early 1960s situated prevailing anti–population growth views within their Keynesian “new economics”—and had population activists engaged the new economics—the economic case against population growth might have survived the collision with the two diametrically opposed forces that eventually overwhelmed it: (1) a pervasive fear of ecological destruction by a “population bomb,” and (2) an ascendant adoration of population growth among economic conservatives. The Demographic Bubble, Structural Unemployment, and the War on Poverty Among domestic policy makers, the most pressing demographic topic was whether the large cohort of Americans born since World War II—the “demographic bubble”—posed a threat to the economy and high quality of life. Policy makers primarily thought about the bulging Baby Boom cohort in terms of its employment effects. The activist employment policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the War on Poverty’s emphasis on youth were in large measure an effort to respond to the demographic bubble.

President Johnson’s January 1964 economic message to Congress embraced the idea, warning of the combination of population increase and rising output per worker driven by automation.41 Apprehension of the structural unemployment resulting from the Baby Boomers turning eighteen was thus important to the general zeitgeist surrounding Johnson’s War on Poverty. More specifically, the Youth Corps reemerged in the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, the legislative cornerstone of the Great Society.42 The War on Poverty emphasized youth not only because, as historian Irwin Unger wrote, it was “the group among the poor who seemed most salvageable and most promising,” but also because it was the group growing the fastest.43 Yet while the stress on the Baby Boom cohort’s employment prospects was easily translatable into public policies, it also conveyed the impression that the sum total of the “population problem” in the United States was managing the Baby Boom generation’s entrance into adulthood.

As always, the demographic debate was about more than birthrates and sheer numbers of people; made manifest in diverse policy discussions, it encapsulated several interconnected issues related to the age, geographical location, and racial distribution of the population. Disparate population concerns left their mark not only on the development of federal contraception policy—the era’s best-known “population policy”—but also on macroeconomic and employment policy, the “War on Poverty,” and immigration reform. Nervousness about the economic fortunes of Baby Boom- 136 chapter 5 ers—and the macroeconomic effects of the Baby Boom cohort—added momentum for the state to pursue a “high-pressure” economy managed along Keynesian lines, broadened the base of support for family planning programs, and ensured immigration reform was designed to not increase the total population.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

There would be the beginning of attacks on the certainty and on the trust that peoples had put in Keynesian countercyclical policies and in the benefits that had been expected to come from the larger role of the state in the economy, the role that had been introduced by President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the United States and by similar and, at times, more ambitious programs in other, especially European, countries. In future years some critics would point out that several trillion dollars had been spent fighting poverty in the United States, but, a half-century later, the official poverty rate in that country was still as high as it had been in the 1960s when the War on Poverty programs had been enacted. However, while the officially measured poverty rate in the United States had remained high, after some decline in the first few years immediately following the introduction of the War on Poverty, there are some reasons to believe that particular factors may have distorted the statistical results, thus hiding some of the progress that had been made on that score.

He was reported to have declared that “[he had] never known a man who was known as an economist and who understood so little economics,” as he believed that Beveridge did (cited in Wapshott, 2011, p. 227). In this Welfare Policies 43 he may have shared, to some limited extent, Keynes’s own view, in the judgment of the architect of the creation of the British welfare state. The “War on Poverty” in the United States, the social programs that were introduced by President Johnson some years later (in 1964), and similar programs introduced in France, in the Scandinavian countries, and in some other countries were all examples of the ongoing, dramatic changes in economic thinking that had taken place since the 1920s, and of the growing optimism about what could be achieved with government policies.

A growing number of economists had come to believe that democratically elected, benevolent governments, with significant public resources, aided by competent and honest bureaucracies, and advised by clever economists, would be able to deliver on this objective. It should be noted that, by this time, the governments of most advanced countries had extended the voting rights to most adult citizens including women. President Johnson’s War on Poverty had, to some extent, delivered on a wish expressed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt a couple decades earlier in a “fireside chat” in January 1944 (the year before his death). The fireside chat might in turn have been influenced, or inspired, by the Beveridge Report, of which President Roosevelt would have been aware.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

They pushed for a minimum wage for all when virtually all union wages were well above the minimum, national health care when most union members had private health-care plans, workplace health and safety regulations when unionized members were most able to protect themselves, and the War on Poverty when most of their members were well above the poverty line. Unions were, as the saying went, “the people who brought you the weekend.” In the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Lyndon Johnson ushered in the Great Society, the New Deal’s second act. Within two years, Johnson had engineered Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty, which he confidently predicted would eliminate destitution in America within ten years. All of this would be painlessly and automatically financed by continual strong economic growth, because the progressive income tax brackets generated proportionally greater government revenues as people’s incomes rose.

As whites moved up the job and economic ladder, it created space for African Americans and other minorities to move into jobs and even neighborhoods that had excluded them in the past. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders argued that poverty was a burden on the whole economy and that when black workers earned more they spent more, generating more income for everyone. The civil rights movement and President Johnson’s War on Poverty program could not have achieved what they did without the expanding demand for workers and rising opportunities for everyone in the 1960s. There was backlash, of course, against racial integration, especially of schools and housing. The right wing smeared the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy, but the movement persevered and ultimately prevailed.

This decision not to recommend a general tax increase in 1966 was the critical decision that set the economic system into a prolonged period of chaos, from which it has still not recovered.”5 Among those who immediately saw the danger was Martin Luther King Jr. As King understood, the issue was not just money. The United States lacked the moral and political capital to fight the War on Poverty at home and a war on Asian peasants in Vietnam. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America,” he said in 1967.6 Vietnam was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”7 King was criticized by many liberals for endangering public support for domestic reform by linking it to foreign policy.


pages: 261 words: 78,884

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

More programs targeting poor families were passed as part of Johnson’s Great Society and its War on Poverty than at any other time in American history. Congress made the fledgling Food Stamp Program permanent (although the program grew dramatically during the 1970s under President Richard Nixon) and increased federal funds for school breakfasts and lunches, making them free to children from poor families. Social Security was expanded to better serve the poorest of its claimants, Head Start was born, and new health insurance programs for the poor (Medicaid) and elderly (Medicare) were created. What the War on Poverty did not do was target the cash welfare system (by then renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) for expansion.

It was Wilson who first observed, famously, that a poor child fared worse when she grew up among only poor neighbors than she would have if she’d been raised in a neighborhood that included members of the middle class, too. Wilson argued that the reason poverty had persisted in America even in the face of the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 was that in the 1970s and 1980s, poor African Americans had become increasingly isolated, relegated to sections of the city where their neighbors were more and more likely to be poor, and less and less likely to find gainful employment. For Wilson, it was the rise of joblessness among a black “ghetto underclass” that had left poverty rates so stubbornly high despite billions spent on antipoverty efforts.

Shedding light on the lives of the poor from New York to Appalachia to the Deep South, Harrington’s book asked how it was possible that so much poverty existed in a land of such prosperity. It challenged the country to ask what it was prepared to do about it. Prompted in part by the strong public reaction to The Other America, and just weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America.” In his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson lamented that “many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both.” He charged the country with a new task: to uplift the poor, “to help replace their despair with opportunity.”


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Shutdown furloughs may turn into layoffs, as elected officials, now marketing survival as the new American Dream, will assure us we did fine without them. The nonessential worker is the archetypal hire. Our worst-case scenarios are simply scenarios. Socioeconomic Astigmatism In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty. Over the next half century, that war turned into a war on the poor. This war was once disguised as “compassionate conservatism” and debated with words like “responsibility” and “opportunity.” Compassionate conservatism assumed that we could take care of ourselves so we did not need to take care of each other.

After stating that the point of a college degree was not a “first job” but “a lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change,” she recounted her own experience. She wrote in a letter to The New York Times: I graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, and my first job was working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My starting salary was low, but I was inspired by the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty to regard public service as an important calling. I went on to graduate school, joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and ultimately became the president of Harvard University. Should Bryn Mawr have been judged based on what I was paid in my first year at HUD? Faust’s is an inspiring tale—and one beyond the comprehension of most young graduates in America today.

Perhaps that is why the city’s corporate venues—like its high-end golf club, hockey arena, football stadium, and over half of the city’s commercial and industrial users—still have their water running despite owing over $30 million, while its most impoverished residents have their water, and their rights, taken away. In Detroit, corporations are people. Their worth is unquestioned because it is measured in dollars. The worth of the residents of Detroit is measured in utility, and so their utilities are denied. War on Poverty Human rights may be guaranteed by law, but one’s humanity is never a given. The U.S. was built on the labor of slaves considered three-fifths of a person. Today, one’s relative humanity—and the rights that accompany it—is shaped by race, class, gender, and geography. Citizens may be subject to the same written laws, but they are not equally subject to the same punishments and practices.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Not until discussion about AFDC and then the “welfare backlash” of the 1980s and 1990s do we again find African Americans incorporated in any substantive way into the narrative, and then it is largely as objects of white and elite animus.1 To use one crude measure, in the index of Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, which is among the most widely admired histories of American poverty and welfare (and rightly so), the first entry for “blacks” is on page 181, where they appear in a two-page discussion about housing, school segregation, and race riots (there is no listing for African Americans). The only other entries reference a handful of pages on blacks and the New Deal, the war on poverty, and AFDC—altogether, 7 pages in a text with 334, or 2 percent of the total.2 Walter Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State does better, offering references to minister George Whitfield’s early efforts to bring slaves into his fold with free education programs (or, less charitably put, with efforts at indoctrination); discrimination against blacks in the early years of the antituberculosis campaigns; black infant mortality; African Americans and the formative juvenile justice system; and then to the New Deal, urban riots in the 1960s, and the civil rights movement, giving us indexed references to a total of 29 out of 395 pages of text, 7 percent of the total.

There is in each community a definite standard of living, and that charitable relief is concerned, not with raising or lowering it, but rather with eliminating the obstacles which particular individuals have in realizing the standard, and in securing the withdrawal from the industrial class of those who are unfit for a place in it. The WPA set its own line in 1937, as did a Joint Congressional Committee in 1949. CIO president Walter Reuther proposed a line of $3,000 in 1953, the amount coincidentally adopted a dozen years later by Lyndon Johnson to help measure the success of his war on poverty. In the same year, Rose Friedman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute argued for an alternative measure, one that would have been about 30 percent lower.11 Whether it’s Hull House’s efforts in the late 1800s and early 1900s (inspired, like Hunter, by Britain’s Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree), or more recent attempts by economic historians to measure poverty in Revolutionary-era New England or the post–Civil War South, all efforts to establish an absolute poverty line should be viewed with suspicion, taken on their own terms, and judged to be, at best, reasoned estimates—a healthy skepticism we should also apply to our more recent, and supposedly more “scientific,” efforts.

Even in those states that passed maximum hour and other child-labor laws in the mid-1800s, little changed since such laws were rarely enforced. 61 Spargo, Bitter Cry of the Children, 172–73. 62 S.J. Kleinberg, “Children’s and Mothers’ Wage Labor in Three Eastern U.S. Cities, 1880–1920,” Social Science History 29, no. 1 (spring 2005): 45–76. 63 Kleinberg, Widows and Orphans First, 60. 64 Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon, 2005), 11. 65 Dodson, Don’t Call Us Out of Name. 5. Love: Women and Children First 1 Mark Robert Rank, One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “Welfare Use as a Life Course Event,” Social Work 47, no. 3 (July 2002).


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

And there lies the problem with federal spending on poverty, or government investments in ideas meant to cure its worst features. The powerful desire among outsiders to live in the United States is a certain signal that the War on Poverty was long ago won such that the spending isn’t necessary. Worse, all government programs develop constituencies. The jobs of individuals who vote are on the line. So even though the calculated rate of poverty4 is the same as it was when the war began, spending on that which, at least statistically, doesn’t work, and that really isn’t necessary, continues. In short, the alleged War on Poverty has failed, yet trillions continue to be spent on it. In the private sector such a war would have ended in bankruptcy long ago; that, or the strategy for fighting the problem would have long since changed.

When politicians spend, they have an unlimited source of funds—you, me, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison—to tap. They can continue to support that which doesn’t work. Stated simply, businesses disappear on a daily basis, but government programs are generally forever. Since the federal government’s “War on Poverty” began, in the 1960s, more than $16 trillion has been spent on the battle.3 Yet, it seems that both liberals and conservatives miss the real story here. A more reasoned analysis, one driven by market signals, would strongly conclude that the United States conquered poverty back in the nineteenth century.

It exists to lend taxpayer funds to foreign companies interested in buying U.S. exports. Since reaching the White House, Obama has changed his position on the Bank. As of this writing, even a Republican-controlled Congress is still struggling to fully close this monument to crony capitalism. The existence of Ex-Im, along with the TVA and the War on Poverty, shows why supply-siders are so wrong when they sell income tax cuts to the political class as a way to get politicians more money to spend. That all three programs and subsidies still exist is a reminder that surging federal revenues morph into a major tax on future growth as politicians divine new ways to spend the money; the ideas hatched are exceedingly difficult to sunset.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

That David Lilienthal, trained as a lawyer, headed both these innovative agencies testified to the increasing priority put on administrative skill rather than narrowly defined technical knowledge.48 Beyond the New Deal, World War II was pivotal in promoting more rational state planning and the greater administrative expertise needed to implement it. When Hubert Humphrey laid out a liberal social agenda for the United States in his 1964 book, War on Poverty, he urged a transfer of “our genius for planning and management,” which had successfully met wartime “attacks from both sides of the globe,” to “fight[ing] the war on poverty.”49 Logue shared Humphrey’s conviction. As early as 1948, in a speech to the American Veterans Committee, he said, “To some people, planning is a bogey; but all veterans are familiar with it; it operates on all levels, sometimes it is good and sometimes bad, but all of us would agree it is necessary.”50 Even as it became clear that a new kind of expert was emerging to oversee urban redevelopment, there was no common label for this budding role.

Experimenting with job training and placement, prekindergarten education, legal assistance, community schools and health centers, tutoring, adult literacy, juvenile delinquency prevention, and other programs, CPI was widely recognized as the incubator for many of the community action programs—such as the Job Corps, Head Start, and Neighborhood Legal Services—that would become signatures of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) national War on Poverty by the mid-1960s. From its inception in 1962 until 1966, CPI was headed by Mitchell “Mike” Sviridoff, a pal of Logue’s going back to his union-organizing days at Yale.4 Born in the same working-class neighborhood of New Haven as Dick Lee, Sviridoff, like Lee, could not afford college upon graduating high school and so headed into the labor force, where he became a sheet metal worker on the assembly line of United Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut.

Lee closed his statement to the commission with an exhortation to the entire nation to do more “to make our cities showplaces of democracy.”42 Harris, for his part, declared, “As long as we have officials sitting back drawing up plans for our neighborhoods,” they are not “involving the people like it’s supposed to be in a so-called democratic society.”43 President Johnson’s Community Action Program, the centerpiece of his War on Poverty, had raised democratic expectations even higher for Harris and his peers by requiring “maximum feasible participation” of citizens in formulating social programs. It is worth noting that another uninvited speaker at the hearings, a conservative New Haven resident named Stephen J. Papa, also called for more listening “to the people who know the needs of the people in New Haven” to stem the tide of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

On that issue, the Inequality Narrative has nothing to say. The Welfare State To credit the welfare state with creating a growing middle class requires us to ignore some basic facts of history. Until 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson launched his so-called Great Society programs and the “War on Poverty,” the only significant welfare program was the Social Security Act of 1935, and it wasn’t until the end of the post-war era that a substantial number of Americans were receiving Social Security retirement checks.25 Moreover, the money paid out by Social Security could not have created or even expanded the middle class since Social Security payments were mainly financed by taxes on the middle class.

The effects of this inversion go far beyond stripping productive individuals of their wealth—although it’s disturbing how little that counts for today. It also discourages many people from even attempting to become self-supporting and self-directing. Nowhere are the welfare state’s corrosive effects on opportunity more clear than in its so-called War on Poverty. The list of anti-poverty programs is long, amounting to 126 separate programs at the federal level alone, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, housing subsidies, work-training programs, child care subsidies, Medicaid, and much more. Spending on these and state and local programs is enormous, amounting to nearly $1 trillion a year.52 The first thing to observe about these anti-poverty programs is that they haven’t ended poverty—at least not poverty as the government defines it.

(The absolute poverty we see in Haiti and Uganda was eliminated in the West long before the welfare state. When we speak about poverty in advanced countries we are talking about relative poverty.) The official poverty measure shows that the poverty rate remains about where it was when Lyndon B. Johnson launched his War on Poverty in the mid-1960s. That is somewhat misleading, however. Experts are in general agreement that the government’s official poverty measure overstates poverty, and that better assessments suggest that poverty has been cut in half over the last fifty years.53 What’s more, most of the people the government classifies as “poor” live relatively comfortable lives.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

They would swell: “Figure 20 B: Total Pell Grant Expenditures and Number of Recipients, 1977–78 to 2017–2018.” In Sandy Baum, Jennifer Ma, Matea Pender, and C. J. Libassi (New York: CollegeBoard, 2018), 27. According to one sympathetic account: Christopher Jencks, “Did We Lose the War on Poverty?—II,” New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015. Jencks cites a chapter by Bridget Terry Long in Legacies of the War on Poverty, edited by Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013). the largest collector of Pell Grant tuition: Tamar Lewin, “Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-Profit Colleges,” New York Times, November 24, 2010.

Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil. On top of those conflicts, the United States has had two massive domestic policy programs that mobilized public resources and sentiments so thoroughly that they were presented to the public as what the philosopher and psychologist William James called a “moral equivalent of war”: the War on Poverty in the 1960s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s and ’90s. Both were mere battlefronts in a larger struggle over race relations. The reinterpretation of America’s entire history and purpose in light of its race problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years. The scholar Derrick Bell described the quarter-century after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision Brown v.

White House counsel Clark Clifford saw “a pattern for a kind of life that the people of all Southeast Asia can begin to enjoy . . . So what the president wants to make is a demonstration.” The sociologist and Johnson advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan was eager to use the military draft as an engine of upward mobility for blacks and the poor. By the summer of 1966, it was evident that the two Johnson wars, on poverty and in Vietnam, were set to open up a vast deficit that would make inflation inevitable. Johnson, with his cabinet’s help, bought time with various accounting tricks and falsifications. A year later, McNamara, speaking privately to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, was unrepentant. “Do you really think,” McNamara asked, “that if I had estimated the cost of the war correctly, Congress would have given any more for schools and housing?”


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Cavanagh’s election was almost accidental: he was supported by an unlikely alliance of African Americans and white neighborhood groups, both alienated (for different reasons) by Miriani’s equivocal, middle-of-the-road position on race and housing.8 Under Cavanagh, who astutely lobbied government officials for assistance, War on Poverty dollars flooded into Detroit. Detroit was second only to New York in the amount of federal dollars that it received in the 1960s. But officials channeled government assistance down familiar routes and established programs that did not fundamentally deviate from the limited agenda that social welfare, labor, and civil rights groups had set in the 1950s. By and large, War on Poverty programs embodied the conventional wisdom of mainstream economists and social welfare advocates, and focused on behavioral modification as the solution to poverty.

Jackson has argued in his seminal article on antipoverty policy in the 1960s, was that they “failed to eliminate income poverty or reduce income inequality [or] to increase the aggregate supply of jobs in urban and other labor markets.” The education, job training, and youth programs that were at the heart of the War on Poverty in Detroit were built on the same premises and suffered many of the same limitations as the previous generation of ad hoc programs. None responded adequately to deindustrialization and discrimination.9 Simultaneous with the organized protest of civil rights groups were spontaneous outbursts of violent resistance on the streets of Detroit.

“The close identification of the Democratic party with the cause of racial justice,” argues Allen Matusow, “did it special injury.”16 Jonathan Rieder contends that the 1960s rebellion of the “silent majority” was in part a response to “certain structural limitations of liberal reform,” especially “black demands” that “ran up against the limits of liberalism.”17 Wallace’s meteoric rise seems to sustain Thomas and Mary Edsall’s argument that the Alabama independent “captured the central political dilemma of racial liberalism and the Democratic party: the inability of Democrats to provide a political home for those whites who felt they were paying—unwillingly—the largest ‘costs’ in the struggle to achieve an integrated society.”18 The Edsalls, Rieder, and Matusow, although they correctly emphasize the importance of white discontent as a national political force, err in their overemphasis on the role of the Great Society and the sixties rebellions in the rise of the “silent majority.” To view the defection of whites from Democratic ranks simply as a reaction to the War on Poverty, civil rights, and black power movements ignores racial cleavages that shaped local politics in the north well before the tumult of the 1960s. Urban antiliberalism had deep roots in a simmering politics of race and neighborhood defensiveness that divided northern cities well before George Wallace began his first speaking tours in the Snowbelt, well before Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, well before the long, hot summers of Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit, and well before affirmative action and busing began to dominate the civil rights agenda.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

That was Dwight Macdonald writing in the New Yorker, in an influential review of Michael Harrington’s even more influential 1962 book The Other America. The book, a document of poverty in the midst of plenty, is credited in part with inspiring President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Free school lunches were mandated in 1962 as part of that War on Poverty, which also introduced food stamps. But there was no federal funding to back up the free lunch mandate for four years after it first appeared. That came with the 1966 Child Nutrition Act. Federal War on Poverty programs required a national standard for determining who was poor. So it was that in the mid-1960s, home economist Mollie Orshansky invented the federal poverty line.

Serena had been a picky eater, fond of candy, and now there was no way to get her favorite things. As they saw these numbers coming in, hunger researchers and advocates felt like they were screaming into a void. Economist Diane Schanzenbach is a star in the world of child benefits. She’s done groundbreaking research on the introduction of food stamps as part of the War on Poverty in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating that it improved birth weights and lifetime health outcomes for children with access to the program before the age of five. And for little girls in particular, there was also a measurable impact on life outcomes: those with access to food aid as children were more likely to graduate high school, earned more, and were less reliant on public benefits as adults.

In the early 1970s, the nation had yet another kick at the Charlie Brown football of childcare. That was when Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale, a liberal from Minnesota, introduced the Comprehensive Child Development Act. He was building on the success of Head Start, which had been introduced as part of the War on Poverty just a few years before. The proposal was for a national network of federally funded childcare centers open to all families on a sliding scale. “Because the focus was on children… I assumed this would not be a controversial bill,” Mondale recalled. Hahahaha, that’s a sweet thought, guy. It was the dawn of second-wave feminism.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Bob Distefano, “ ‘Action Jackson’—From Con to Counselor,” Oakland Tribune, March 21, 1970, 1. 41. “Panel Favors Police Review,” Oakland Tribune, February 24, 1966, 23E. 42. “Playing Political Games Won’t End Oakland’s War on Poverty,” editorial, Oakland Tribune, March 31, 1970, 16. 43. Bob Distefano, “Oakland War on Poverty Agency Doomed; Months Required for Successor,” Oakland Tribune, April 13, 1971, 1. 44. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 134–79. 45. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990), 129, 363. 46.

“Stories about ‘police brutality’ and ‘police harassment’ are common, yet the existing channels for filing complaints are seldom used.”41 The split on police oversight contributed to the eventual position taken by Oakland’s white power structure to run the federal government out of town. Oakland’s hostile approach to the War on Poverty foreshadowed the direction the United States would eventually take when it turned hard to the right during the administration of President Richard Nixon and rejected social and economic transformation that could structurally eliminate the root causes of crime. Instead, the country embraced police violence to contain poverty. One telling episode involved an East Bay congressman’s discovery that Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale was employed by a North Oakland youth center, one of the War on Poverty programs. Federal officials quickly had Seale fired.

With millions of dollars in funding from Washington, they hired the chronically unemployed, formerly incarcerated, and disillusioned, paying them living wages to attend college and train for careers.40 At first, Mayor John Reading and a handful of other powerful Oakland conservatives were cautiously optimistic about the War on Poverty programs. His own philosophical view, Reading said in interviews, was that jobs were the solution to crime and civil unrest. If the federal government was footing the bill, all the better for Oakland’s taxpayers. However, it didn’t take long before the federally funded agencies conflicted with the city’s white leadership.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Report of Commission on Civil Disorders, pp. 106–7, 115, 164. 66. Ibid., pp. 1, 407. 67. Ibid., pp. 134, 177. 68. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 269. 69. Ralph M. Kramer, Participation of the Poor: Comparative Community Case Studies in the War on Poverty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 25, 31. 70. Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1970), p. 156. 71. Kramer, Participation of the Poor, p. 53. 72. Estelle Zannes, Checkmate in Cleveland: The Rhetoric of Confrontation During the Stokes Years (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), p. 49. 73.

What was evident was that much of the central city was out of bounds to them. Newark and Detroit were no longer their cities. They belonged to rebellious blacks and thus were not desirable places to invest and live in or even to visit. Reinforcing the perception of rebellion were government-sponsored community action programs. In 1964 President Johnson launched his War on Poverty, a federal initiative to level the social and economic playing field in America. One vital element of the federal scheme was the community action councils, which were to guide the assault on poverty in poor neighborhoods throughout the nation. There was to be “maximum feasible participation” by the poor on these neighborhood councils.

There was to be “maximum feasible participation” by the poor on these neighborhood councils. In the minds of many Americans, the program was intended to empower the poor, specifically poor blacks, and enable them to seize control of their destinies from the prevailing white power structure. According to one contemporary observer, the federal bureaucrats in charge of the War on Poverty “operated on the assumption that the involvement of the poor in policy-making was necessary in order to redistribute power in the cities; without power redistribution, they believed, there would be no great improvement in the lot of the Negro poor.”68 The notion of a federally funded revolution understandably troubled many white central-city officials.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery. Liberals, by contrast, insisted that social reforms such as the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the “root causes” of criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably generate crime. Lyndon Johnson, for example, argued during his 1964 presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater that antipoverty programs were, in effect, anticrime programs: “There is something mighty wrong when a candidate for the highest office bemoans violence in the streets but votes against the War on Poverty, votes against the Civil Rights Act and votes against major educational bills that come before him as a legislator.”56 Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became central components of the debate.

In the summer of 1963, he initiated a series of staff studies on those subjects. By the end of the summer, he declared his intention to make the eradication of poverty a key legislative objective in 1964.35 Following Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson embraced the antipoverty rhetoric with great passion, calling for an “unconditional war on poverty,” in his State of the Union Address in January 1964. Weeks later he proposed to Congress the Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964. The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms.

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s book, American Apartheid, documents how racially segregated ghettos were deliberately created by federal policy, not impersonal market forces or private housing choices.79 The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to them does not directly affect—and is scarcely noticed by—the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

And see, broadly, Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Claude Brown and Arthur Dunmey, “Harlem’s America,” New Leader, September 1966. For a brilliant reconstruction and discussion of the relationship between the war on poverty and the war on crime, including the emphasis on prediction in both efforts, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Especially useful is ELG, “Statement to Stockholders, September 20, 1966,” in which Greenfield notes the growth of the company between 1965 and 1966 and explains, “The seeds of our future growth were already germinating in 1964.

“We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color,” he said, his voice rising. Congress interrupted him with applause. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”9 Johnson would pledge to create a Great Society. He would announce a war on poverty. He sought federal aid for public education, and for the care of the sick and the poor and the old, with the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. Johnson was a legislative mastermind. “Kennedy couldn’t have gotten the Ten Commandments through Congress,” Johnson later scoffed, privately. Johnson’s program was not Kennedy’s program; compared to Johnson, Kennedy was a conservative.

The violence lasted for six nights and involved an astonishing thirty-five thousand people. A thousand people were injured. Thirty-four were killed. “If I’ve got to die, I ain’t dying in Vietnam,” said one protester. “I’m going to die here.”8 Lyndon Johnson shepherded the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, declared a War on Poverty, and planned to build a Great Society, with federal aid for economic development. Conservatives read the riots as an indictment of everything he had done and hoped to do. Greenfield had a plan of his own, Claude Brown told the Senate. Greenfield had the idea that there were mathematical geniuses all over Harlem, in every ghetto in the country, kids who were running numbers games, hustlers with a natural aptitude for business.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

On the first day of school in the fall of 1965, Gene Roberts of the New York Times reported that southern educators "said it was the biggest day of integration in the Souths history."38 On January 25, LBJ proposed a budget containing what the New York Times described as the "biggest expansion of domestic welfare and educational programs since the New Deal of the nineteen thirties."39 Two months later, Johnson signed the bill creating the Appalachian Regional Commission, the first, but certainly not the last, War on Poverty bill to reach the president that year. The first children entered Head Start in May. In 1965, "for the first time since the Great Depression, the federal government began to exert a strong and direct influence on the arts," wrote Julia Ardery, as Congress created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.40 Johnson could control Congress, but he couldn't contain the conflict in Vietnam or the American South.

Professor Ivor Crewe was Carteresque when he testified that "there is no doubt that distrust and alienation has risen to a higher level than ever before."60 When Americans looked within their own history to explain this change in the national psyche, they latched on to nouns: Watts, My Lai, Watergate, Stagflation, Monica, Enron, Katrina. But, as Dalton explained, nouns don't tell the story. People, places, and events familiar to Americans wouldn't cause trust to decline in countries with wildly different political histories. Why Bill Clinton Didn't Declare a War on Poverty The loss of faith in public institutions has been the "key change in American public opinion over the last 40 years," Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington concludes. The decline in trust placed Democrats at a permanent disadvantage, one that both diminished their chances for winning elections and hogtied their efforts to govern.61 President John Kennedy had been able to proclaim a "New Frontier" and President Lyndon Johnson could declare a "Great Society" because Americans trusted government.

In the new political climate, they proposed solutions to public problems that were to be carried out by a government that most people—even Democrats—no longer trusted to act in society's best interest. Hetherington points out that Bill Clinton was not so different from Johnson in his background or his politics. Both had grown up poor in the South. Both were presidents during economic expansions. Both had partisan advantages in Congress. But whereas Johnson declared the War on Poverty, Clinton announced that the "era of big government is over." What separated Johnson's administration from Clinton's wasn't the power of the right wing, the reticence of business, or Democratic perfidy, Hetherington argues. The difference was that people trusted government in 1965 and they didn't in 1993.62 Hetherington found the perfect example of the Democrats' dilemma.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

We won’t need government at all. Troubling this vision of a government governing best by governing least is the fact that, historically, we have only made headway against persistent poverty when mass protest compelled substantial federal investment. Many of the programs of the Social Security Act, the GI Bill, and the War on Poverty suffered from fatal flaws: by excluding women and men of color from their programs, they limited their own equalizing potential. But they offered broadly social solutions to risk and acknowledged that prosperity should be widely shared. The very existence of a social safety net is premised on an agreement to share the social costs of uncertainty.

In a letter to supporters, King warned that the Poor People’s Campaign was America’s “last chance” to arouse its “conscience toward constructive democratic change.”3 Instead, by 1976, the digital poorhouse had emerged and a movement to restrict the rights of poor families was sweeping the country. The combination of more restrictive rules, faster processing, less human discretion, and more complete surveillance shredded our already inadequate social safety net. The Congress used the cost of the war in Vietnam to rationalize dismantling War on Poverty programs. The peacetime GI Bill, public service jobs, and minimum guaranteed income called for by the Poor People’s Campaign never materialized. * * * Today, these goals still sometimes feel hopelessly out of reach. But if we are serious about dismantling the digital poorhouse—and ending poverty—we could do worse than to start with this list of 50-year-old demands.

Jackson, Larry R., and William A. Johnson. “Protest by the Poor: The Welfare Rights Movement in New York City.” New York: RAND Institute, 1973. Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1996. ________. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. Katz, Michael B., and the Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass Social of the Science Research Council . The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Kennedy, Howard. “Policy Due on ‘Night Raid’ Checking of Welfare Cases,” LA Times, Feb. 18, 1963, 1.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

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

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

“WE ARE THE 20 PERCENT”: THE MONEYED UPPER MIDDLE CLASS The American conversation about economic inequality has two dominant motifs. The first is the persistence of poverty, even in a country that a hundred years ago W. E. B. Du Bois labeled “a land of dollars.”8 Nobody can plausibly suggest that the War on Poverty was won: 15 percent of Americans remain in poverty, according to official estimates.9 But nor can anyone sensibly suggest that the War on Poverty was lost, either. The poverty rate has dropped by 7 percent since 1959, largely as a result of increased government transfers to those with low incomes. The fairest conclusion is a draw. The second theme, especially salient in recent years, is the extraordinary gains of those at the very top—variously the “upper class,” the “super-rich,” the “top 1 percent.”

See also Children’s advantages; Inequality gap; Inheritance of status; Market meritocracy; Opportunity hoarding; Sacrifices required Upstream, 126 Vance, J. D., 75–76, 120 Van Hollen, Chris, 1–2 Venator, Joanna, 126 Vocational education, 50 Vonnegut, Kurt, 78 Wage inequalities, 26–27. See also Income inequality Waldfogel, Jane, 45 Waldman, Paul, 2 Walker, Darren, 145 War on Poverty, 22 Washbrook, Liz, 45 West, Darrell, 135 White anxiety, 3 Williams, Bernard, 81–82 Winship, Scott, 66–67 Wolff, Edward, 26 Women. See Gender Yale University, 109, 120 Young, Michael, 11–12, 29, 78–80 Zhang, Kan, 34 Z-lists, 112–13 Zoning. See Exclusionary zoning


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

John Steinbeck’s brave Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl are a staple of high school classes. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal marked the beginning of an era where poverty was seen as something society could fight, and beat, with government intervention. This continued until the 1960s, culminating in Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” But when growth slowed and resources were tight, the war on poverty turned into war on the poor. Ronald Reagan would return time and again to the image of the so-called welfare queen, who was black, lazy, female, and fraudulent. The model for this was Linda Taylor, a woman from Chicago who had four aliases and was convicted of $8,000 in fraud, for which she spent several years in prison.

In 2018, President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a report advocating a work requirement as a condition of eligibility for the three major noncash assistance programs: Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and rental assistance.18 In June of 2018, Arkansas became the first state to implement a work requirement for Medicaid adults. Interestingly, the Council of Economic Advisers’ main argument was no longer that the war on poverty had failed but, on the contrary, that “our war on poverty is largely over and a success.” The report argued that “the safety net—including government tax and [both cash and non-cash] transfer policies—has contributed to a dramatic reduction in poverty [correctly measured] in the United States. However, the policies have been accompanied by a decline in self-sufficiency [in terms of receipt of welfare benefits] among non-disabled working-age adults.

This was one and a half years longer than onetime billionaire capitalist hero Charles Keating, the central figure in the most famous corruption scandal of the Reagan era (the Keating Five scandal), and the related savings and loans crisis that was to cost taxpayers over $500 billion in bailout money. In a new twist, the moral turpitude of the poor was now presented as the consequence of welfare itself. In 1986, Reagan famously declared the war on poverty lost. It was welfare that made us lose the war, by discouraging work and encouraging dependency, which led to the “crisis of family breakdowns, especially among the welfare poor, both black and white.”14 In a radio address to the nation on February 15, 1986, Reagan declared: We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond; a second and separate America, an America of lost dreams and stunted lives.


pages: 441 words: 124,798

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The region was still referred to as the coalfields, even though coal-mining jobs had long been in steep decline. It had been three decades since President Lyndon Johnson squatted on the porch of a ramshackle house just a few counties west, having a chat with an unemployed sawmiller that led him to launch his War on Poverty, which resulted in bedrock social programs like food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Head Start. But poverty remained very much with the coalfields the day Stallard had his first brush with a new and powerful painkiller. Whereas half the region lived in poverty in 1964 and hunger abounded, it now held national records for obesity, disability rates, and drug diversion, the practice of using and/or selling prescriptions for nonmedical purposes.

The miners had portions of their pay deducted from their salary to build the clinic in 1973. They’d also organized bake sales and talent shows, and spent years soliciting donations, many of the efforts shepherded by a trio of plucky nuns who’d migrated to the region a decade earlier, heeding LBJ’s and Robert Kennedy’s call to help Appalachia fight the War on Poverty. Nicknamed the Nickel and Dime Clinic, it was literally built by coal miners and community activists, people who chipped in every penny of their spare change. These weren’t simply Van Zee’s patients who were showing up in the ER; they were also dear friends, many of them descendants of the coal miners whose pictures lined his exam-room walls.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m an Appalachian scholar, and my family goes back here forever, and I take tremendous insult,’” she recalled. She stormed out with the others, and the newspaper ad never ran. * The next day Friedman gathered with Richard Stallard and other law enforcement officers at Kathy’s Country Kitchen in the Lee County seat. Sister Beth Davies, the pluckiest of the three nuns who had answered the War on Poverty call, was in attendance. So was pharmacist Greg Stewart, a miner’s son whose parents had personally helped build the St. Charles clinic. When Stewart filled OxyContin prescriptions, he begged his customers to lock their medication up. He’d already been the victim of two robbery attempts, including one by the son of a neighboring hair-salon owner who crawled in through the ceiling vents connecting the salon to Stewart’s store.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

FDR also signed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and created an elaborate bureaucracy to enforce this law, investigating whether firms were in compliance and bringing lawsuits against them if they weren’t (even though, as we have seen, later legislation such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act eschewed this approach and went back to the public-private partnership model). An equally significant expansion of the role of the federal state in the economy was spearheaded by President Johnson’s “Great Society” program. Johnson introduced the central tenet of the program, the “War on Poverty,” in his 1964 State of the Union address by stating, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” The War on Poverty too was a response to social changes, driven by both high rates of poverty that had long existed in many parts of the United States and the growing disparities between whites and blacks who had come to form a majority in many neighborhoods in inner cities.

Though society’s mobilization has triggered a spectacular growth in the capacity of the federal state, the architecture of the Constitution continued to influence the way that some of these programs were developed as well as their outcomes (Ronald Reagan quipped about the War on Poverty that “the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won”). Consider, for example, FDR’s flagship Social Security Act. Until the New Deal the United States had failed to develop any broad-based social insurance policy while Britain had started to move in that direction in 1906 and Germany even earlier in the 1880s.

Nor should we be surprised that this public-private partnership model hasn’t worked well for providing a social safety net to poor Americans. As society became more mobilized and assertive, the American Leviathan has sometimes been induced to step in with programs such as President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” to fill this void, but this has often been an incomplete effort. Perhaps paradoxically, we’ll also see that this path of the American Leviathan has had another important unintended consequence: the lack of effective monitoring of state activities in some crucial dimensions. Hemmed in by the straitjacket imposed by the Federalists’ compromises and the public-private partnership model, the American state could not deal through legitimate channels with the increasingly complex security challenges posed by the Cold War and the recent rise in international terrorism.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

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

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

By 1918 Wilson had banned any criticism of the government via the controversial Espionage and Sedition Acts. Jump forward to 1964 and the biggest congressional opposition to the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. The following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, launched his War on Poverty, which was billed as correcting racially related poverty. At this time, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was 25 percent among blacks (according to the Office of Policy Planning and Research). In 2015 it was 77 percent. Dr. Thomas Sowell described this phenomenon by saying, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

., 70, 131–32 Buttigieg, Pete, 159 BuzzFeed, 9, 21–22, 60, 149 Cain, Caleb, 159, 161, 162 cancel culture, 85 Capehart, Jonathan, 154 capitalism, 141–42 Carlson, Tucker, 122–24 Carnevale, Anthony, 104 “Cashing in on the Rise of the Alt-Right” (Harkinson), 77 catastrophizing, 196–97 CBD (cannabidiol), 33 CBS, 149–50 Chabloz, Alison, 52 character assassination, 16–17 Charlesworth, Tessa, 98 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, 20–21 China, 139–40 Churchill, Winston, 203 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 38, 112 Clarkson, Kelly, 198 classical liberalism, 7–8, 28, 29–71 abortion and, 45–49 definition, 30 drugs and, 32–36 economics and, 62–67 foreign policy and, 67–71 free speech and, 50–54 gay marriage and, 37–39 gun control and, 54–58 historical proponents of, 30–31 immigration and, 39–45 individual rights, protection of, 30–31 political language of, 96 stereotypes, neutralization of, 31 tolerance of opposing viewpoints and, 37–39 trans issues and, 59–62 class warfare, 65 Clinton, Hillary, 42, 113 CNN, 10, 21–22, 148–49, 150 Covington story and, 153, 155 Jussie Smollett news story and, 157 Russian Hoax and, 158 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 comedy, 187–90 coming out, 3–5 Confederate flag, 112 conservatives political language of, 96 pro-life position of, 49 Cook, Tim, 146 Covington story scandal, 152–55 crack, 34–35 Cruz, Nikolas, 58 culture war, 197–201 Cuomo, Andrew, 156 Daily Beast, The, 149 Daily Show, The (TV show), 62–63, 134–35 Daily Signal, The, 92 Damore, James, 25–26 Daniels, Jessie, 92 Darcy, Oliver, 161 David and Goliath story, 183 debt, government, 66 Declaration of Independence, 31, 144 Deconstructing Harry (film), 4 defensive gun use, lives saved from, 106 DeFranco, Philip, 159, 160–61 DeGeneres, Ellen, 146 Democratic Party, historical background of Civil Rights Act, opposition to, 112 Confederate flag, creation of, 112 Dred Scott ruling and, 111 Ku Klux Klan, formation of, 111–12 Lincoln assassination and, 112 opposition to Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 112 school choice, opposition to, 113 War on Poverty and, 112 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Demos, 101 denial, 12 digital journalism, 151 discrimination, 83 Dred Scott ruling, 111 dressing as the person you want to be, 175–79 drugs, 32–36 alcohol, 33–34 government role, 34–36 marijuana, 33 nicotine, 33 Schedule I controlled substances, 34–35 state versus federal issue, 36 taxation and, 35 Dunham, Lena, 127 economic issues, 62–67 government debt, 66 government size and spending, 64 minimum wage, 62, 65–66 tax rates, 64–65 unpaid internships, 62–63 welfare, 66 Economist, The, 80 Ehrlich, Paul, 108 Elder, Larry, 87–95 “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (Fryer), 98 environmental issues, 108–10 extreme weather, 109 food shortage, 108–9 polar bears, 110 Equality Act of 1974, 38 Evans, Chris, 127 Evergreen State College, 22, 23 extreme weather, 109 Facebook, speech guidelines of, 53 fact checking, 8, 87–113 Democrats = good, Republicans = bad myth, 111–13 Elder interview and, 87–95 environmental issues, 108–10 gun control, 105–6 hate crimes, 107–8 learning and growing when faced with new facts, 94–95 nuclear family, importance of, 91–93 political languages, recognizing, 95–97 slow thinking, practicing, 96–97 systemic racism, 89–92, 97–100 wage gap, 103–5 war on women, 100–103 fake news, 9–10, 148–65 algorithmic manipulation of news intake, 163 blatant falsehoods, 163 categories of, 162–63 college professors, left-wing political brainwashing by, 151 Covington story scandal, 152–55 curating list of trusted journalists who operate in good faith, 163–64 distrust of media, 162 gut instinct, following your, 164 historical background, 149–51 institutional, 163 Jussie Smollett news story, 155–57 narrative-driven, 162 political activism and propagandism by journalists, 151–52 proprietors of, examples of, 148–49 Roose’s hit piece blaming Rubin and others for radicalizing youth, 159–62 Russian Hoax and, 157–58 family, 91–93, 112–13 Family Guy (TV show), 189 fatherless children, 91–92 Feinstein, Dianne, 44 Ferguson, Niall, 134 Field of Dreams (film), 177 Fifteenth Amendment, 112 First Amendment free speech rights, 14, 50–54 Fonda, Jane, 103 food shortage, 108–9 foreign policy, 67–71 peace through strength strategy, 67–68 red line in Syria, failure to enforce, 68 troop withdrawals, 70 Ukraine, NATO’s failure to help, 69 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 111–12 Fourteenth Amendment, 112 Fox News, 150 France, 69, 141 free speech, 50–54, 207 combating conspiracy theories and bad ideas with, 50–51 comedy and, 189 as essential to civilized society, 52 exceptions specified by Supreme Court, 50 hate speech laws and, 52 Kaepernick’s kneeling for national anthem and, 53–54 progressive policing of, 52–53 free thinking, 7–8, 28, 29–71.

., 98–99 Virtue of Nationalism, The (Hazony), 40 virtue signaling, 127–28 Vox, 9, 149, 159 Vulture, 154 wage gap, 103–5 wake-up call, embracing, 7, 12–28 Affleck’s attack of Harris and Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher, 17–20 author’s wake-up call, 14–22 Charlie Hebdo attack and left’s response, 20–22 Damore’s memo at Google, left’s response to, 25–26 fear of fallout from, 13 independent thinking and, 28 leftism and liberalism, distinguished, 13–14 presumptions, overcoming, 14–15 problem, admitting there’s a, 12 rejection by left, sense of community and other benefits of, 27–28 Shepherd accused of being transphobic, 24–25 truth and reality, embracing, 12–13 Weinstein, and silencing of dissent by left, 22–24 The Young Turks, character assassination of Webb by, 16–17 Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Harris), 17–18 Walmart, 65–66 Ware, Bonnie, 195–96 War of the Worlds (radio broadcast), 198 War on Poverty, 112–13 war on women, 100–103 custody of children in divorce, men versus women, 102 homicide rates and, 101 incarceration rates of women versus men, 102 longevity, 102 online trolling by women versus men, 101–2 Selective Service registration not required for women, 102 taxes paid, men versus women, 102–3 university attendance, rates of, 100–101 wage gap myth, 103–5 Washington Post, The, 99, 149 Covington story and, 153, 154 Jussie Smollett news story and, 157 Waters, Maxine, 156 weather, extremes in, 109 Webb, David, 16–17 Weinstein, Bret, 6–7, 22–24 Weinstein, Eric, 162–63 welfare, 66 Wen, Leana, 47 Western values, hatred for.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

Practically, it was a president’s duty, honoring his pledge to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, to volunteer the army. Since 1964, when riots wracked Harlem, Lyndon Johnson had been agonizing about riots, how to stop them, what they meant, how to keep them from wrecking his war on poverty—and why his war on poverty wasn’t preventing the riots. Asked at his July 18 news conference for his “views on what happened in New Jersey in the last couple of days,” he launched into his standard peroration about the healing power of antipoverty programs—prefacing his remarks with the absurd claim “I don’t think I have any more information on it than you have.”

The anguished cries of liberals masked the magnitude of their retreat: that their dreams of warring on poverty had once been so much grander than $40 million for rats. Johnson had never seen the political squeeze coming. “Push ahead full tilt,” he had said on one of his first days as president, when his new economic adviser told him President Kennedy had been considering a poverty initiative—a program on which President Kennedy was proceeding exceedingly cautiously, for fear of offending middle-class whites. Now, middle-class whites were indeed sorely offended by the War on Poverty. Lyndon Johnson’s poverty programs were doing, after all, what they were supposed to be doing: redistributing wealth, and thus redistributing power.

The income of nonwhites had started rising faster than the income of whites, and though the gap was not nearly closed, many whites’ incomes were beginning to stagnate, even, in real terms, to fall. The War on Poverty came out of their hard-earned tax dollars—draining money, some whites thought, toward ungrateful rioters. Who still demanded their welfare checks. A White House study found that three-fourths of white Bostonians thought most welfare cases were fraudulent. Backlash against the War on Poverty had always been latent. Civil rats showed that backlash to now be mature—as, in places such as Detroit, the races made ready for war. A local black nationalist minister, Albert Cleage, observed to a reporter that the shooting ranges were packed and the city was way behind in processing gun registrations.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

A study relying on longitudinal data (data collected on a specific group over a substantial period) found that the persistently poor families (defined as having family incomes below the poverty line during at least eight years in a ten-year period) in the United States tended to be headed by women, and that 31 percent of all persistently poor households were headed by nonelderly black women. This is a startling figure when you realize that, according to the 1990 census, African-Americans account for just over 12 percent of the entire U.S. population. As Kathryn Edin has pointed out, “More children are poor today than at any time since before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began three decades ago. Children living in households headed by single mothers are America’s poorest demographic group. This fact is not surprising, since single mothers who work seldom earn enough to bring their families out of poverty and most cannot get child support, medical benefits, housing subsidies, or cheap child care.”

In 1978, the French social scientist Robert Castel argued that the paradox of poverty in affluent American society has rested on the notion that “the poor are individuals who themselves bear the chief responsibility for their condition. As a result, the politics of welfare centers around the management of individual deficiencies.” From the building of almshouses in the late nineteenth century to President Johnson’s War on Poverty, Americans have failed to emphasize the social rights of the poor, “rights whose interpretation is independent of the views of the agencies charged with dispensing assistance.” Data from public opinion polls support this argument. They indicate that Americans tend to be far more concerned about the duties or social obligations of the poor, particularly the welfare poor, than about their social rights as American citizens.

Illinois Job Gap Project, Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois, Chicago. Case, Anne C, and Lawrence F. Katz. 1990. “The Company You Keep: The Effects of Family and Neighborhood on Disadvantaged Youth.” Working paper no. 3705, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge. Castel, Robert. 1978. “The ‘War on Poverty’ and the Status of Poverty in an Affluent Society.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 19 (January): 47–60. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 1995a. “Is the EITC Growing at a Rate That Is ‘Out of Control’?” Washington, D.C., May 9. ———. 1995b. “The Earned Income Tax Credit Reductions in the Senate Budget Resolution.”


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push, whether it takes the form of No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021, will change things. We’ve been saying that since the War on Poverty in 1965. It has allowed us to evade our moral obligation to treat others as individuals even though mean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely. I’ve been having conversations about that moral obligation for decades. It has been disquieting to see how few people can make themselves confront it.

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT); comparative results; g-loading in; opposition to self-esteem Silicon Valley Skidmore College slavery social justice Spearman, Charles Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales stereotype threat Sullivan, Andrew systemic racism; in hiring, ; and polarization; in policing Taleb, Nassim Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) teachers: certification of; performance ratings Trump, Donald Tucson, AZ 23andMe universities: IQ distribution in; self-censorship at; see also college admissions University of Southern California Urbana, IL U.S. Army U.S. Constitution U.S. Department of Education U.S. Department of Labor U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) US News U.S. Office of Education Vox War on Poverty Washington, D.C.: crime rates in; socioeconomic differences in Washington Post Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Weiss, Bari White guilt White privilege Wilson, James Q. “woke” politics Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities World War I World War II Yale University Yglesias, Matthew z-scores Zucker School of Medicine A NOTE ON THE TYPE FACING REALITY has been set in Monotype Bulmer.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

That often meant nonprofit work—giving money, taking up party politics, or, for those with real money, setting up their own foundations. 27 Foundations weren’t the only source of funding for nonprofits doing community work in the 1960s and 1970s. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, following on the heels of the New Deal, aimed to carry out a “War on Poverty” by many different means, and one of them was distributing government money directly to nonprofit groups, including Planned Parenthood. The money even came with requirements that the poor participate in the War on Poverty. That requirement placed money in the hands of organizations to hire workers from the communities they served, jobs directly with municipal governments but also with activist groups newly flush with funding—and for a while, at least, some of those groups used that money to make trouble.

After World War II, historians Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein wrote, the job was reshaped into something that “took place in the home but performed the public work of the welfare state,” and as countries face an “elder boom” in the coming decades, these jobs will continue to proliferate. 24 The work of caring for the ill and elderly was something that, before the Depression, had been done in the family, by private charity (often the church), or relegated to the workhouse or poorhouse. New Deal relief programs turned such care into a distinct profession, as much to create work for women as to fulfill needs. The War on Poverty in the 1960s expanded the program, and then it grew further in the 1970s, as the disability and elder rights movements organized for home-based assistance as an alternative to institutions. Funding, bumped up in the 1960s, began to be sliced back in response to economic crises in the 1970s, however. 25 For many years, home care was dominated by Black women, and they had to constantly struggle against the assumption that they were simply state-funded maids.

It is this last factor that has remained contentious over the years as competing administrations have changed their interpretation of this ruling to apply to interns. How far outside the normal run of business must training be in order to count as training and not simply unpaid work? 17 Internships continued to spread during the 1960s and 1970s, starting when Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty pumped money into work-based learning programs, and young, politically involved people sought opportunities to put their values to work. Congress reorganized yet again, expanding the range of subcommittees and staffers, attracting a new wave of nonprofits, lobbyists, and others seeking to influence policy—and stocking up on ambitious, cheap young interns.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

President Lyndon Johnson, who had lived among, and worked with, the poor during his youth and through the Depression years, provided persuasive leadership. The political attractiveness of targeting the votes of blacks who had migrated from southern agricultural jobs for the industrial jobs in northern cities gave politicians the incentive to follow.17 Congress enacted a radical set of government- and community-based programs intended to wage war on poverty and make the United States into Johnson’s Great Society. Funding was increased significantly for welfare, especially for the indigent elderly, for health care (including Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor), and for education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was reauthorized by President Bush as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and by President Obama as the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Moreover, it was not clear whether the objective of community engagement was to organize a new power structure for the community, confront the existing power structure, or extend or assist the existing power structure.18 At any rate, the programs did not sit well with existing structures and interests, and did not draw in those in the community with sensible ideas of how to raise economic opportunity. Traditional political leadership, intent on protecting its turf, pushed back on community involvement, while neighborhood activists fought any structure that was not their own. Almost inevitably, the War on Poverty became more top-down than bottom-up, and failed to sustain enthusiasm even among initial supporters like Dr. King, who wanted more comprehensive, coordinated action. As the Vietnam War consumed President Johnson’s political energies, some of the innovative spending was repurposed to support the war effort.

Unfortunately, as the 1960s ended, and just as governments had promised their citizens a substantial share of the high anticipated future growth, growth suddenly proved much harder to generate. There were plenty of proximate causes: rising inflation in the United States as spending on the Vietnam quagmire added to the new social spending promised in the War on Poverty; the subsequent breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates as the United States abandoned the international convertibility of the dollar into gold; the tripling of oil prices as OPEC tested its powers after the Yom Kippur war broke out . . . But perhaps the most obvious reason was that the gains from the Second Industrial Revolution had largely played out.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

That spending (in effect, transferring money from younger people to older people) has made the age distribution of income more egalitarian, mostly ending the scourge of elderly poverty that in the 1960s outraged social reformers like Michael Harrington, author of The Other America. However, that new spending has not had such a marked effect on the class distribution of income, which also concerned Harrington.106 The only battle of the War on Poverty that was won was the War on Elder Poverty. These transfers have not much narrowed the gap between the top 1 percent and the bottom 50 percent. “The bottom half of the adult population has thus been shut off from economic growth for over 40 years, and the modest increase in their post-tax income has been absorbed by increased health spending,” conclude economists Piketty, Saez, and Zucman.107 One way to see this skewing of the American welfare state over the last half century is to compare the average monthly “welfare” benefit per family with the average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker and spouse, as shown in Figure 2.16.

You ask a voter who calls himself a conservative what he thinks I am and he says I’m a conservative.”37 That was partisan politics at low tide. Buoyed by his landslide victory in 1964, LBJ moved to the left on issues of race and inequality, beginning to open an ideological divide that would widen steadily for the next half century. Nevertheless, across LBJ’s far-reaching Great Society initiatives (the War on Poverty, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare/Medicaid, federal aid to education, and immigration reform—the very issues at the core of intense party polarization in our own period, a half century later), all major bills were supported by majorities or substantial minorities within both parties. On average, these bills were supported by 74 percent of congressional Democrats and 63 percent of congressional Republicans, a fact forgotten by later Republicans who would rail against the leftist extremism of the Great Society programs.38 Behind the scenes LBJ cooperated with Senator Everett Dirksen, the titular head of congressional Republicans, just as he himself had done with Ike a decade earlier.

With the advent of Reaganism, however, the Republicans became steadily more skeptical about environmentalism, a trend capped by their leaders’ uncompromising denial of climate science in the twenty-first century. Education: Roughly 40 percent of Republicans in the House and Senate had voted alongside roughly 80 percent of Democrats in favor of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, part of LBJ’s War on Poverty. But as the issue of school desegregation heated up and free market orthodoxy permeated the Republican Party in the 1980s, the two parties began to divide on the issue of public vs. private or charter schools, a division that would remain into the next century. Eventually, even a technical debate about reading pedagogy between “phonics” and “whole language” approaches became the subject of the party-inflected “Reading Wars.”54 So the renewed party polarization of the last half century began with race—the one constant and central conflict in American history—but polarization soon came to be about much more than race.55 By the years of Obama and Trump, bipartisanship in Congress had become virtually nonexistent; on six major votes of this period, the administration received support from 95 percent of their own party, but only 3 percent of the opposition.56 Statistically speaking, party polarization was rapidly approaching mathematical perfection.


pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

He steered the tax cut through the Senate 77 to 21 in February. Federal budget deficits were now, officially, a good thing. Then there was that other quintessential LBJ answer to the confident spirit of his age. A week earlier, Peace Corps chief Sargent Shriver had arrived back from a monthlong trip to the news that he was to direct a “war on poverty.” The confidence that growth could cure all ills was secure enough for the Democrats’ 1960 platform drafters to declare “the final eradication” of poverty “within reach.” Wary of turning off middle-class voters in 1964, Kennedy had let Heller toil away at such a plan so long as he made sure they also did something for the suburbs, where all agreed the 1964 election would be decided.

The Economic Opportunity Act, coordinated by a new Office of Economic Opportunity and capitalized at $962.5 million, was presented to Congress on March 16 via a special message from the President. (The riposte from Barry Goldwater was immediate: “Under the enterprise system,” America was already winning the War on Poverty, he said; federal welfare was leading to rates of fraud of 50 percent or more; the idea that people cannot find jobs because of insufficient education is “like saying that people have big feet because they wear big shoes. The fact is that most people have no skills, have no education for the same reason—low intelligence or low ambition.”)

Letters and numbers darkened his presentations: RS-70 and B-70 (bomber programs the Pentagon was scrapping); A-11 (a plane Lyndon Johnson claimed was a new fighter but Goldwater said was really just a reconnaissance plane); TFX (a fighter General Dynamics was building in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas despite the brass’s insistence it could be built better and more cheaply in California); 1970 (by which time a bomber gap would turn “the shield of the Republic into a Swiss cheese wall”). He attacked Johnson’s poverty program, which, since Johnson had cleverly named it the War on Poverty, made it look like Goldwater was rooting for poverty to win. He did little better with another new theme: Vietnam. Johnson said American involvement was the same as it had been a decade before. Goldwater implored his listeners to acknowledge that America was in a war in Vietnam. U.S. News had printed letters from a flier killed in action, Captain Edward G.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

By the 1970s the American government seemed to be failing at everything it touched—wars (Vietnam), the economy (stagflation), crime (the drug epidemic), social cohesion (the culture wars). Even Europe’s love affair with the welfare state was beginning to sour. This was a time of strikes, energy crises, and riots. It was also a time when the modish ideas of the 1960s, such as comprehensive education in Britain or the “war on poverty” in America, got “mugged by reality,” in Irving Kristol’s classic phrase. Worse, the welfare state was failing in its core functions—in the ideas that the Webbs and their disciples had trumpeted. R. H. Tawney had promised that, under the welfare state, Britain “would cease to be the rule for the rich to be rewarded, not only with riches, but with a preferential share of health and life, and for the penalty of the poor to be not merely poverty, but ignorance, sickness and premature death.”13 Yet in the 1970s the gap between Britain’s upper and lower social classes in terms of age-adjusted mortality was more than twice as large as it had been in the 1930s.14 The upper classes continued to be fitter and taller than the lower classes—3.2 centimeters taller, to be exact—as well as richer.15 In America even the architects of the “war on poverty” admitted that “unprecedented generosity . . . had not made much of a dent in the poverty, dependency, delinquency, or ­despair against which the 1964 war had been declared.”16 Many of the 1960s reforms aimed at producing equality of results, rather than just equality of opportunity, were producing very unegalitarian results, especially in education.

Tawney had promised that, under the welfare state, Britain “would cease to be the rule for the rich to be rewarded, not only with riches, but with a preferential share of health and life, and for the penalty of the poor to be not merely poverty, but ignorance, sickness and premature death.”13 Yet in the 1970s the gap between Britain’s upper and lower social classes in terms of age-adjusted mortality was more than twice as large as it had been in the 1930s.14 The upper classes continued to be fitter and taller than the lower classes—3.2 centimeters taller, to be exact—as well as richer.15 In America even the architects of the “war on poverty” admitted that “unprecedented generosity . . . had not made much of a dent in the poverty, dependency, delinquency, or ­despair against which the 1964 war had been declared.”16 Many of the 1960s reforms aimed at producing equality of results, rather than just equality of opportunity, were producing very unegalitarian results, especially in education.

., 143 Trevelyan, Charles, 52–53 Tsinghua University, 157 Tullock, Gordon, 84 Tunisia, 253 Turkey, 13, 254 Turner, Ted, 238 tyranny of the majority, 226, 250, 255 unemployment insurance, 123, 244, 245 unfunded liabilities, 14, 119, 120, 129, 130, 232, 245–46, 264, 265 unions, public-sector: innovation blocked by, 20 pay and benefits of, 113–15, 119–20 political power of, 112–15 Unirule Institute of Economics, 154 United Nations, 76, 265 United States: affirmative action in, 79 antiliberal discourse in, 95–96 big government in, 71–72 checks and balances system in, 226, 250, 255–56, 265 China contrasted with, 147, 153 crony capitalism in, 237–38, 246 deficits and deficit spending in, 14, 97, 100, 120, 231, 241 democracy’s failures in, 254–59 education reform in, 212, 214–15 elitism in, 162 entitlements in, 241–42 expanding role of government in, 62, 77 falling crime rate in, 181 financial liabilities of, 15–16, 119–20 financial services industry in, 239 fiscal uncertainty in, 12, 255 government bloat in, 9, 98, 177 in Iraq War, 143 local government in, 217 money politics in, 256–58 national debt of, 120, 241–42 political polarization in, 100, 125–26, 164, 255, 256 postwar era in, 78 privatization in, 234–37 public pessimism in, 11, 126 public spending in, 9, 261 small-government model in, 54–55 state capitalism in, 235–36 taxes in, 82, 116–17, 121, 237, 240–41 Webbs and, 71 welfare reform in, 95 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 265 Uppsala, University of, 78 Urban Institute, 185 utilitarianism, 49, 57, 58 Van Reenen, John, 191 Veep (TV show), 227 VisionSpring, 203 Voegeli, William, 115 voting rights, 7, 9, 51 voucher systems, 171, 176–77, 220 Wade, John, 49 Wallas, Graham, 77 Wallgren, Britta, 172 Wall Street Journal, 90 Wang Jisi, 164 war, technology and, 182 war on poverty, 87, 88 war on terror, 98, 143 Warren, Earl, 105–6, 124–25 Washington, D.C., 210 Washington, George, 250 Washington consensus, 8, 96, 142, 164 Washington Post, 86 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 7, 27–28, 64, 66, 68, 71, 74, 75, 87, 116, 134, 140, 219, 268 collectivism as principle of, 68 as creators of welfare state, 65 eugenics endorsed by, 67–68 national minimum concept of, 68, 69 Stalin admired by, 67 statism and, 67 Weibo, 161 Weiner, Anthony, 227–28 welfare state, Asian model of, 164–65 health-care spending in, 142 social insurance as basis of, 140–41, 142, 242, 243 spending on, Western model vs., 142 welfare state, Western model of, 7–9, 65–80, 88, 221 aging population and, 15, 122–23, 124, 165, 174, 178, 183–84, 232, 241–42 as “all-you-can-eat” buffet, 17, 137, 140, 183, 241 creation of, 27–28, 263, 268–69 dependency and, 129–30 education in, 68, 69 elitism and, 77–78 entitlements in, see entitlements equality and, 68–69, 74, 79, 222 in Europe, 75 expanding public sector in, 76 failure of egalitarian policies in, 87–90 fraternity and, 74, 79 government bloat in, 9–11, 18–19, 89–90, 98, 177, 222–23, 227, 229–30, 231, 233 inefficiency in, 89, 229 interest groups in, 90 Lee Kuan Yew’s criticism of, 17 middle class in, 17, 88, 122 national minimum and, 68, 69 Nordic reinvention of, 169–78, 183–84, 186–87, 212, 265–66 overreaching by, 87, 176, 222, 229–30, 233, 264, 265, 268, 269 perverse incentives created by, 89 poverty and, 68 social assistance as basis of, 140, 142 social services and, 68, 69, 74 as threat to democracy, 22, 142 as threat to freedom, 22, 74, 222 Webbs as creators of, 65, 220 Wells, H.G., 66 Wen Jiabao, 162 Westminster model, 54 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 163 Whitaker, Jeremiah, 34 “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (Hayek), 85 Wilders, Geert, 259 Will, George, 30 Willetts, David, 124 William III, King of England, 43 Williamson, John, 8, 163–64 Wilson, James Q., 198 Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, 209 Woolf, Virginia, 28–29 World Bank, 76 Asian financial crisis and, 143 World Economic Forum, 146, 148 World Forum on Democracy, 252 World Health Organization, 201 World on Fire (Chua), 143 World Trade Organization, 260 World War II, 73–74, 232 Wukan, China, 160 Xi Jinping, 133, 145, 148, 161, 164, 165 Xilai, Bo, 154, 162 Xinmin Weekly, 162 Yang Jianchang, 159–61 Yeltsin, Boris, 253 Ye Lucheng, 151 Yes, Minister (TV show), 194 Yongle, Emperor of China, 36 youth, public spending as biased against, 124 Zakaria, Fareed, 143 Zhang Weiwei, 164 Zheng He, 36 Zingales, Luigi, 128, 239 Zuma, Jacob, 254


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes, “The Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013,” Cato Institute (2013), http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, “The War on Poverty After 50 Years,” Heritage Foundation (2014), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years. 20. “Current Population Survey,” U.S. Census Bureau, tabulation of data by Sentier Research, accessed November 2015. 21. “Social Spending During the Crisis: Social Expenditure (SOCX) Data Update 2012,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2012, http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2012SocialSpendingDuring TheCrisis8pages.pdf.

Differences in the workforce participation rates of able-bodied adults are alarming. Growth in unproductive behavior, such as out-of-wedlock births among lower-wage workers, is worrisome. Lack of increase in the work effort of poor, able-bodied workers, despite increases in social spending, is discouraging. One can’t help but wonder if the “War on Poverty” caused more able-bodied poverty than it cured. Solutions to Poverty Are Likely to Be Prohibitively Expensive That said, it’s likely to be quite expensive to put able-bodied but reluctant workers to work. It costs far more than just their wages to hire lower-skilled and less-productive workers, especially people who are reluctant to work.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

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

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

Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969); Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Romain D. Huret and John Angell, The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and the Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Carter, The Price of Peace; Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Wendy L.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 342–379. 49.On the rise of the carceral state, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Heather Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010), 703–734; Heather Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2010); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Hinton, America on Fire; Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (1999; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009). 50.

Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (1999; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009). 50.“The American Underclass,” Time, August 29, 1977, 14–15. 51.Ken Auletta, The Underclass (New York: Random House, 1982). On alternative ways of understanding urban poverty and crime in 1980s America, see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Thomas J.


pages: 537 words: 200,923

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Asbell, “Dick Lee Discovers How Much Is Not Enough.” 53. See Marris and Rein, Dilemmas, esp. 25 –26. 54. See Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 198. 55. “Community Action Policy Review” (New Haven: CPI, 1965). 56. See Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, chaps. 3 –6. 57. Edgar Cahn and Jean Cahn, “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective,” Yale Law Journal 73, no. 8 (1964). 58. Asbell, “Dick Lee Discovers How Much Is Not Enough.” 59. Ibid. 60. In 1966, CPI staffer Peter Almond would report: “They would call meetings, at which their programs were discussed. There was never, at least at any meetings I ever attended, any opening where the citizen’s word would have any kind of direct and obvious impact. . . .

And that is where CPI and the city and the mayor are failing, as far as I’m concerned.” Quoted in Powledge, Model City, 143. 61. Robert Giaimo, “Investigation into the Operation of Community Progress, Inc.” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Record, 1968). 62. Howard Shuman, “Behind the Scenes and Under the Rug,” Washington Monthly, 1969. 63. “Old Industrial City Wages Dramatic War on Poverty,” Trenton Sunday Times Advertiser, July 12, 1964. Quoted in Powledge, Model City. 64. Although this quote is often repeated in the secondary literature, I have been unable to find a primary source for it. 65. Quoted in Powledge, Model City, 149. 66. All quotations and facts in this section are taken from stories in the New Haven Register for August 20, 21, and 22, 1967. 67.

New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Bucki, Cecelia. Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915 –36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Burnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett. Plan of Chicago (1909). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. Cahn, Edgar, and Jean Cahn. “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective.” Yale Law Journal 73, no. 8 (1964). Cain, John F. “The Influence of Race and Income on Racial Segregation and Housing Policy.” In Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy, edited by John M. Goering, 99–118. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Calder, Isabel MacBeath.


pages: 225 words: 55,458

Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose

blue-collar work, centre right, confounding variable, creative destruction, delayed gratification, digital divide, George Santayana, income inequality, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, new economy, Ronald Reagan, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

I’m going to fast-forward through my undergraduate English major (that English teacher had turned me on to literature, and, besides, he was an English major) and zoom across a subsequent year of a doctoral program in English—which turned out to be too removed from the work of the world for me. Looking to ground myself and make a living, I found the Teacher Corps, a War on Poverty program that placed prospective teachers in lowincome schools. That was my introduction to teaching and education, and after Teacher Corps I would go on to work for eight more years in a community college and in a range of programs for special populations: from traffic cops and parole aides to returning Vietnam veterans.

Cronbach, “Beyond the Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology,” American Psychologist, vol. 30, 1975, 116–126. 140 “As Bill Gates said . . .‘drill in’ on that skill.”: Marketplace Life, Interview with Bill Gates, February 28, 2011. www .marketplace.org/topics/life/importance-teachers-education. 141 “We have here the makings in education . . . ”: Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 205 NOTES Chapter 6 147 The Physical Environment: “This section draws on . . .”: C. Carney Strange and James H. Banning, Educating by Design: Creating Campus Learning Environments That Work (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001). 170 “. . . undergraduate curriculum from the 1950s.”: Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978). 173 “The sociologist James Rosenbaum . . .”: James E.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

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

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

In broad terms, this has meant privatizations, a shift away from government regulation of industry, cutbacks in government services, and a free trade agenda that has pushed other governments—especially Third World governments—to follow these same policies in more extreme ways. Domestically, this process has been described as a retreat from the mid-century redistributive government role embodied in the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Although those programs are associated (rightly) with the Democratic Party, the Democrats of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have retreated from the social welfare orientation of their predecessors, at least at the national level. Internationally, the new consensus is sometimes (not very accurately) called globalization.

In the 1950s, sterilization, “preponderantly aimed at African American and poor women, began to be wielded by state courts and legislatures as a punishment for bearing illegitimate children or as extortion to ensure ongoing receipt of family assistance.”10 Sterilization rates rose again, especially after the War on Poverty in the 1960s introduced federally funded sterilizations through Medicaid and the Office of Economic Opportunity, leading to what one analyst called “widespread sterilization abuse” during the 1960s and ’70s. Between 1960 and 1974 over 100,000 sterilizations were carried out annually.11 The Indian Health Service began providing family planning services in 1965.


pages: 392 words: 112,954

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

Just as the Codes appeared after the end of slavery and the fall of Reconstruction, Broken Windows grew out of a brief but powerful moment of racial reconciliation in the sixties: the end of segregation, the passing of civil rights laws, and the launching of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Great Society programs that came out of that War on Poverty set into motion a series of unintended consequences. The assistance programs always had a strong bureaucratic and even punitive element. The government created armies of inspectors and social workers who, in the process of administering public assistance, got involved in regulating every aspect of life in poor black neighborhoods.

The ensuing series of legislative programs passed included Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Food Stamp Act, even the Public Broadcasting Act that created PBS. The Great Society was to domestic politics what the moon program was to the military-industrial complex, an audacious long shot. The very phrase “War on Poverty” conjured images of the unity and collective determination America had employed to defeat the Nazis. These programs were never meant to be an expensive Band-Aid used to maintain a perpetual uncomfortable détente between rich and poor, black and white. They were designed to wipe out divisions and inequities and leave one prosperous, integrated people standing at war’s end.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

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

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

He believed in the marriage of government and social science to formulate policy. “All manner of later experiences in politics were to test this youthful faith.” Moynihan stayed on at the Labor Department during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, but became increasingly disillusioned with Johnson’s War on Poverty. He believed that the initiative should be run through an established societal institution: the patriarchal family. Fathers should be supported by public policy, in the form of jobs funded by the government. Moynihan believed that unemployment, specifically male unemployment, was the biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor.

He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal—called the Family Assistance Plan—before the American public in a television address in August 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October. This was a personal victory for Moynihan—a triumph in an argument he had been waging since the War on Poverty began, over the need to help families, not individuals. “I felt I was finally rid of a subject. A subject that just…spoiled my life,” Moynihan told The New York Times that November. “Four—long—years of being called awful things. The people you would most want to admire you detesting you. Being anathematized and stigmatized.

The decline of law and order “can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to obey them.” The cure, as Nixon saw it, was not addressing criminogenic conditions, but locking up more people. “Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do far more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for [the] War on Poverty,” he said in 1968. As president, Nixon did just that: During his second term, incarceration rates began their historic rise. Drugs in particular attracted Nixon’s ire. Heroin dealers were “literally the slave traders of our time,” he said, “traffickers in living death. They must be hunted to the end of the earth.”


pages: 489 words: 111,305

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

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

During the Depression, there was again a live union movement in Flint, and popular rights were again extended. But the business counterattack began right after the Second World War. It took a while this time, but by the 1950s, it was getting somewhere. It slowed somewhat in the 1960s, when there was a lot more ferment—programs like the War on Poverty, things coming out of the civil rights movement—but by the early 1970s, it reached new heights, and it’s been going pretty much fullsteam ever since. The typical picture painted by business propaganda since the Second World War—in everything from television comedies to scholarly books—has been: We all live together in harmony.

See poverty population control populism, phony Port-au-Prince (Haiti) Port of Spain (Trinidad) Portuguese empire collapse postmodernism potato famine in Ireland poverty among children in NYC in Brazil democracy vs. in Eastern Europe economic recovery and in Haiti in India vs. US in Latin America shantytowns and slums in US US pacification of the poor War on Poverty welfare Powell, Colin power generation, alternatives for power, speaking truth to preaching to the choir “preferential option for the poor,” Preston, Julia PRI (Institutional Revolution Party) prisoner’s dilemma prisoners of war prison labor, Chinese prisons privatizing Social Security process patents vs. product patents “profits” now called “jobs,” programmers, Indian Progressive Caucus Progressive Policy Institute progress, signs of, (and not) Prohibition propaganda.

See Soviet Union Ustasha US Trade Representative (USTR) panel Vaid, Urvashi Vancouver (BC) Vanguard Party (USSR) Vanity Fair Vatican Vermont victims, worthy vs. unworthy Viet Minh Vietnam bombing of Boston Globe on war Chomsky’s visit to Japanese investment in “nation building” in New York Times on NY Times on Pentagon Papers NY Times on war “peace treaty” with punished by US after war state terror in Vietnam syndrome Vietnam War domino theory and ensuring service role as reason for US-blocked peace attempts US cruelty afterwards US escalation of US goals achieved in US rationale for “vile maxim” of the “masters,” village self-government in India violence Virtual Equality “vital center, the,” von Humboldt, Wilhelm VW (Volkswagen) Wall Street Journal war criminals war on drugsSee also drugs War on Poverty Washington Institute for Near East Studies Washington Post wealth weapons manufacturers Webb, Gary Weizmann, Chaim Welch, John welfare for corporations in Kerala opposition to Reagan’s racist take on rich people on wages raised by welfare capitalism welfare states needed for democracy in Sweden well-being, consumption vs.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Between the 1940s and 1960s, poverty rates stayed relatively flat. Then they dropped again after the 1960s’ War on Poverty, which introduced new programs and reduced poverty rates to their current levels. The state of poverty hasn’t changed much since: as many Americans live in poverty today as in the 1960s. If there is one thing America ought to have learned about eradicating poverty over the past century, it is that government transfers are the only proven way to significantly reduce poverty rates. Substantial drops in poverty rates followed the New Deal and War on Poverty, both of which were major government-led initiatives that put more money in impoverished people’s pockets.

Each of these proposals has some drawbacks, and—as megainvestors have told me—unexpected things happen anytime billions of dollars are invested anywhere. What I’m trying to emphasize with these examples is that it is possible to end poverty in America; that if addressing wealth inequality became a priority, this nation has more than enough resources to launch a war on poverty that actually wins. One reason why I feel so much urgency about abolishing poverty is that countless impoverished Americans ultimately end up somewhere even more inhumane than a high-poverty neighborhood: prison. Instead of investing in abolishing poverty, America’s leaders have invested in the prison industrial complex, which is plagued by brutal conditions that normalize sexual assault and murder.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The negative income tax, in his view, should replace the bulk of AmerÂ�iÂ�ca’s welfare programs. We have a maze of detailed governmental programs that have been justified on welfare grounds—Â� though typically their product is “Â�illfare”: public housing, urban renewal, old-Â�age and unemployment insurance, job training, the host of assorted programs Â�under the mislabeled “war on poverty,” farm price supports, and so on at incredible length.â•‹.â•‹.â•‹.╋╉The Negative Income Tax would be vastly superior to this collection of welfare meaÂ�sures. It would concentrate public funds on supplementing the incomes of the poor—Â�not distribute funds broadside in the hope that some Â�will trickle down to the poor.67 Friedman, however, did not Â�favor just any negative income tax.

Tobin developed his proposal inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dently of Friedman’s: “At some point [in the 1960s] I became aware of Friedman’s proposal, but I thought it was confined to a negative income tax rate equal to the lowest income tax bracket tax rate, and that Â�didn’t seem to me to offer substantial help” (Tobin 2001). But he is likely to have been inspired by other proposals such as the “negative rates taxation” proposed by Robert J. Lampman (1965), according to Tobin (New York Times, March 8, 1997) “the intellectual architect of the war on poverty.” 77. Tobin 1965, 1968. 78. “The essential characteristic of demogrants is that the payment is made to all families in the potential eligible group, regardless of income” (Tobin et al. 1967: 161 fn 4). The term “demogrant” was commonly used in the 1960s to refer to “a payment made to all persons above or below a certain age, with no other eligibility conditions except perhaps residence in the country” (Burns 1965: 132).

“L’allocation universelle à l’épreuve de la Théorie de la justice.” Documents pour l’enseignement économique et social 106: 71–110. Preiss, Joshua. 2015. “Milton Friedman on Freedom and the Negative Income Tax.” Basic Income Studies 10(2): 169–191. Quadagno, Jill. 1995. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press. Québec solidaire. 2014. Plateforme électorale. Elections 2014. Montréal: Québec solidaire. Quinn, Michael. 1994. “Jeremy Bentham on the Relief of Indigence: An Exercise in Applied Philosophy.” Utilitas 6(1): 81–96. Raes, Koen. 1985. “Variaties op een thema.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

In addition to the mythical “welfare queen” with “eighty names” and “twelve Social Security cards,” whose tax-free income alone was “over $150,000,” Reagan described the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”48 He promised to crack down on crime by bringing more federal resources to bear on the problem—law and order being the one exception to a rigid intolerance for government spending. As neighborhoods in our greatest cities cried out for help in dealing with the spasms of joblessness and a rising drug trade, there was no New Deal. Or new War on Poverty. There was a war on drugs. And it was, and still is, being waged with near impunity in black and brown communities.49 Today 2.2 million people are incarcerated in prisons or jails, up from just 350,000 in 1980.50 A full 60 percent of incarcerated individuals are people of color, and two-thirds of all people in prison for drug offenses are people of color.

In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.”14 In 2012, O’Reilly listed what he called the “true causes of poverty” as “poor education, addiction, irresponsible behavior, and laziness.”15 In 2014, during the week that marked the fiftieth anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty, O’Reilly again said that “true poverty” “is being driven by personal behavior,” which included, according to him, “addictive behavior, laziness, apathy.”16 Why does what Bill O’Reilly thinks and communicates to his audience matter? Because his is the most viewed cable news show, regularly drawing in between 2 and 3 million viewers each night.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, boosting infrastructure investment, launching public-works programs, reforming the banking sector, and so on. The Social Security Act of 1935 provided “old age payments,” and the government set up the Aid to Dependent Children program that later became welfare. Three decades later, Lyndon Johnson led another dramatic expansion of this safety net as part of his civil rights–era “unconditional war” on poverty. “Many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he told a joint session of Congress at his 1964 State of the Union. “One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.”

“American social programs”: Frances Fox Piven, “Why Welfare Is Racist,” in Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform, ed. Sanford F. Schram, Joe Brian Soss, and Richard Carl Fording (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 323. even wealthy black individuals: Richard Rothstein, “Modern Segregation” (presentation to the Atlantic Live Conference, Reinventing the War on Poverty, Washington, DC, Mar. 6, 2014), http://www.epi.org/​publication/​modern-segregation/. “on explicit condition that no sales be made to blacks”: Richard Rothstein, “School Policy Is Housing Policy: Deconcentrating Disadvantage to Address the Achievement Gap” in Race, Equity, and Education: Sixty Years from Brown, ed.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Soft Imperialism Since the mid-1990s the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and other aid institutions have increasingly bypassed or short-circuited governments to work directly with regional and neighborhood non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indeed, the NGO revolution - there are now tens of thousands in Third World cities has reshaped the landscape of urban development aid in much the same way that the War on Poverty in the 1960s transformed relations between Washington, big city political machines, and insurgent innercity constituencies.17 As the intermediary role of the state has declined, the big international institutions have acquired their own grassroots presence through dependent NGOs in thousands of slums and poor urban communities.

In a review of recent studies, including a major report by the London-based Panos Institute, Rita Abrahamsen concludes that "rather than empowering 'civil society,' the PRSP process has entrenched the position of a small, homogeneous 'iron triangle' of transnational professionals based in key government ministries (especially Finance), multilateral and bilateral development agencies and international NGOs."19 What Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his brief tenure as chief economist for the Bank described as an emerging "post-Washington Consensus" might be better characterized as "soft imperialism," with the major NGOs captive to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent upon the international NGOs.20 For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism. Moreover, like the community organizations patronized by the War on Poverty in the 1960s, Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at coopting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left Even if there are some celebrated exceptions - such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums - the broad impact of the NGO/ "civil society revolution," as even some World Bank researchers acknowledge, has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements.21 18 Sebastian Mallaby, The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York 2004, pp. 89-90, 145. 19 Rita Abrahamsen, "Review Essay: Poverty Reduction or Adjustment by Another Name?


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

As Arkansas representative Wilbur Mills66 recalled, “Johnson always was a spender, in a sense, different from Kennedy. He thought that you could always stimulate the economy better through public spending than you could through private spending.”67 Johnson’s program was as radical as anything Franklin Roosevelt had attempted. He extended civil rights to African-Americans, embarked on a “war on poverty” through federal entitlements, and instituted Medicare to give health care to everyone over age sixty-five and Medicaid for those who could not afford health insurance. The 1960s was a decade of unparalleled wealth. Whereas the 1950s had been years of widespread affluence, the 1960s made the average worker comfortably well-off.

Oral history interview with Leon Keyserling by Jerry N. Hess, Washington, D.C., May 10, 1971, p. 94. 46 Walter Wolfgang Heller (1915–87), chair of economics at the University of Minnesota. Helped design the Marshall Plan of 1947 that reinvigorated Europe after World War II. Suggested to Lyndon Johnson the “War on Poverty.” 47 Kermit Gordon (1916–76), later president of the Brookings Institution who oversaw the first budget of Johnson’s Great Society. 48 John F. Kennedy, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” February 2, 1961, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

., 128, 157, 170, 178–79, 199, 228–30, 232, 236–46, 251, 253, 261, 277, 282, 283 —wage levels and, 148 United Nations, 228, 229 United States: —banking system of, 28, 41, 84–85 —capitalism in, 46, 144–46 —domestic programs of, 157–70, 202, 205, 228, 231–32, 240, 248, 253, 256, 320n —economy of, 46, 52–53, 62, 106, 111, 141–42, 188–90, 228–46, 253–55, 261–65, 269–72 —foreign aid of, 136, 228 —Hayek’s influence in, xiii–xiv, 201–11, 234, 246, 247–65, 267–74 —inflation rate of, 230, 232, 236, 238–39, 242–46, 248, 251, 255, 261–62, 263, 267, 271 —infrastructure of, 159, 163, 189, 281 —interest rates in, 232, 235, 236, 246, 277, 280, 282, 284 —Keynesianism in, 146–47, 154–70, 188–90, 228–46, 276–84 —military spending of, 190, 231–34, 237, 241, 261, 264, 274, 276–78 —national security of, 233–34, 237, 276–77 —space program of, 234, 237 taxation in, 231, 262–63 —unemployment rate in, 128, 157, 170, 178–79, 199, 228–30, 232, 236–46, 251, 253, 261, 277, 282, 283 —Versailles Treaty and, 4–5, 155–57 —welfare programs in, 240, 264 —in World War II, 189–90, 229, 234 University of Chicago Press, 194, 201–2, 212, 216, 247 utilities, 291 utopias, 290–91, 292 value: —of currency, 22–23 —determination of, 5, 22–23 —of equipment (depreciation), 105–6, 118–19 —of goods, 74–75, 101, 117 —monetary, 22–23, 74–75, 120–21, 161 Vanity Fair, 157 “velocity of circulation,” 26, 33, 104, 136 Versailles Treaty, xii, xiii, 3, 4–5, 8–14, 17, 28, 56, 68, 84, 136, 137, 155–57, 158, 189 Vienna, xi–xiii, 1–3, 15–16, 17, 18–21, 27, 29–30, 40, 44, 111, 145, 214–15 Vienna, University of, 3, 15, 19, 20–22, 140 Vietnam War, 241 Viner, Jacob, 216, 221–22, 329n Volcker, Paul, 246, 261, 263, 286 voluntary savings, 104, 107 von Szeliski, Victor, 164 voting rights, 140 wages, 32, 38–39, 60, 63, 118, 119–20, 134, 135, 148, 188, 241 —controls on, 243–44 —increases in, 118, 119–20, 134 —production costs and, 119–20 Walras, Léon, 74 war debt, 4–5, 8–14, 21–22, 31–32, 84, 155–57, 206 warfare, 4, 137, 138, 190–92, 194, 229, 231–34 war on poverty, 240 war on terror, 276–78 “War Potential and War Finance” (Keynes), 191–92 Watergate scandal, 244 wealth accumulation, 56–57, 117–20, 127, 143–44, 149–50, 222, 241, 279, 287 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 218 Webb, Beatrice, 24, 64 Webb, Sidney, 24 Weber, Max, 21, 304n Wedgwood, Veronica, 212, 329n weights and measures, 201 Weimar Republic, 9 welfare state, 199–200, 201, 222, 227, 233, 234–35, 240, 249–50, 253, 258–61, 264, 267, 288–89, 295 Westminster Abbey, 226 wholesale prices, 62 “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (Hayek), 220 Wicksell, Knut, 42, 43, 48, 55, 74, 91, 100, 103, 120 “widow’s cruse,” 127 Wieser, Friedrich von, 20, 21–22 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 9 William Volcker Charities Fund, 211, 216, 218 Wilson, Woodrow, 4–5, 11, 28, 155–57, 161 Winant, John, 226 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 114, 300n Wolfson, Adam, 288–89, 292 Woolf, Leonard, 53, 226 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 53, 301n Wootton, Barbara, 202–3, 320n, 326n “Working of the Price Mechanism in the Course of the Credit Cycle, The” (Hayek), 76–78 World Bank, 136, 193 WorldCom, 278 World War I, 3–5, 16, 19–20, 22, 55–56, 68, 69, 72, 84, 155–57, 189 World War II, 136, 189–92, 229, 234 Wright, Quincy, 85 Yale University, 271 Yom Kippur War, 244 Yugoslavia, 16, 17 Zionism, 158 More praise for KEYNES HAYEK “An essential primer on the two men who shaped modern finance.”


pages: 692 words: 127,032

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

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

At its peak, the Apollo Program would employ some 400,000 people.5 There were just two problems: We didn’t have a clue about how to do it, and we didn’t have the money either, with the country in a major recession and federal tax revenues down. To make matters worse, Kennedy’s inspirational ideas for domestic policy were getting shot down. He had painted a grand vision of the New Frontier and the War on Poverty, but he couldn’t get Congress to pay for a major expansion of social programs, at least not yet. But if a program were tied to the cold war, he thought he could get Congress to support it like they had the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act five years before and the National Defense Education Act of 1958.6 Apollo could be a bold new vision and a jobs program, an economic stimulus with benefits.

The cultural anxiety was so high by then that the very idea of Russians crawling all over the Moon caused a visceral reaction in many Main Street Americans. Kennedy thought he had a winner. But once the budget numbers came back, they showed that the program would cost almost $20 billion over eight years, eating up all the discretionary funds that Kennedy needed for his War on Poverty. If he wanted Apollo, he would likely have to sacrifice everything else. He began looking for a way out. He realized that if he took away the cold-war justification, he’d lose the support of fiscal conservatives, and he could use that loss to move the deadline back indefinitely by defunding it.

See also specific name V Vaccination debate, 151–55, 178–79 Value on ecosystem, 259 Values war, 111, 163–66, 171 Varmus, Harold, 8–9, 19 Vaughn, Lewis, 136 Velocity-distance relationship, 69 Vioxx (rofecoxib) lawsuit, 17 Vitalism, concept of, 118–19 Vonnegut, Kurt Jr., 97–98 “Vulgar induction,” 194–95, 289 W Wakefield, Andrew, 152, 154 War on Poverty, 95 Washington, George, 22, 90–91 Watson, James, 78 Watts, Anthony, 201 Weapons of mass destruction, 11. See also Atomic bomb Webber, Michael, 274–76, 289 Welles, Orson, 144 Western Christianity, 41–43 Westphal, Scott, 184, 299 Whitfield, Ed, 218–19 Willer, Robb, 283–85 Williams, Brian, 286 Wilson, Edward O., 4, 129 Wilson, Robert, 309–11 World War II, 73–79 Wundt, Wilhelm, 117 Y Yellow journalism, 150–51 Z Zakir, Waseem, 195 Mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher, nor does mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities imply that they endorse this book, its author, or the publisher.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Ask yourself: what is the moral and intellectual state of a nation that gives a blank check on its wealth, its work, its efforts, its lives to a “yearner” and “dreamer,” to spend on lost causes? Can anyone feel morally inspired to live and work for such a purpose? Can anyone preserve any values by looking at anything today? If a man who earns his living hears constant denunciations of his “selfish greed” and then, as a moral example, is offered the spectacle of the War on Poverty—which fills the newspapers with allegations of political favoritism, intrigues, maneuvering, corruption among its “selfless” administrators—what will happen to his sense of honesty? If a young man struggles sixteen hours a day to work his way through school, and then has to pay taxes to help the dropouts from the dropout programs—what will happen to his ambition?

Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar or for anyone’s cause—life is not one huge hospital. Those who suggest that we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded. The answer applies as well to the values and premises of the astronauts’ admirers.

The response of Congress to Apollo 11 included some prominent voices who declared that NASA’s appropriations should be cut because the lunar mission has succeeded.(!) The purpose of the years of scientific work is completed, they said, and “national priorities” demand that we now pour more money down the sewers of the war on poverty. If you want to know the process that embitters, corrupts, and destroys the managers of government projects, you are seeing it in action. I hope that the NASA administrators will be able to withstand it. As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not have to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

., who meekly recited a six-minute message for the benefit of two Board of Estimate members. Wagner still proposed to close the gap by issuing short-term notes. It amounted, he said, to “borrow now, repay later.” The Mayor’s message echoed the boundless optimism and rhetoric of the day: “I intend that we shall press ahead with the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on narcotics addiction, the war on slums, the war on disease and the war on civil ugliness.” Such “wars” cost money, and the Mayor presented a record $3.87 billion budget—up $514,299,699—plus a first-time fiscal trick to pay for it. Unlike subsequent mayors, Wagner did not hide his tricks.

While the game was divorced from rules, it was not divorced from the political ethos of the time. The public was demanding, expecting, more. In truth, it would have been difficult, even if New York had enjoyed strong leadership, to have cut the city’s budget. The sixties saw Mayor Wagner pledge a local war on poverty. President Kennedy promised Camelot. President Johnson promised both guns and butter. Mayor Lindsay promised Fun City. Martin Luther King had a dream. The Great Society was going to transform slums into Scarsdales, Vietnam into Ohio. Public expectations rose. Cities seethed with rage when the inflated promises of the Great Society and New Frontier were not met, and City Hall tried to step into the breach.

.…” “Hell, five years ago all the so-called ‘budgetary gimmicks’ were being called genius,” Lindsay’s former chief of staff, Jay Kriegel, told writer Harry Stein. “It wasn’t Lindsay, it was the times.” And the times were optimistic. John Kennedy kicked off the decade of the sixties promising to “get this country moving again.” Lyndon Johnson’s first State of the Union message, in 1964, announced “a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.” Vietnam was to preserve the world for democracy. When John Lindsay captured the mayoralty in 1965, Newsweek’s cover story rhapsodized that his campaign was “the most important political operation in America today.…” In addition to optimism, the sixties featured social upheaval.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

In other cases, the metaphorical discourse of war is invoked as a strategic political maneuver in order to achieve the total mobilization of social forces for a united purpose that is typical of a war effort. The war on poverty, for example, launched in the United States in the mid-1960s by the Johnson administration, used the discourse of war to avoid partisan conflict and rally national forces for a domestic policy goal. Because poverty is an abstract enemy and the means to combat it are nonviolent, the war discourse in this case remains merely rhetorical. With the war on drugs, however, which began in the 1980s, and more so with the twenty-first-century war on terrorism, the rhetoric of war begins to develop a more concrete character. As in the case of the war on poverty, here too the enemies are posed not as specific nation-states or political communities or even individuals but rather as abstract concepts or perhaps as sets of practices.

As in the case of the war on poverty, here too the enemies are posed not as specific nation-states or political communities or even individuals but rather as abstract concepts or perhaps as sets of practices. Much more successfully than the war on poverty, these discourses of war serve to mobilize all social forces and suspend or limit normal political exchange. And yet these wars are not so metaphorical because like war traditionally conceived they involve armed combat and lethal force. In these wars there is increasingly little difference between outside and inside, between foreign conflicts and homeland security. We have thus proceeded from metaphorical and rhetorical invocations of war to real wars against indefinite, immaterial enemies.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Beginning in the mid-1960s, institutions themselves began to yield to the participatory ideal. The 1964 Wilderness Act was the first piece of federal legislation to require participation by citizens’ groups in proposals for wilderness designations.36 And the mandate of “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in designing the War on Poverty’s Community Action Programs suggested the potency of the participatory ideal. Of course, neither tobacco interests nor their allies in Congress would cede ground to this broadened conception of the public when it was articulated in front of regulatory agencies and in the courts. Regulating after the Report The Surgeon General’s Report triggered an equal and opposite reaction from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

For example, the 1967 Air Quality Act provided for citizen participation in public hearings, offering encouragement to neighborhood groups across the country. And the 1970 Clean Air Act encouraged grassroots involvement in policymaking, requiring that states hold public hearings on proposed environmental laws so that citizen groups could present testimony.85 From the War on Poverty’s Community Action Agencies to city-based experiments in community policing to the advisory committees of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), state regulations began to open to new constituencies in dramatic ways that reflected an expanding conception of the public. These experiments in openness were never as accessible as their architects intended.

SCRAP, 187–188 Van den Haag, Ernest, 219 The Ventilator, 176–177 Verband der Zigarettenindustrie, 89 Village Voice, 194 Virginia, 31–32, 82 Volpe, John, 168 Voting Rights Act, 153 Wallace, Henry C., 33–36, 46–48, 52, 55, 57, 60, 62, 319n50 Wall Street Journal, 61, 169, 218 Wanamaker, John, 25 warehouses, 30, 44, 72–74, 113, 199 War on Poverty, 125, 186 Warren, Earl, 130 Warren, Robert Penn, 11–12, 37 Warsaw Uprising, 83 Washington Post, 140, 148, 164, 171, 225–226, 242–243, 247–248, 255, 257, 282, 284 Watergate, 173, 242, 247 Watts, Glenn, 233 Waxman, Henry, 247–248, 262–263, 279–280, 283–284, 288–289 WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Movement), 24–25, 27, 142–143 W.


pages: 338 words: 92,465

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century by Katherine S. Newman, Hella Winston

active measures, blue-collar work, business cycle, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, desegregation, factory automation, high-speed rail, information security, intentional community, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, performance metric, proprietary trading, reshoring, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

The silver lining to these Cold War obsessions was the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which supported a massive investment in higher education through loan programs that fostered college enrollments, especially in defense-oriented fields, from foreign languages and area studies to engineering and mathematics. The vocational education section of the bill focused on training individuals for highly skilled technical occupations such as computer programming and aircraft mechanics, which were vital to national defense. Vocational Education and the War on Poverty The common purpose of the second wave of vocational education and its allied programs of apprenticeship had emphasized the needs of the labor market for skilled workers as well as the manpower requirements of war production. In the 1960s, a new mission emerged that had little to do with either of these goals.

community and technical colleges and credentials and debates over decentralization of employer ties to schools and funding and funding and, Germany German dual system German dual system, in US high school high-school, vs. general education hiring biases and history of improving and expanding Japan and manual training movement and mathematics and modernizing obstacles to rebranded as CTE standardized tests and workforce needs and Vocational Education Act (1963) vocational teachers Vocational Training Act (Germany) Volkswagen (VW) Coaching wages and incomes apprenticeships and community colleges and Germany and protection of South and wait staff Waitz, Martin Walker, Scott Walmart War on Poverty Washington, Booker T. Washington State Web developers “We’d Love to Hire them, But…” (Kirschenman and Neckerman) welding Wentworth Institute of Technology West Virginia white-collar work White House Fact Sheet (1992) Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School Williams, Keith Williams, Nigeria Wilson, William Julius Wisconsin Wolf, Stephan Wolfsburg Works Council workers’ councils Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA, 2014) World War I World War II writing skills Yale University Youssef, Said Youth Apprenticeship, American Style conference (1990) youth apprenticeship programs.


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

DEALING WITH MALARIA AND DEPENDENCY In January 2005, I attended the World Economic Forum, a gathering of heads of state, entrepreneurs, economists, and public figures that is held every year in Davos, Switzerland. In one session, I listened as then Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa addressed the theme “Funding the War on Poverty” on a panel that included President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil; Domenico Siniscalco, Italy's then minister of economy and finance; Gordon Brown, then the UK's chancellor of the exchequer; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.1 President Mkapa made a passionate appeal for the global North (the wealthy, industrialized countries, which are mainly located in the northern hemisphere) to cancel the debts that his country owed, which, he said, severely hampered his government's ability to make investments in public health, including, for example, providing bed nets to protect Tanzanian children from malaria-infected mosquitoes.

Indeed, at the end of his speech, President Mkapa had gotten to the heart of the need for Africa's leaders to commit to serving their peoples and to practicing better governance for their peoples' benefit: Now for our own, let me say: I don't want to be putting the developed countries on the dock. We [Africans] also have a task, we also have a challenge; because we also have a capacity to some extent of funding the war on poverty ourselves: organizing our economies, organizing our revenue collection systems, organizing our own budgeting, being more accountable and transparent. Those we can undertake. A combination of those reforms I think would see a tremendous, truly predictable advance in the war against poverty. President Mkapa knew what the right actions were.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

The nineteenth-century British economist and philosopher Henry Sidgwick is usually credited with introducing the concept of externalities. They were originally called spillovers. Later economists apparently decided that that term was too clear and stopped using it in favor of the more opaque word externalities. II. As we’ll see in chapter 11, the Chinese war on poverty has also been hugely successful. III. Monsanto began to acquire its bad name in the 1960s and 1970s when it (along with other chemical companies) produced Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide that was widely used by the US military during the Vietnam War. Agent Orange caused serious health problems in humans.

A graph created by Max Roser clearly reveals the “miracle” Smith was talking about, and how right he was that the improvement is without precedent. The graph doesn’t show the percentage of people living in poverty, but instead something even more important: the total number of extremely poor people on earth. World Population Living in Extreme Poverty, 1820–2015 The World’s War on Poverty The total number of poor people in the world peaked right at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, then started to slowly decrease. But the real miracle came when this happy decline accelerated during the twenty-first century. In 1999, 1.76 billion people were living in extreme poverty. Just sixteen years later, this number had declined by 60 percent, to 705 million.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Even the belated discovery of poverty in Appalachia and other predominantly white areas, as detailed in Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1963), could not diminish this utopian optimism that economists could attain affluence for all. If anything, the Council of Economic Advisors under both Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia 101 President Kennedy and President Johnson believed in their ability to develop policies to help to eradicate poverty, a belief expanded by Johnson with his “War on Poverty.” Similarly, sociologist Daniel Bell’s influential The End of Ideology (1960), even though it was misread as endorsing this consensus over the end of strongly ideological politics in affluent America, nevertheless gave enormous intellectual legitimacy to it. Furthermore, the purported consensus on America’s present and future was now traced to the nation’s past by influential historians such as Daniel Boorstin in The Genius of American Politics (1953) and David Potter in People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954).

W. 165 TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936–1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in PostIndustrial America (Wheeler, McDonald) 111 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne) 8 Twitter 193 Two Cultures, The (Snow) 113– 114, and engineering 121 Unabomber 84 “underdeveloped” or “Third World” 102, 105, 172 Union Carbide 253 United Kingdom 151 Fabianism in 20 286 Index relationship with the United States 114 utopianism in 24 and wind power 151 United Nations International Year of Cooperatives 64 United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing see Shakers United States 187 “aging or declining era” 237 America as “Second Creation” 81–85 America as utopia 10, 24–25, 74–78, 188–189 American “exceptionalism” 89 attitudes toward inventors, engineers and scientists 157–160 attitude toward rulers 159 attitudes toward technological progress 78, 82, 84, 116 citizens’ demand for separation from external world 122 Civil War 76, 77 concept of System 78 exportation of science and technology 102–103, 109–110 fairs 36, 37 gap between science and public beliefs 116–117 immigration 77–78 imperialism 9 influence of European utopianism 76 moral superiority 11 nature of Americaness 78–79 and nuclear plants 142–156 “nuclear renaissance” 154 and Old World 74 “positive thinking” 168 potentiality of utopia in 75–76 reconceptualization of America 78 religious beliefs 11–12 science and technology 108–109 sense of identity 77 technology and opportunism 75, 77 2011 earthquake 153 United States and digital literacy 210 United States Constitution 74, 93 utopianism and contemporary disorder 93 utopianism 5, 24–32, 24 views of industrialization and technology 83, 84 see also technological utopia Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 252 universal rights 252 Universal Studios 36 universities 130, 204, 207, 213, 214 Kellogg Commission 215, 216 and “power of knowledge” 104 and TQM 217 see also electronic campus University of California 112 Berkeley, protests at 111 University of Illinois 207, 210 University of Maine System 208 University of Phoenix 210, 210, 211 urban crises 115 “urbanization” 31 utilitarianism 62 utopias: defined 1, 5–7 alternative energy 150–151 American 24–32, 89–96 artifacts and utopia 196, 243, 252 attitudes toward utopia 124, 192, 242–244 background to 50ff in China and Japan 17–21 contemporary utopias 194–199 creation of 13 critics of utopia 48ff, 74ff, 123–131 critiques 169–173, 243 and cyberspace 198–199 declining faith in 158 digital utopianism 154 and dystopias 5, 216, 244 educational 205, 206–213 and electrification 94 expectations of achievability 50–51, 248–249 failures of 186 as fantasies 251 feasibility of establishment 13–14 forecasters’ claims 160–169 future of utopias 255, 234ff genres of utopianism 24ff and globalization 253–254 high-tech 1, 2, 16, 118, 162, 163, 172, 186, 210, 214–215, 253, 255 negative components 165–166, 167–168 inherent impracticality of 123 intent of utopias 7, 205 internal criticism 28 Kellogg Commission’s utopianism 213–217 Latin American utopias 21–23 literary accounts 1–2, 47–50, 54–55 location of 13 Index 287 utopias (Continued) and megaprojects 139–142 and millenarian movements 8–9 minor utopias 251, 252–253 and modernization 105–106 and “near future” 164, 186 necessity for ability to change 5, 251 non-utopianism 7, 147, 252 non-Western utopianism 16–23, 196, 243 nuclear power 146, 153–154, 156 ongoing significance of utopia 241–255 origin of term 5, 48 overdetailed descriptions 250–251 print and utopianism 217–222 and real world 1, 5–6, 7, 12–13, 244–245 reflecting societies 1, 31 and religion 9–12, 56 and science fiction 8–9, 199–201 and scientific and technological plateau 67, 234–241 significance of utopianism 241–255 significance of utopian writers 95–96 skepticism toward 2 and social media 193–194 spiritual qualities and formal religion 9–12 spread of utopias 16–17 technological utopias 3, 32, 34, 53ff, 99, 102, 107, 109, 202, 247, 253 potential failure of 187 tradition of 188–189 timescale of utopias 13–11 288 Index true and false utopias 5–6, 7, 106 utopia and history 244–245 utopian communities’ political viewpoint 25 utopian writings 47, 254 utopianism and availability of choice 123 utopias and role of women 25, 63, 90–92, 173 utopias, millenarianism and science fiction 8–9 and virtual reality 255 Western utopias 16, 242, 250, 252 see also particular authors, Best and Brightest, Edutopia, Pansophists, Shakers, Technocracy, World’s fairs utopian communities 194–198, 247 and France 2 negative aspects 254–255 quasi-utopian societies 201 religion-based 2, 10 utopian settlements, US 98 Utopian Socialist Society, Venezuela 79 Utopia (New York Library exhibition catalog) 245 Utopia (Thomas More) 5, 13, 23, 47, 48, 123, 242, 244 Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (Fuller) 14, 164, 207, 248 Utopia Road, Southern California 2 Utopia, Texas, United States 2 Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (exhibition, New York Public Library) 242–245 utopianism (movement) 5, 100–101, 245, 247, 250, 254 Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Sargent) 16 utopians 98, 161, 186–192 Utopias (beer) 3, 249 Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India (Embree) 171 Veblen, Thorstein 97, 106, 216 Venezuela 23, 189 Venter, Craig 127 Vergil 47 Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant 145, 148, 154 Verne, Jules 7, 8 Vernon, Vermont, United States 145, 147–148 Vietnam War 104–105, 111, 112, 115, 158, 159, 160, 245 Vincenti, Walter 52, 121 virtual governments 250 virtual reality 255 “virtual school” 206 “vision thing” (H. W. Bush) 241–242 Visual Factory, The 212 von Braun, Wernher 9 Wallingford, Connecticut 28 “War on Poverty” 101 War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (Franklin) 141–142 water power 150 Watergate scandal 158, 159 Watt, James 8 We (Zamyatin) 123, 166 Webber, Melvin 112 Weinberg, Alvin 106, 107–108, 109, 110, 114, 122 Wells, H. G. 9, 35, 240, 251 Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister 38 Western ethnocentrism and industrialisation 169–170 Westinghouse, George 157 What Will Be (Dertouzos) 164 Wheeler, William Bruce 111 Whewell, Rev.


pages: 128 words: 35,958

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

“A Rising Natural Rate of Unemployment: Transitory or Permanent?” Report No. 11-160/3. The Netherlands: Tinbergen Institute. Holtz-Eakin, Douglas. 1992. “Public-Sector Capital and the Productivity Puzzle.” Working Paper No. 4122. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Holzer, Harry. 2013. “Workforce Development Programs.” In Legacies of the War on Poverty, ed. Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger, 121-151.New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Johnson, Clifford M., Amy Rynell, and Melissa Young. 2010. “Publicly Funded Jobs: An Essential Strategy for Reducing Poverty and Economic Distress Throughout the Business Cycle.” Paper prepared for the Georgetown University and Urban Institute Conference on Reducing Poverty and Economic Distress after ARRA, January 15.


pages: 605 words: 110,673

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

British Empire, double helix, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, offshore financial centre, precautionary principle, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), War on Poverty

In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.” Richard Nixon, 1971. In 1971, President Nixon gave a speech in which he declared that the USA was facing a “national emergency”, and that drug addiction was “public enemy number one”. This was the beginning of the “War on Drugs”, a term coined as a reference to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, (which has been about as unsuccessful as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” which followed it). The word “war” in this case was oddly appropriate, as the “drug abuse emergency” Nixon referred to was largely taking place amongst the US Army in Vietnam, where drug-taking was very prevalent.

view=Binary 168. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar /05/korean-girl-starved-online-game 169. www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/ sciofaddiction.pdf 170. info.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/ groups/cr_common/@nre/@sta/documents/ generalcontent/crukmig_1000ast-2989.xls 171. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1119598109 172. www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/ 31/race-bias-drug-arrests-claim 173. www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/ 17carter.html 174. www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/feb/ 11/uk.drugsandalcohol1 175. www.ukcia.org/research/ ProjectionsOfImpactOfRiseInUse/ ProjectionsOfImpactOfRiseInUse.pdf 176. www.beckleyfoundation.org/2011/11/19/ public-letter-in-the-times-and-guardian-calling-for-a-new-approach 177. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/drugs/drug-law/ 178. www.time.com/time/world/article/ 0,8599,1887488,00.html 179. www.apa.org/science/programs/ conference/2011/harwood.ppt 180. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35914759/ns/business-world _business/t/wachovia-settle-drug-money-laundering-case 181. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-435393/ Exclusive-Cameron-DID-smoke-cannabis.html 182. www.lawrencephillips.net/ Decision_conferencing.html Index Page numbers in bold indicate definitions. 12-step programme, 1, 2 5HT2A receptors and psychedelics, 1 acamprosate, 1 acetylcholine receptors, 1 ACMD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 cannabis report, 1 drugs ranked, 1 expert panel for MCDA, 1 purpose, 1 ranking procedure, 1 ranking, limitations, 1 ranking, reaction to, 1 ranking, results, 1 ranking, weights, 1 sacked from, 1 website, 1 acquisitive crime, 1, 2, 3 Portugal, 1 UK statistics, 1 activate, 1 acute, 1 Adams, Tony, 1, 2 addiction, 1 alcohol, Tony Adams, 1 Amy Winehouse, 1, 2 benzodiazepines, 1 brain mechanisms, 1 curing, 1 diagnosing, 1 dynamics and, 1 gambling, 1 habits and, 1 history, 1 kinetics and, 1 memories in, 1, 2, 3 neurotransmitters and, 1 painkillers, to, avoiding, 1 Pete Doherty, 1 preventing, 1 protective factors against, 1 Ritalin and, 1 treatment difficult, 1 treatment with psychedelics, 1 treatment, Alcoholics Anonymous, 1 treatment, evaluating, 1 treatment, future, 1 treatment, pharmacological substitutes, see pharmacological substitutes treatment, Portuguese experiment, 1 treatment, psychological, 1 withdrawal and, 1 addictive personality, 1, 2 protective factors, 1 addictiveness crack, 1 routes of use, 1 smoking, 1 tolerance and, 1 withdrawal and, 1 adenosine coffee produces, 1 receptors, 1 ADHD, 1, 2, 3 Ritalin treatment for, 1 Advertising Standards Authority, 1 advice on drugs, 1 aerobatics, 1 aerosols, see solvents agonist, see also antagonist and pseudo-antagonist, see also full and partial agonists full, 1 partial, 1 agoraphobia and alcohol, 1 AIDS, see HIV/AIDS Ainsworth, Bob, and decriminalisation, 1 Al Qaeda drugs money, 1 alcohol, 1, 2 addiction, 1 addiction endorphins, 1 agoraphobia and, 1 ALDH2 enzyme, 1, 2 alternatives, 1 anxiety and, 1 availability, 1 binge drinking, 1 cirrhosis and, 1, 2 cocaethylene, 1, 2 cocaine combined with, 1 dependence treatment, 1 depressant, 1 endorphins and, 1 ethnic groups, ALDH2 and, 1 GHB treatment for, 1 harms reduction, 1 health priority, 1 inverse agonist, 1 mixing with drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 price, 1 PTSD, and, 1 road safety, 1 smuggling, 1 sport, drugs in, 1 treatment in Italy and Austria, 1 treatment, LSD in, 1 withdrawal, 1, 2, 3 withdrawal, benzodiazepine treatment for, 1 withdrawal, ibogaine treatment for, 1 alcohol policy, drinks industry, 1 alcoholics anxiety disorders, 1, 2 dopamine receptor, 1 Alcoholics Anonymous, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ALDH2 enzyme and alcohol, 1, 2 allergic reaction, 1 Alpert, Richard, 1 Alpha receptors, 1 alternative approach, legislation, 1 licensed drug premises, 1 licensed drug sales, 1 alternatives for farmers, 1 alternatives to War on Drugs, 1 Portuguese approach, 1 Ameisen, Olivier, 1 amines, 1 amitriptyline, 1 amphetamines, 1 child soldiers given, 1 performance enhancers, 1 stimulant, 1 war, in, 1 amputation of limbs from smoking, 1 anabolic, 1 anabolic steroids, 1, 2, 3 corticosteroids, difference, 1 effects, 1 harms, 1 harms reduction, 1 HIV/AIDS, treatment in, 1 overdose, unlikely, 1 performance enhancers, 1 sex hormones, 1 suicide and, 1 uses, 1 anabolic-androgenic steroids, 1 anadenanthera peregrina, 1 analgesic-induced headaches, 1 analogues, synthetic, 1 ancient Greece Elysian Fields, 1 mushrooms, 1 Andes, cocaine in, 1 androgenic, 1 anhedonia, 1 antagonist, 1, 2, 3 vaccines, anti-drug, 1 anthrax, 1 anti-drug vaccines, 1 anti-inflammatory, corticosteroids, 1 anti-stress corticosteroids, 1 antibody for cocaine overdose, 1 antidepressants, 1 how they work, 1 tricyclic, 1 anxiety addiction and, 1 alcohol and, 1 benzodiazepines for, 1 cannabis and, 1 depressants for, 1 disorder in alcoholics, 1, 2 GABA receptors, low levels, 1 neurotransmitters and, 1 new drugs for, 1 panic attacks, 1 PTSD, in, 1 reduction in terminal illness, 1 treatment outcomes, 1 treatment, SSRIs, 1 archery, 1 ASA, 1 asphyxiation from solvents, 1 aspirin, 1 side effects, 1 aspirin, side effects, 1 Ativan, 1 atom bomb, spiritual antidote to, 1 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, see ADHD auditory effects, schizophrenia, 1 Australia, decriminalisation of drugs in, 1 ayuesca, psychedelic, 1 baby, starved by parents, 1 baclofen, 1 bagging, route of use, 1 ban, temporary order, 1 banisteriopsis caapi, 1 banks, money-laundering, 1 barbiturates, 1, 2, 3 PTSD, and, 1 suicide, 1 Barcelona, 1 battle fatigue, 1, see also PTSD BCS, see British Crime Survey benefits cannabis, 1 mephedrone, 1 psychedelics, 1 Benzedrine, 1, 2 benzodiazepines, 1, 2 addiction, 1 alcohol treatment, in, 1 benefits, 1 depressant, 1 endogenous, 1 GABA receptors, 1 harms, 1 how they work, 1 Librium, 1 overdose, safer, 1 physical dependence, 1 rebound less likely, 1 side effects, few, 1 suicide and, 1 withdrawal, 1 benzylpiperazine, 1 Bernays, Edward, 1 beta blockers in sport, 1 Betts, Leah, 1, 2 bhang, 1, 2 binge cocaine, 1 drinking, 1, 2, 3 LSD, impossible, 1 tolerance and, 1 treatment, 1 Bird, Sheila, Professor, 1 bladder, ketamine, 1 Blair, Tony, 1 blind trial, 1 Bolivia, 1, 2 coca, 1, 2 bong, 1 brain addiction mechanisms, 1 default mode, 1 brain chemicals, 1 receptors, 1 Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs programme, 1 dispense with care scenario, 1 high performance scenario, 1 neighbourhood watch scenario, 1 treated positively scenario, 1 Brake, Tom, MP, 1 Breakdown Britain, 1, 2 British Aerobatic Association, 1 British Crime Survey, 1 Brokenshire, James, 1 bromides, PTSD, and, 1 bubbles, see mephedrone buprenorphine, 1, 2 advantages, 1 blocks on-top heroin use, 1 early problems, 1 effects, 1 heroin susbstitute, 1 how it works, 1 morphine alternative, 1 opioid, 1 origin, 1 partial agonist for heroin, 1 pharmacological substitute, as, 1 bupropion, 1 burglary, 1, 2 Burrows, David, 1 butane, see also solvents, 1 Bwiti cult, 1 BZP, 1 caffeine Coca-Cola, 1 coffee, 1 stimulant, 1 withdrawal, 1, 2 calmness, drugs for, 1 Camden, 1 “Cameron approach”, 1 Cameron, David, MP, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Cameroon, 1 Campral, 1 cancer, see also terminal illness ecstasy in treating, 1 cannabis, 1, 2 ACMD report, 1 anxiety and, 1 as medicine, historical, 1 as medicine, present, 1 benefits, 1 cluster headache and, 1 decriminalisation of drugs, 1 different forms compared, 1 downgrading, 1, 2 farmers required to grow, 1 gateway to more harmful drugs, 1 harms, 1 harms, compared to prison, 1 hemp, 1 heroin instead of, 1 multiple sclerosis and, 1, 2, 3 munchies, the, 1 psychoactive ingredient, 1 re-upgraded, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3, 4 routes of use, 1 schizophrenia, 1, 2 terminal illness, for, 1 therapeutic drug, as, 1 tinctures, 1 upgrading, 1, 2 cannabis indica, 1 Carlin, Eric, 1, 2 Carnage UK, 1 Carter, Jimmy, 1 Case for Heroin, The, 1 catechol O methyl transferase, see COMT cathinones, 1 banned, 1 naphyrone, 1 synthetic, 1 CBD, 1, 2, 3 CBT, 1, 2 Celera Genomics and genetic sequencing, 1 Celexa, 1 Centre for Social Justice, 1 Champix, 1 Champs Elysees, 1 chemicals, brain, 1 chewing, routes of use, 1 Chief Medical Officer, 1 child soldiers given amphetamines, 1 children advice to, 1 age to advise at, 1 Chinese, alcohol and, 1 cholecystokinin, 1 chronic, 1 cigarettes advertising, 1 generic packaging, 1 invention, 1 labelling, 1 wars, in, 1 Cipramil, 1 cirrhosis, 1 cirrhosis and alcohol, 1, 2 cirrhosis and khat, 1 citalopram, 1 civil liberties, 1 Clarke, Ken, 1 Class of drug, see also downgrading, see also upgrading too high, perverse consequences, 1 kinetics affect, 1 prison sentences by, 1 purpose, 1 reviewing, 1 social context and, 1, 2 classification of harms, 1, 2 climate change, 1, 2 Clinton, Bill, 1 clonidine, 1 clostridium, 1 cluster headache cannabis and, 1 psychedelics for, 1, 2 CMO, see Chief Medical Officer CNN, 1 co-ingestants, 1, 2 coca, 1 Bolivia, 1, 2 Coca-Cola and caffeine, 1 Coca-Cola and cocaine, 1 cocaethylene, 1 cocaine, see also crack, 1, 2 addiction endorphins, 1 alcohol combined with, 1 binge, 1 Coca-Cola, 1 cocaethylene, 1, 2 crack compared, 1 crop destruction, 1, 2, 3 deaths in drugs war, 1 effects, 1 environmental damage, 1 farmers, 1 freebase is crack, 1 history, 1 how it works, 1 hydrochloride, 1 insecticide, as, 1 international damage, 1 manufacturing process, 1 nose, 1 overdose mechanism, 1 overdose, antibody for, 1 political damage, 1 powder, 1 rainforests affected, 1, 2 routes of use, 1, 2 stimulant, 1 vaccine, anti-, 1 wine, see Vin Mariani Cockburn, Joslyne, 1 codeine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cough medicine, removed, 1 headaches induced, 1 opioid, 1 coffee adenosine, produces, 1 caffeine, 1 cognition enhancer, as, 1 effects, 1 history, 1 how it works, 1 origin, 1 coffee shop model, Netherlands, 1, 2 cognition enhancer coffee as, 1 cognition enhancers, 1 common, scenario, 1 economic divide, 1 exams, in, 1 memory and, 1 modafinil, 1 uses, 1 cognitive behavioural therapy, see CBT Colombia, 1, 2 Columbus, Christopher, 1 compensating farmers, 1 COMT dopamine and, 1 noradrenaline and, 1 pain sensitivity, 1 types, 1 consent, see, informed consent contraceptive pill, 1 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1 corruption, 1 corticosteroids anabolic steroids, difference, 1 muscle wasting with, 1 cortisol, 1 cost crime, drug-related, 1 drug habits, of, 1 War on Drugs, 1 cot death, see Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cough medicine, codeine removed, 1 Counterblast to Tobacco, 1 crack, see also cocaine, 1 addictiveness, 1 cocaine compared, 1 dopamine receptors and, 1 harms, 1 kinetics, 1 origin, 1 purity, 1 routes of use, 1 vaporisation temperature, 1 craving, 1 creativity enhanced by psychedelics, 1 CRF, 1 crime, see also acquisitive crime drug-related, cost, 1 statistics, 1 Crimean War, cigarettes in, 1 criminalisation effects, 1 of sick end disabled, 1 smoking, 1 supply reduction, 1 criteria for harms, 1, 2 crop destruction, 1 cocaine, 1 crop destruction, cocaine, 1 cultural context, see social context curing addiction, 1 cycling, 1 D-cycloserine, 1, 2 Daily Mail, the, 1, 2, 3 DALY, 1 DARE programme, 1 costs, 1 does not work, 1 data set, minimum required, 1 day with drugs, 1 day without drugs, 1 decriminalisation of drugs Ainsworth, Bob, 1 Australia, 1 cannabis, 1 legalisation differs, 1 Mowlam, Mo, 1 Portugal, 1, 2, 3 UK independence party, 1 UN Conventions and, 1 default mode of brain, 1 Delgarno, Phil, 1 demand reduction statistics, 1 War on Drugs, 1 demographic imbalance, 1 demographic shifts, 1 dependence, see physical dependence, psychological dependence depressants, 1, 2 alcohol, 1 anxiety, for, 1 benzodiazepines, 1 “downers”, 1 GHB, 1 depression psilocybin, 1 vicious cycle, 1, 2 designer drugs mephedrone, 1 problems legislating for, 1 development of new drugs, 1 impediments, 1 social implications, 1 War on Drugs hinders, 1 diabetes, 1 diabetes, dietary treatment, 1 diabetes, insulin treatment, 1 diagnosing addiction, 1 dietary treatment, diabetes, 1 DIMS, Netherlands, 1, 2 disability-adjusted life year, 1 discriminatory policing, 1 disease, infectious, War on Drugs and, 1 disease-modifying agents, 1 dispense with care scenario, 1 disrepute, law into, 1 dissuasion board, 1 diverting prescription drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ritalin, 1 DMT, see also ayuesca, 1 psychedelic, 1 Doblin, Rick, 1 Doherty, Pete, 1, 2 Doll, Richard, 1, 2 Donaldson, Sir Liam, 1 Doors of Perception, The, 1 dopamine, 1 COMT and, 1 levels in withdrawal, 1 nicotine withdrawal, in, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 receptors in alcoholics, 1 receptors vicious cycle, 1 receptors, crack and, 1 receptors, methamphetamine and, 1 receptors, monkey, 1 receptors, stimulants and, 1 reuptake, 1 reuptake inhibitor, Ritalin, 1 reward chemical, 1 tobacco releases, 1 transporters, 1 double-blind trial, 1 down-regulating receptors, 1, 2 downgrading ecstasy recommendation, 1, 2 cannabis, 1, 2 purpose, 1 Drake, Sir Francis, 1 drinking, routes of use, 1 drinks industry alcohol policy, 1 misleading messages, 1 driving, drugs and, 1 Drone, see mephedrone drug, 1 defined, 1 efficacy, 1 Drug Abuse Resistance Education, see DARE Drug Information and Monitoring System, see DIMS, Netherlands drug ranking, Netherlands, 1 drug tourism, 1 drug trials informed consent, 1 drug trials, informed consent, 1 drug-related factors, 1 drugs, see also performance enhancer anti-insect defence, 1 Classes, see Class of drug daily cycle, 1, 2 different forms, why, 1 evolution, 1 future developments, 1 harms related to physical form, 1 history, 1 mixing, 1 mixing with alcohol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mixing, dangers, 1, 2, 3 mixing, speedballs, 1 neurotransmitters, mimic, 1 performance enhancing, see performance enhancers plant origin, 1 prescription, see prescription drugs profit margin, 1 psychedelic, see psychedelics reasons for taking, 1 sport, in, see sport, drugs in why people take, 1 withdrawal, 1 drugs in war, 1 amphetamines, 1 morphine, 1 prevalent, 1 recovery from, 1 unsanctioned, 1 Drummond, Colin, 1 Duncan Smith, Iain, 1 Dutch, see Netherlands Dutch courage, 1 dynamics, 1 addiction and, 1 mephedrone, 1 dynorphins, 1 dyslexia, 1 early-onset Parkinson’s, 1 Easter Parade, 1 eating overdose, increases risk of, 1 routes of use, 1, 2 economic divide and cognition enhancers, 1 economic growth low, scenario, 1 slower, scenario, 1 strong, scenario, 1 ecstasy, 1, 2 cancer, and, 1 dangers of, 1 death from, 1 downgrade recommended, 1, 2 effects, 1 empathy, first called, 1 harms, 1, 2 media reaction, 1 Parkinson’s and, 1 precautions, water, 1 properties, 1 PTSD, and, 1, 2 serotonin and, 1 withdrawal, 1 education, immediate downsides, about, 1 efficacy of a drug, 1 Egypt, 1 electron, 1 Elysian Fields, 1 Elysian fields, 1 empathogenic, 1 empathogens, 1 empathy, see ecstasy emphysema, 1 endocannabinoid system, 1, 2 endocannabinoids, 1 endogenous benzodiazepines, 1 endorphins, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 alcohol addiction, 1 alcohol and, 1 cocaine addiction, 1 heroin addiction, 1 receptor and heroin, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3, 4 reward chemical, 1 endoscopies, 1 endozapines, 1 energisation effect, suicide, 1 enkephalins, 1 entheogenic, 1, 2, 3 environmental damage, cocaine, 1 Environmental Protection Agency, 1 enzymes, 1 ephedra, 1 ephedrine, 1 epidemic, mental-health, 1 epilepsy, 1, 2 equasy, 1 defined, 1 equine addiction syndrome, see equasy ergotamine and Salem witch trials, 1 ergotamine, LSD derived from, 1 Estimating Drug Harms: A Risky Business, 1 ether, 1 ethical issues, genetic sequencing, 1 ethnic groups, ALDH2 and alcohol, 1 Eton, David Cameron at, 1 evidence-based policy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 evolution of drugs, 1 exams, cognition enhancers in, 1 experimentation, delay to reduce harms, 1 farmers alternatives for, 1 cannabis, required to grow, 1 coca, 1 compensating, 1 Pakistan, alternatives for, 1 supporting, 1 Thailand, alternatives for, 1 unequal trade terms, 1 flumazenil, 1 flumazenil as tracer, 1 fluoxetine, 1 fly agaric mushrooms, 1 flying, drugs and, 1, 2 fMRI, 1 Foresight programme, 1 pharmaceutical industry, 1 stakeholders, 1 Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers, 1 freebase, 1 freedom to choose addiction and, 1 impact on others, 1 objective information required, 1 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Freudian psychoanalysis, 1 Frischer, Martin, 1 full agonist, 1 heroin, for, 1 functional MRI, 1 future drugs, 1 issues, 1 GABA glutamate, blocked by, 1 memory formation, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 GABA receptors anxiety and, 1 benzodiazepines, 1 neuroimaging, 1 overdose, 1 tolerance and, 1 withdrawal and, 1 Gabon, 1 Gaedecke, Friedriche, 1 gambling addiction, 1 gangs, Vietnamese, 1 ganja, 1 gap between neurons, see synapse gateway to more harmful drugs cannabis, 1 prison, 1 GBL, 1, 2, 3, 4 generic packaging, cigarettes, 1 genetic sequencing, 1 Celera Genomics, 1 ethical issues, 1 risks, 1 Geneva International Convention on Narcotics Control, 1 genotyping, see genetic sequencing GHB, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 alcohol treatment, in, 1 dangers, 1 depressant, 1 tolerance to, 1 Gilmore, Sir Ian, 1 Gin Craze, 1, 2, 3 glue, see solvents glutamate GABA, blocks, 1 memory formation and, 1 receptors, 1 grey campaigners, 1 Guardian, the, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gucci, profit margin, 1 Guinea Bissau, 1 Guinea-Bissau, 1 Guinea-Bissau, collapsing, 1 Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, 1 habits and addiction, 1 haemoglobin, 1 half-life, 1 hallucinations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 schizophrenia, 1 Hargreaves, Patrick, 1 harms 16 types, 1 9 types, 1, 2 anabolic steroids, 1 cannabis, 1 classification, 1, 2 crack, 1 ecstasy, 1, 2 kinetics affect, 1 measuring, 1 measuring, political reaction, 1 measuring, purpose, 1 mephedrone, 1 others, to, 1 psychedelics, 1 related to form of drug, 1 routes of use, 1 users, to, 1 harms reduction alcohol, 1 alcohol alternatives, 1 alcohol availability, 1 alcohol binge drinking, 1 alcohol dependence, 1 alcohol price, 1 alcohol priority, 1 alcohol, road safety, 1 anabolic steroids, 1 delay experimenting, 1 smoking ban, 1 smoking restrictions, 1 War on Drugs, 1 Harrods sold cocaine and heroin, 1 Harvard, Leary Timothy at, 1 hash, skunk, compared, 1 headaches, see also cluster headache analgesic-induced, 1 codeine-induced, 1 Hearst, William Randolph, 1 hemp, 1 hepatitis, injecting, risk, 1, 2 heroin, 1, 2, 3, 4 £300/week, 1 £500/week, 1 addiction endorphins, 1 addiction, Pete Doherty, 1 buprenorphine blocks on-top use, 1 cannabis, instead of, 1 endorphin receptor targeted, 1 full agonist for, 1 methadone and withdrawal, 1 methadone blocks on-top use, 1 morphine alternative, 1 Netherlands, in, 1 opioid, 1 opium, from, 1 origin of name, 1 overdose, benzodiazepines and, 1 painkiller, as, 1 painkiller, is most effective, 1 partial agonist for, 1 pharmacological substitutes, 1 prisoners overdose on, 1 receptors affected, 1 synthesised 1874, 1 therapeutic, as, 1 treatment for, 1 treatment with heroin itself, 1 treatment, British model, 1 treatment, Switzerland, 1 withdrawal, 1 heroin susbstitute buprenorphine, 1 methadone, 1 high performance scenario, 1 history cocaine, 1 coffee, 1 drugs, 1 LSD, 1 tobacco, 1 HIV/AIDS anabolic steroids treatment, 1 injecting, risk, 1, 2, 3 reduced, Portuguese experiment, 1 Russia, 1 TurBo-HIV, 1 Hofmann, Albert, 1 Holland, see Netherlands Holmes, Sherlock, 1 Home Secretary, see also Johnson, Alan, see also Smith, Jacqui, 1, 2 horse tranquilliser, 1 horse-riding ecstasy, comparison, 1, 2 Parkinson’s and, 1 huffing, route of use, 1 Human Genome Project, 1 Human Rights Watch, 1 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 2 hydrochloride, cocaine, 1 hydrochlorides, vaporisation temperature, 1 hypertension, rebound and, 1 hyponatraemia, 1, 117 ibogaine, 1, 2 addiction treatment, in, 1 as wit hdrawal treatment, 1 psychedelic, 1 ibuprofen, 1 imipramine, 1 impotence, 1 India Kerala and opiates, 1 morphine as painkiller, 1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report, 1 informed consent NHS, 1 informed consent, drug trials, 1 inhaling routes of use, 1 inhaling, routes of use, 1 initial misery with SSRIs, 1 injecting dangers of, 1 hepatitis risk, 1, 2 HIV/AIDS risk, 1, 2, 3 other risks risk, 1 routes of use, 1 insecticide cocaine as, 1 mephedrone, 1 insects, drugs defend against, 1 insulin treatment, diabetes, 1 international damage from cocaine, 1 Inuit, alcohol and, 1 inverse agonist, 1 ISCD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 foundation, 1 minimum dataset, 1 website, 1 isotope, see radioactive isotope Jackson, Toby, 1 jail, see prison Johnson, Alan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Johnson, Lyndon, 1 Just Say No, 1 Kerala opiates policy, 1 ketamine, 1, 2 bladder, 1 Class, 1 don’t mix, 1 side effects, 1 tolerance, 1 ulcerative cystitis, 1 Vietnam, in, 1 khat, 1, 2 cirrhosis and, 1 mules, 1 perverse consequences if banned, 1 stimulant, 1 kicking the habit, derivation, 1 kids, see children kinetics, 1 addiction and, 1 Class and, 1 crack, 1 harms and, 1 mephedrone, 1 routes of use, and, 1 King Charles II, 1 King James I, 1 King Philip II, 1 King, Les, 1 Kleps, Arthur, 1 knowledge nomads, 1 Koller, Karl, 1 Korea, 1 Korean couple starve baby, 1 Lansley, Andrew, 1 laudanum, 1, 2 law brought into disrepute, 1 law, patent, 1 League of Nations, 1 Leary, Timothy, 1 LSD, 1 mushrooms, magic, 1 psilocybin, 1 legal high, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 legalisation v decriminalisation, 1 legislation alternative approach, 1 designer drugs, 1 libertarians, 1, 2 Rand, Ayn, 1 liberty caps, 1 Librium alcohol withdrawal, for, 1 benzodiazepines, 1 licence to take psychedelics, 1 licensed drug premises, 1 licensed drug sales, 1 lifespan reduction, smoking, 1 lime, 1 London School of Economics, 1 LSD, 1 discovery, 1 ergotamine, derived from, 1 history, 1 psychedelic, 1 psychiatry and, 1 recreational drug, origins, 1 Saskatchewan hospital, 1 therapeutic, as, 1, 2 LSD – The Problem Solving Psychedelic, 1 LSE, 1 lung cancer Rand, Ayn, 1 smoking, causes, 1 tobacco industry response, 1 lymphocytes, 1 lysergic acid, 1 lysergic acid diethylamide, see LSD M-cat, see mephedrone magic mushrooms, see mushrooms magnetic resonance imaging, 1 Mail on Sunday, the, 1 Major, John, 1 MAPS, 1 Maria, Antonio Maria, 1 Mariani wine, see Vin Mariani Mariani, Angelo, 1, 2 Marsden, John, 1 MCDA, 1 ACMD expert panel, 1 defined, 1 MDMA, see ecstasy Measham, Fiona, 1, 2 measuring harms, see harms, measuring media, ecstasy, and, 1 Medicare, 1 Medicines Act, 1 Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, 1 memories addiction, in, 1, 2, 3 phobias and, 1 pleasure-seeking and, 1 PTSD, in, 1 stressful, benzodiazepines for, 1 memory and cognition enhancers, 1 memory formation cannabis impairs, 1 GABA, and, 1 glutamate and, 1 neurotransmitters and, 1 mental performance improvement, see cognition enhancers mental-health epidemic, 1 “meow meow”, see mephedrone mephedrone, 1, 2 banned, 1 banned, why, 1 benefits, 1 designer drugs, 1 dynamics, 1 harms, 1 insecticide, as, 1 kinetics, 1 nicknames, 1 origin, 1 plant food, 1 Scunthorpe Two, 1, 2 serotonin and, 1 stimulant, 1 suicide and, 1 mescaline, 1 Huxley, Aldous, 1 psychedelic, 1 met-met COMT type, 1 methadone, 1, 2 blocks on-top heroin use, 1 effects, 1 full agonist for heroin, 1 heroin susbstitute, 1 heroin withdrawal, avoids, 1 how it works, 1 opioid, 1 origin, 1 overdose risk with heroin, 1 pharmacological substitute, as, 1 problems, 1 withdrawal, 1 methamphetamine, 1 dopamine receptors and, 1 stimulant, 1 Mexico, 1, 2 violence in, 1 MHRA, 1 mind-manifesting, 1, 2 minimum data set required, 1 minimum data set, withdrawal and, 1 minimum dataset, 1 Minister for Crime Prevention, 1 Misuse of Drugs Act, 1, 2, 3 ACMD and, 1 cathinones ban, 1 correct operation, 1 mephedrone ban, 1 purpose, 1 suggested change, 1, 2 unfit for purpose, 1 mixing drugs or alcohol, see drugs, mixing Mixmag magazine, 1, 2 modafinil, 1, 2, 3 cognition enhancers, 1 exams, in, 1 Mogadon, 1 money-laundering, 1, 2 banks, 1 Panama, 1 monkeys, dopamine receptors, 1 Monroe, Marilyn, suicide, 1 Moore v Regents of the University of California, 1 moral issues, 1 morphine, 1, 2, 3 buprenorphine alternative for, 1 chronic pain for, 1, 2, 3 dose inadequate, Ukraine, 1 heroin alternative for, 1 not available, India, 1 opium, from, 1, 2 wars, in, 1 Mowlam, Mo, 1 MRI, 1 MS, see multiple sclerosis mules harm to, 1 imprisonment, 1 khat, 1 Mullis, Kary, 1 multi-criteria decision analysis, see MCDA Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, see MAPS multiple sclerosis cannabis and, 1, 2, 3 Sativex and, 1 munchies, the, 1 muscle tremor, 1 muscle wasting, corticosteroids, 1 muscle, drugs to increase, 1 mushrooms, 1, 2 ancient Greece, 1 effects, 1 fly agaric, 1 Netherlands, from, 1 psychedelic, 1 why banned in UK, 1 nalmefene, 1, 2 naltrexone, 1, 2 naphyrone, 1 narcostates, 1 National Addiction Centre, 1 National Health Service, see NHS National Union of Students, 1 Native American Church, 1, 2, 3 Native Americans, 1 alcohol and, 1 natural opiates, 1 needle exchange beneficial effects, 1, 2 none in Russia, 1 neighbourhood watch scenario, 1 Netherlands coffee shop model, 1, 2 little heroin use, 1 mushrooms, magic, 1 Netherlands drug ranking study, 1 neuroimaging, 1 GABA receptors, 1 neuron, 1, 2 neurotransmitters, see also endorphins, see also receptor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 addiction and, 1 anxiety and, 1 drugs mimic, 1 memory formation and, 1 on/off switch, 1, 2, 3 new drugs, see development of new drugs New York Times, The, 1, 2 NHS, 1, 2 informed consent, 1 NIAAA website, 1 nicotiana tabacum, 1 nicotine dopamine and withdrawal, 1 schizophrenia and, 1 vaccine, anti-, 1 withdrawal, 1, 2 nicotinic acid diethylamide, 1 NIDA website, 1 Nixon, Richard, 1, 2, 3 No. 10 Downing Street Strategy Unit, 1, 2 Freedom of Information Act, 1, 2 noradrenaline, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 COMT and, 1 norepinephrine, see noradrenaline North Battleford, see Saskatchewan hospital nose, cocaine, 1 Nutt, David Radio 1 interview, 2 sacked from ACMD, 1 Obama, Barack, 1, 2, 3 Observer, the, 1 oestrogen sex hormone, 1 Olympic Games, drugs in, 1 on-top use buprenorphine blocks heroin, 1 methadone blocks heroin, 1 on/off switch, neurotransmitters, 1, 2, 3 opiates, 1 natural, 1 overdose, 1 opioids, 1, 2 buprenorphine, 1 codeine, 1 heroin, 1 methadone, 1 synthetic, 1 opium heroin from, 1 morphine from, 1, 2 opium trade, 1 Orford, Jim, 1, 2, 3 overdose anabolic steroids, unlikely, 1 benzodiazepines, safer, 1 cocaine, mechanism, 1 death in Shetlands, 1 death rare in cannabis, LSD, 1 eating increases risk, 1 from chewing impossible, 1 GABA receptors, 1 heroin, benzodiazepines and, 1 low risk in heroin treatment, 1 methadone and heroin, risk, 1 opiates, harms, 1 prisoners on heroin, 1 psychedelics, impossible, 1 purity variation and, 1, 2 SSRIs, safer, 1, 2 tolerance as protection, 1 overshoot, 1 epilepsy, in, 1 oxycodone, 1 pain sensitivity and COMT, 1 painkillers, 1 addiction to, avoiding, 1 heroin, 1 heroin is most effective, 1 terminal illness, 1 under-prescribed, 1 paint, see solvents Pakistan, farmers, alternatives for, 1 palliative-care movement, 1 Panama, money-laundering, 1 panic attacks, 1 paracetamol, 1 paracetamol, side effects, 1, 2 Parkinson’s early onset, 1 ecstasy and, 1 horse-riding and, 1 smoking and, 1 paroxetine, 1 partial agonist, 1 buprenorphine, 1 heroin, for, 1 withdrawal, 1 patent law, 1 peer pressure, 1, 2 Pemberton, John, 1 pentathlon, 1 performance enhancers, see also cognition enhancers, 1 amphetamines, 1 anabolic steroids, 1 muscle/power, for, 1 personal and biological factors, 1 personal interactions, vicious cycle, 1 Peru, 1 perverse consequences Class, too high, 1 government policies, 1 international policies, 1 khat ban, 1 prohibition, 1 smoking ban, none, 1 War on Drugs, 1 Pervitin, 1, 2 PET, 1 PET camera, 1 PET scan, 1 peyote psychedelic, 1 pharmaceutical industry, 1 Foresight programme, 1 pharmacological substitutes, 1 agonists, full, 1 agonists, partial, 1 buprenorphine, 1 heroin, for, 1, 2 methadone, 1 treatment with, 1 pharmacological treatments antagonist, 1 disease-modifying agents, 1 pseudo-antagonist, 1 pharmacology, 1 phenylalanine and phenylketonuria, 1 phenylketonuria, 1, 2 phenylketonuria and phenylalanine, 1 phobias memories and, 1 treating, 1 physical dependence, benzodiazepines, 1 plant food, see mephedrone plant origin of drugs, 1 policing, discriminatory, 1 political damage from cocaine, 1 poly drug users, see also drugs, mixing, 1, 2, 3, 4 Pope Leo XIII, Vin Mariani, and, 1 Portman Group, 1, 2, 3 Portugal decriminalisation of drugs, 1, 2 Portuguese experiment addiction treatment, 1 HIV/AIDS reduced, 1 positron, 1 positron emission tomography, see PET post-traumatic stress disorder, see PTSD postsynaptic neuron, 1 power, drugs to enhance, 1 prednisolone, 1 Premier League, 1 prescription drugs, 1 diversion, see diverting prescription drugs presynaptic neuron, 1 preventing addiction, 1 Prime Minister, 1, 2, 3 prison annual cost, 1 drug free policy, 1 gateway to more harmful drugs, 1 harms, compared to cannabis, 1 heroin v cannabis, 1 reoffending rate, 1 statistics, 1 suicide in, 1 prison sentences by drug Class, 1 prisoners ex, unemployment rate, 1 overdose on heroin, 1 problem solving and psychedelics, 1 Proceeds of Crime legislation, 1 profit margin drugs, 1 Gucci, 1 prohibition, 1 perverse consequences, 1 repeal, 1 protective factors against addiction, 1 protein production, 1 Prozac, 1 pseudo-antagonist, 1 psilocybe semilanceata, 1 psilocybin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 addiction treatment, in, 1 depression, 1 Leary, Timothy, 1 psychedelics, see also LSD, 1, 2, 3 5HT2A receptors and, 1 ayuesca, 1 benefits, 1 cluster headache, for, 1, 2 creativity enhanced, 1 defined, 1 DMT, 1 harms, 1 how they work, 1 ibogaine, 1 licences for taking, 1 LSD, 1 mescaline, 1 mushrooms, 1 origin of name, 1 other, 1 other, effects, 1 overdose, impossible, 1 peyote, 1 problem solving, 1 PTSD, and, 1, 2 serotonin receptor, 1 therapeutics, as, 1 vasoconstrictor effect, 1 psychiatry and LSD, 1 psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, 1 psychonauts, 1 psychopharmacology, 1, 2 psychotria viridis, 1 PTSD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 alcohol and, 1 barbiturates in treating, 1 bromides in treating, 1 ecstasy in treating, 1, 2 memory in, 1 psychedelics in treating, 1, 2 suicide, 1 treatment, 1 war, in, 1 purity variation and overdose, 1, 2 Purple Hearts, 1 Queen Victoria, 1 Vin Mariani, and, 1 quid, 1 Radio 4 interview, D Nutt, 1 radioactive isotope, 1 rainforests and cocaine, 1, 2 Ramsey, John, 1 Rand, Ayn, lung cancer, 1 ranking drugs, see ACMD, ranking RAVE act, 1, 2, 3 reasons for taking drugs, 1 rebound, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3 5HT2A, in psychedelics, 1 acetylcholine, 1 adenosine, 1 Alpha, 1 brain chemicals, 1 cannabis, 1, 2 dopamine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 dopamine, stimulants and, 1 down-regulating, 1, 2 endorphin, 1, 2, 3, 4 GABA, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 glutamate, 1 heroin and, 1 number of, 1, 2 serotonin, 1, 2, 3 targeted by drug, 1 tolerance and, 1 recreational drugs defined, 1 improved synthetic, 1 recurrence, 1 Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act, see RAVE Act Reid, John, MP, 1 relapse, 1 rates of, 1 reducing risk of, 1 stress-induced, 1, 2 triggers, 1 reoffending rate of prisoners, 1 research new drugs, 1 War on Drugs hinders, 1 restless legs, 1 reuptake, see also SSRIs blocking, 1 dopamine, 1 dopamine, cocaine blocks, 1 ecstasy blocks, 1 serotonin, 1 serotonin, ecstasy blocks, 1 sites, 1, 2, 3 reward chemicals, 1 Reynolds, JR, Queen Victoria’s physician, 1 Ricaurte, George, 1 risks genetic sequencing, of, 1 higher for young people, 1 surgery, statistics, 1 Ritalin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 addiction and, 1 ADHD, in treating, 1 case study, 1 children and, 1 diversion, 1 dopamine reuptake inhibitor, 1 side effects, 1 rituals, 1 shamanic, 1 road traffic accidents, 1, 2, 3 Rohypnol, 1 rosewater, 1 routes of use, 1 addictiveness and, 1, 2 bagging, 1 cannabis, 1 chewing, 1 cocaine, 1, 2 crack, 1 drinking, 1 eating, 1, 2 harms, 1 huffing, 1 inhaling, 1, 2 injecting, 1 kinetics, 1 rubbing, 1 smoking, 1, 2 snorting, 1 speed of different, 1 spraying, 1 rubbing, routes of use, 1 Runciman report, 1, 2, 3 Runciman, Viscountess, 1 Russia, HIV/AIDS uncurbed, 1 safety ratio, 1 Salem witch trials, ergotamine and, 1 Sami, 1 Sandoz, 1 Sare, Jeremy, 1 Saskatchewan hospital and LSD, 1 Sativex, 1, 2, 3 multiple sclerosis and, 1 scenarios, future, 1 schizophrenia auditory effects, 1 cannabis, 1 cannabis, and, 1 hallucinations, 1 nicotine and, 1 skunk, 1 skunk, and, 1 voices, hearing, 1 Schofield, Penny, 1 school, drugs and, 1 Scunthorpe Two, 1, 2, 3 secondary smoking, 1 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, see SSRIs sentence, no effect on cannabis use, 1, 2 serotonin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ecstasy and, 1 mephedrone and, 1 receptors, 1, 2, 3 receptors, psychedelics and, 1 reuptake, 1 Seroxat, 1 sertraline, 1 set, 1 set and setting, 1 setting, 1 setting, set and, 1 sex hormones anabolic steroids, 1 oestrogen, 1 testosterone, 1, 2, 3 shamanic rituals, 1 shell shock, 1, see also PTSD shooting, see injecting, 1 shoplifting, 1 Siberia, 1 side effects benzodiazepines, 1 ketamine, 1 Ritalin, 1 SSRIs, 1 stimulants, 1 Sierra Leone, child soldiers, 1 Simpson, Tommy, 1 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1, 2, 3 Bolivia and, 1 decriminalisation and, 1 Portugal and, 1 Singleton, Nicola, 1 skin infections, 1 skunk, 1 hash, compared, 1 schizophrenia, 1, 2 sleeping pills, 1, 2 insomnia research, 1 Smith, Jacqui, MP, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Smith, Nicholas, 1, 2, 3 smoking, see also nicotine, see also tobacco, 1 addictiveness, 1 amputation of limbs from, 1 ban, 1 ban, objections, 1 ban, results, 1 benefits, 1 criminalisation, 1 harms reduction, 1, 2 labelling, 1 lifespan reduction, 1 lung cancer, causes, 1 Parkinson’s and, 1 promoted as healthy, 1, 2 restrictions, 1 routes of use, 1, 2 secondary, 1 social context, 1 withdrawal, 1, 2 smoking ban no perverse consequences, 1 smuggling alcohol, 1 tobacco, 1, 2 snorting, routes of use, 1 social context and Class of drug, 1, 2 social context of smoking, 1 social factors, 1 social implications of new drugs, 1 soldiers, see drugs in war solvents asphyxiation, 1 dangers of, 1 speed of different routes of use, 1 speed of offset, 1 speed of onset, 1 speedballs in Vietnam, 1 spice, 1 Spiegelhalter, David, 1, 2 spiritual antidote to atom bomb, 1 sport, drugs in, see also performance enhancers, 1 alcohol, 1 beta blockers, 1 calmness, for, 1 non performance-enhancing, 1 Olympic Games, 1 withdrawal, 1 spraying, routes of use, 1 SSDS, see sudden sniffing death syndrome SSRIs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 how they work, 1 miserable initially, 1 overdose, safer, 1, 2 rebound less likely, 1 side effects, few, 1 street value, none, 1 suicide and, 1, 2 suicide rate lowered, 1 withdrawal, 1 stereotypy, 1 steroids, see also anabolic steroids, corticosteroids stimulant, 1 Stevens, Alex, Professor, 1 Stewart, Hester, 1 stimulants, 1, 2, 3 amphetamine, 1 caffeine, 1 cocaine, 1 dopamine receptors and, 1 khat, 1 mephedrone, 1 methamphetamine, 1 side effects, 1 steroids, 1 tobacco, 1 “uppers”, 1 street value, SSRIs, none, 1 stress hormones, 1 substance P, 1 substitute prescribing, 1 substitutes, see pharmacological substitutes Subutex, 1 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, 1 sudden sniffing death syndrome, 1 suicide anabolic steroids and, 1 barbiturates, 1 benzodiazepines and, 1 energisation effect, 1 Marilyn Monroe, 1 mephedrone contributed to, 1 prison, in, 1 PTSD, 1 SSRIs and, 1, 2 SSRIs lower rate, 1 Sun, the, 1 supply reduction, criminalisation and, 1 Surgeon General, US, 1 surgery, risk statistics, 1 Switzerland, heroin treatment, 1 synapse, 1 synthetic analogues, 1 synthetic opioids, 1 synthetic recreational drugs, 1 Taylor, Polly, Dr, 1 TB, see tuberculosis teeth, bad, 1 Temperance Movement, 1 temporary banning orders, 1 terminal illness anxiety reduction, 1 cannabis for, 1 heroin for, 1 morphine in, 1, 2, 3 painkillers, 1 painkillers not given, 1, 2, 3, 4 preparation for, with LSD, 1, 2 War on Drugs, 1 testosterone withdrawal, 1 testosterone sex hormone, 1, 2, 3 Thailand, farmers, alternatives for, 1 Thatcher, Margaret, 1 THC, 1, 2, 3, 4 content, cannabis forms, 1 therapeutic drug cannabis as, 1 heroin, as, 1 LSD as, 1 psychedelics as, 1, 2 thrombosis, 1 Times, The, and heroin, 1 tinctures, cannabis, 1 tobacco, see also smoking, 1 benefits, 1 dopamine, releases, 1 harms, 1 history, 1 ritual function, 1 routes of use, 1 smuggling, 1, 2 stimulant, 1 tobacco industry distorted evidence, 1 lung cancer, response to, 1 resistance to health measures, 1 tolerance addictiveness and, 1 bingeing and, 1 defined, 1 GABA receptors and, 1 GHB, to, 1 ketamine, 1 mechanism, 1 overdose protection, as, 1 receptors and, 1 Tour de France, 1 toxicology, 1 tracer, 1 flumazenil, 1 transporters, 1, 2 dopamine, 1 treated positively scenario, 1 treatment, see addiction treatment tricyclic antidepressants, 1 tuberculosis, 1 TurBo-HIV, 1 Turkey, 1 UK independence party, decriminalisation of drugs, 1 Ukraine, morphine dose inadequate, 1 ulcerative cystitis, ketamine-induced, 1 UN Office on Drugs and Crime, see UNODC unemployment rate, ex-prisoners, 1 unlearning and phobias, 1 UNODC, 1 upgrading cannabis, 1, 2 purpose, 1 uppers, 1 vaccines, anti-drug, 1 antagonist, 1 cocaine, 1 nicotine, 1 val-met COMT type, 1 val-val COMT type, 1 valeda, 1 Valium, 1, 2 vandalism, 1 vaporisation temperature crack, 1 hydrochlorides, 1 varenicline, 1 vasoconstriction, psychedelics, 1 veins, damaged, 1 vicious cycle depression, 1, 2 dopamine receptors, 1 personal interactions, 1 withdrawal, 1 Vietnam drug-taking prevalent, 1 ketamine used, 1 LSD and anti-war movement, 1 speedballs, 1 statistics for drugs, 1 Vietnamese gangs, 1 Vin Mariani, 1, 2, 3 Pope Leo XIII, 1 Queen Victoria, 1 visual distortions, 1, 2, 3 voices, hearing, schizophrenia, 1 Wachovia bank money-laundering investigation, 1 Wainwright, Louis, 1, 2, 3 war American Civil, 1 cigarettes in, 1 Crimean, 1 Franco-Prussian, 1 PTSD in, 1 War on Drugs, 1 aims, 1 alternatives, 1 cost, 1 crime, increases, 1 demand reduction, 1 disease, infectious, 1 diverts attention, 1 harms reduction, 1 ineffective, report on, 1 perverse consequences, 1 research, hinders, 1 terminal illness, 1 War on Poverty, 1 War on Terror, 1 war, drugs in, see drugs in war wash up, 1 water overdrinking, dangers of, 1 when taking ecstasy, 1 weed, 1 weights in ACMD ranking, 1 Wellbutrin, 1 West Africa, 1 White, Kelli, 1 WHO, 1, 2 International Classificn. of Diseases, 1 smoking statistics, 1 William of Orange, 1 Williams, Tim, 1 wine, cocaine, see Vin Mariani Winehouse, Amy, 1, 2 Winstock, Adam, 1 winter sports, 1 withdrawal, 1 addiction and, 1 addictiveness and, 1 alcohol, 1, 2, 3 alcohol, benzodiazepines for, 1 benzodiazepines, 1 caffeine, 1, 2 defined, 1 dopamine levels, 1 drugs, 1 ecstasy, 1 GABA receptors and, 1 heroin, 1 ibogaine treatment for, 1 methadone, 1 methadone avoids heroin, 1 minimum data set and, 1 nicotine, 1, 2 partial agonist, 1 physical, 1 psychological, 1 smoking, 1, 2 sport, drugs in, 1 SSRIs, 1 testosterone, 1 vicious cycle, 1 World Health Organization, see WHO Wynder, Ernst, 1 Xanax, 1 young people, risks higher for, 1 Zoloft, 1 Copyright Published by UIT Cambridge Ltd.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

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

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

Her previous books include Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States (1995/2017), Soviet Jewish Americans (1999), Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (2005), and Rethinking American Women’s Activism (2014). She is the coeditor of The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (1997) and The War on Poverty, 1964–1980: A New Grassroots History (2011). She teaches at Dartmouth College in the departments of History; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Jewish Studies. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she lives in Thetford Center, Vermont, with her partner, journalist Alexis Jetter.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

This explosion of widespread wealth, which was accompanied by a baby boom, allowed countries to further strengthen their social security systems and education, health care and housing policies. In America, President Lyndon Johnson announced a Great Society program.41 It aimed at eliminating poverty and racial issues through initiatives such as the War on Poverty, introduced health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and mandated the building of many new schools and colleges, as well as the establishing of grants and a Teacher Corps. In Europe, the welfare state was introduced, with often universal free health care, free education, and state-subsidized housing.

., 117–120, 123 dropping voter turnover and social unrest in the, 188 erosion of the political center in, 80 First Industrial Revolution (19th century) in the, 132–134 gig workers making less in the, 238 government debt of the, 30–31 health coverage disparities in the, 43 high cost of health care in the, 227, 231, 232 history of income inequality in the, 34–36, 38–39fig, 88–89 as ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, 186 Marshall Plan to rebuild European economy by the, 6–7 9/11 terrorist attacks against, 17, 18 Pearl Harbor attack against, 17 polarizing labor politics in the, 122–123 post-war baby boom in, 8 See also California; New York City; US economy Universal basic income (UBI), 239 Universal Postal Union, 197, 198 “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Davos Manifesto 2020), 191–192 University of Chicago (Chicago School), 14, 136, 140 University of Kharkiv, 22 University of Leuven, 243 University of Liverpool, 224 University of Reading, 224 Upwork (US), 237, 240 Urbanization metatrend, 159–160 Urban Radar (US), 163 US Business Roundtable, 250 US dollar currency, 31 US economic policies overly focused on GDP growth, 25 stakeholder model driving 1980s, 14 US economy economic boom (1945–1970s) of the, 8 economic development curve (1920s), 23 Federal Reserve interest rates (2009–2019), 31 See also Big Tech; United States US government bonds, 31 Utomo, William, 94–95, 96, 114 Utomo, Winston, 94–95, 96 V Value creation company aim to generate profits and, 179 environment, social, and governance (ESG) objectives of, 185, 193 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics to measure stakeholder, 193, 214–215 stakeholder capitalism's appropriate measurement of, 185 stakeholder model beliefs on sharing and, 184–185 The Value of Everything (Mazzucato), 184 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 132 Venezuela, 225 The Verge, 239 Vestager, Margarethe, 211 Vietnam economy ongoing through COVID crisis, 109 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 state capitalism model of, 173 tech unicorns of, 66, 67fig Volksparteien (Germany), 80, 83 W Wage “decoupling” practice, 34 Walesa, Lech, 83 Wall Street Journal “Competition is for Losers” editorial (Thiel), 208–209 on lower global GDP growth, 25 on rising global debt (2020), 28 Ward, Barbara, 11 Warner, Charles Dudley, 133 War on Poverty, 135 Warren, Elizabeth, 127, 128 Warsaw Pact, 77 Washington Post, 121, 221 Water resources microplastics pollution of, 50 UN Water agency on state of, 50 Waze app (Israel), 33 Wealth inequality consequences of increasing, 42–43 First Industrial Revolution (19th century) and, 132–134 health, social mobility, and, 41–46 as higher than income inequality, 41 the one percent and, 41–42 United Kingdom turn of the 20th century, 104 World Inequality Lab (WIL) on India and China's, 72–73fig See also Income inequality; Inequalities Wealth Project, 191 Weiszacker, Richard von, 76–77 West Berlin (West Germany), 75–77, 88, 89 West Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing East and, 75–77, 88, 89 Marshall Plan to rebuild, 6–7 reconstruction of post-war society and, 8 reunification of East and, 17, 78 ruined post-World War II economy of, 4–5 Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) [1945–early 1970s], 8 Works Council Act (1952) of, 10 See also East Germany; Germany West Java entrepreneur story (2012), 93–94 WhatsApp (US), 211 Wheatley, James, 27 Windows Media Player (Microsoft), 139 Wipro [India], 68 Wired magazine, 59, 128, 149, 242 Wirtschaftswunder (German economic miracle) [1945–early 1970s], 8 Wolf, Martin, 62 Women as effective government leaders during COVID-19 pandemic, 224 increased education and labor-force participation of, 9 political issue of gender representation of, 188–189 Women's liberation trends (21st century), 9–10 Wood, Alex, 242 Works Council Act (1952) [Germany], 10 World Bank creation of the, 6 on education levels in Africa and South Asia (2018), 44 GDP measure used by, 24 on Indonesia's prudent economic management, 98 lack of representation evidenced in, 197 World Economic Forum advocating long-term perspective by companies, 250 Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (San Francisco, 2017) of the, 144 CEO Climate Leaders group at the, 167 climate change solutions sought by, 162, 164–165 COVID-19 pandemic accusations against, 87 Davos Manifesto (1973), 13–14, 88, 213 Davos Manifesto (2020), 191–192, 213 European Management Forum forerunner of, 11, 15 facilitating German reunification process, 78 Global Competitiveness Index and Inclusive Development Index of, 189, 190 global membership (1980s) of the, 15 Global Risks annual report by the, 52 Global Shapers network of, 245, 246 Global Social Mobility index (2020), 43–44 on global warming (1973), 47 International Business Council of the, 193, 214, 249 Internet Agenda of the, 246 Jack Ma as “Young Global Leader,” 128 on pension savings gap, 32–33 presentation on societal unrest to, 85–86 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics initiative, 193, 214–215, 249, 250–251 World Economic Forum Annual Meetings (Davos) Annual Meeting in New York (2002), 17–18 Benioff's comments on need to shift toward stakeholder model, 201 the first European Management Forum (1971), 11, 88 Greta Thunberg's speech (2019) at, 53, 147, 149–150, 168, 250 Marc Benioff's speech on capitalism (2020) during, 164, 211 Net-Zero Challenge invitation to participates in, 162 Peccei's keynote speech (1973) at, 13, 47, 52 as platform for German reunification process (1990), 78 viritual meeting (2020) during COVID-19 pandemic, 250 World Health Organization (WHO) proposed integrating antitrust measures into, 142 on public health care spending, 32 on unsafe air of polluted cities (2019), 72 World Inequality Lab (WIL), 72–73fig World Inequality Report (2018), 38, 138fig World Meteorological Organization, 51 World Trade Organization (WTO) Appellate Judges of the, 197 China's membership in, 18, 59, 64 as an international community stakeholder, 178 World War I ending first wave of globalization, 105 Germany's “Never Again War” rallying cry after, 4 technology as destructive power during, 134 Treat of Versailles (1919) ending, 5–6 World War II division of East and West Germany after end of, 75–76 global economic development following end of, 3, 7–11, 251 low GDP at end of the, 105 Pearl Harbor attack against US, 17 ruinous state of Germany by end of, 4 “Stunde Null” (or “Zero Hour”) [May 8, 1945] ending, 5 tanks and planes technologies during, 134 Wozniak, Steve, 126, 128 Wu, Tim, 126–127, 128, 137, 139, 140, 145 X Xi Jinping, 62, 100, 184 Y Yang, Andrew, 239 Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests (France), 86–87, 195 Yom Kippur War, 12 Yoshida Shigeru, 8 YouGov–Bertelsmann globalization poll (2018), 97 Youth for Climate movement (2017) [France], 86 Z Zambia, 64 Zeppelin (German manufacturer), 4 Zermatt (Switzerland), 51–52 ZF (Zeppelin Foundation), 6–9, 16, 18 Zhangjiang hi-tech zone (Shanghai, China), 61 Zhongguancun neighborhood (Beijing, China), 61 ZIP codes, 3 ZTE (China), 55, 60 Zuckerberg, Mark, 128, 212 Zucman, Gabriel, 41, 127 WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

This explosion of widespread wealth, which was accompanied by a baby boom, allowed countries to further strengthen their social security systems and education, health care and housing policies. In America, President Lyndon Johnson announced a Great Society program.41 It aimed at eliminating poverty and racial issues through initiatives such as the War on Poverty, introduced health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and mandated the building of many new schools and colleges, as well as the establishing of grants and a Teacher Corps. In Europe, the welfare state was introduced, with often universal free health care, free education, and state-subsidized housing.

., 117–120, 123 dropping voter turnover and social unrest in the, 188 erosion of the political center in, 80 First Industrial Revolution (19th century) in the, 132–134 gig workers making less in the, 238 government debt of the, 30–31 health coverage disparities in the, 43 high cost of health care in the, 227, 231, 232 history of income inequality in the, 34–36, 38–39fig, 88–89 as ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, 186 Marshall Plan to rebuild European economy by the, 6–7 9/11 terrorist attacks against, 17, 18 Pearl Harbor attack against, 17 polarizing labor politics in the, 122–123 post-war baby boom in, 8 See also California; New York City; US economy Universal basic income (UBI), 239 Universal Postal Union, 197, 198 “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Davos Manifesto 2020), 191–192 University of Chicago (Chicago School), 14, 136, 140 University of Kharkiv, 22 University of Leuven, 243 University of Liverpool, 224 University of Reading, 224 Upwork (US), 237, 240 Urbanization metatrend, 159–160 Urban Radar (US), 163 US Business Roundtable, 250 US dollar currency, 31 US economic policies overly focused on GDP growth, 25 stakeholder model driving 1980s, 14 US economy economic boom (1945–1970s) of the, 8 economic development curve (1920s), 23 Federal Reserve interest rates (2009–2019), 31 See also Big Tech; United States US government bonds, 31 Utomo, William, 94–95, 96, 114 Utomo, Winston, 94–95, 96 V Value creation company aim to generate profits and, 179 environment, social, and governance (ESG) objectives of, 185, 193 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics to measure stakeholder, 193, 214–215 stakeholder capitalism's appropriate measurement of, 185 stakeholder model beliefs on sharing and, 184–185 The Value of Everything (Mazzucato), 184 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 132 Venezuela, 225 The Verge, 239 Vestager, Margarethe, 211 Vietnam economy ongoing through COVID crisis, 109 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 state capitalism model of, 173 tech unicorns of, 66, 67fig Volksparteien (Germany), 80, 83 W Wage “decoupling” practice, 34 Walesa, Lech, 83 Wall Street Journal “Competition is for Losers” editorial (Thiel), 208–209 on lower global GDP growth, 25 on rising global debt (2020), 28 Ward, Barbara, 11 Warner, Charles Dudley, 133 War on Poverty, 135 Warren, Elizabeth, 127, 128 Warsaw Pact, 77 Washington Post, 121, 221 Water resources microplastics pollution of, 50 UN Water agency on state of, 50 Waze app (Israel), 33 Wealth inequality consequences of increasing, 42–43 First Industrial Revolution (19th century) and, 132–134 health, social mobility, and, 41–46 as higher than income inequality, 41 the one percent and, 41–42 United Kingdom turn of the 20th century, 104 World Inequality Lab (WIL) on India and China's, 72–73fig See also Income inequality; Inequalities Wealth Project, 191 Weiszacker, Richard von, 76–77 West Berlin (West Germany), 75–77, 88, 89 West Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing East and, 75–77, 88, 89 Marshall Plan to rebuild, 6–7 reconstruction of post-war society and, 8 reunification of East and, 17, 78 ruined post-World War II economy of, 4–5 Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) [1945–early 1970s], 8 Works Council Act (1952) of, 10 See also East Germany; Germany West Java entrepreneur story (2012), 93–94 WhatsApp (US), 211 Wheatley, James, 27 Windows Media Player (Microsoft), 139 Wipro [India], 68 Wired magazine, 59, 128, 149, 242 Wirtschaftswunder (German economic miracle) [1945–early 1970s], 8 Wolf, Martin, 62 Women as effective government leaders during COVID-19 pandemic, 224 increased education and labor-force participation of, 9 political issue of gender representation of, 188–189 Women's liberation trends (21st century), 9–10 Wood, Alex, 242 Works Council Act (1952) [Germany], 10 World Bank creation of the, 6 on education levels in Africa and South Asia (2018), 44 GDP measure used by, 24 on Indonesia's prudent economic management, 98 lack of representation evidenced in, 197 World Economic Forum advocating long-term perspective by companies, 250 Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (San Francisco, 2017) of the, 144 CEO Climate Leaders group at the, 167 climate change solutions sought by, 162, 164–165 COVID-19 pandemic accusations against, 87 Davos Manifesto (1973), 13–14, 88, 213 Davos Manifesto (2020), 191–192, 213 European Management Forum forerunner of, 11, 15 facilitating German reunification process, 78 Global Competitiveness Index and Inclusive Development Index of, 189, 190 global membership (1980s) of the, 15 Global Risks annual report by the, 52 Global Shapers network of, 245, 246 Global Social Mobility index (2020), 43–44 on global warming (1973), 47 International Business Council of the, 193, 214, 249 Internet Agenda of the, 246 Jack Ma as “Young Global Leader,” 128 on pension savings gap, 32–33 presentation on societal unrest to, 85–86 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics initiative, 193, 214–215, 249, 250–251 World Economic Forum Annual Meetings (Davos) Annual Meeting in New York (2002), 17–18 Benioff's comments on need to shift toward stakeholder model, 201 the first European Management Forum (1971), 11, 88 Greta Thunberg's speech (2019) at, 53, 147, 149–150, 168, 250 Marc Benioff's speech on capitalism (2020) during, 164, 211 Net-Zero Challenge invitation to participates in, 162 Peccei's keynote speech (1973) at, 13, 47, 52 as platform for German reunification process (1990), 78 viritual meeting (2020) during COVID-19 pandemic, 250 World Health Organization (WHO) proposed integrating antitrust measures into, 142 on public health care spending, 32 on unsafe air of polluted cities (2019), 72 World Inequality Lab (WIL), 72–73fig World Inequality Report (2018), 38, 138fig World Meteorological Organization, 51 World Trade Organization (WTO) Appellate Judges of the, 197 China's membership in, 18, 59, 64 as an international community stakeholder, 178 World War I ending first wave of globalization, 105 Germany's “Never Again War” rallying cry after, 4 technology as destructive power during, 134 Treat of Versailles (1919) ending, 5–6 World War II division of East and West Germany after end of, 75–76 global economic development following end of, 3, 7–11, 251 low GDP at end of the, 105 Pearl Harbor attack against US, 17 ruinous state of Germany by end of, 4 “Stunde Null” (or “Zero Hour”) [May 8, 1945] ending, 5 tanks and planes technologies during, 134 Wozniak, Steve, 126, 128 Wu, Tim, 126–127, 128, 137, 139, 140, 145 X Xi Jinping, 62, 100, 184 Y Yang, Andrew, 239 Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests (France), 86–87, 195 Yom Kippur War, 12 Yoshida Shigeru, 8 YouGov–Bertelsmann globalization poll (2018), 97 Youth for Climate movement (2017) [France], 86 Z Zambia, 64 Zeppelin (German manufacturer), 4 Zermatt (Switzerland), 51–52 ZF (Zeppelin Foundation), 6–9, 16, 18 Zhangjiang hi-tech zone (Shanghai, China), 61 Zhongguancun neighborhood (Beijing, China), 61 ZIP codes, 3 ZTE (China), 55, 60 Zuckerberg, Mark, 128, 212 Zucman, Gabriel, 41, 127 WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

PROGRESS AND RETROGRESSIONS Black Americans, a group often identified as beneficiaries of the welfare state in America, made considerable economic progress in the twentieth century but much, if not most, of it was prior to the massive expansion of the American welfare state, beginning with the “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s. This is just one of many possible empirical tests of the social vision behind the creation and expansion of the welfare state. Testing the Prevailing Vision Progress, for most blacks, can be measured from the time of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.d That progress was slow but steady.

As of 1940, 87 percent of black families in the United States lived below the poverty line. But this declined to 47 percent by 1960, as black education and urban job experience increased in the wake of the mass migrations of blacks out of the South. This 40 percentage point drop in the black poverty rate occurred prior to both the civil rights laws and the “war on poverty” social welfare programs of the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, the black poverty rate dropped an additional 18 points21— significant, but the continuation of a preexisting trend at a slower pace, rather than being a new result from new civil rights laws and welfare state policies, as so often claimed.

However plausible, or even inspiring, it might seem that a lagging minority needs to unite in solidarity behind political leaders representing their interests to the larger society, in order to get ahead, the historical record shows no such pattern of economic success for politics, as compared to education, job skills and intact families. Social pathology in black ghettos is often assumed to be due to poverty, discrimination or the larger society’s neglect. But the decade in which there was the greatest emphasis on government social programs to help blacks— the 1960s “war on poverty” and civil rights legislation under President Lyndon Johnson— saw the greatest number and severity of ghetto riots in history, while the 1980s Reagan administration, which opposed welfare state programs, saw very few ghetto riots. Similarly, despite the ease with which many people use the “legacy of slavery” argument to explain negative features of black communities today, there is seldom any attempt to examine the facts as to whether whatever is complained of— whether fatherless families, high crime rates or other social pathology— was in fact worse among blacks in the first hundred years after slavery or in the first generation after the triumph of the welfare state vision in the 1960s.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The sonorous, authoritative voice of NBC anchorman David Brinkley: “The pool broadcasters in Philadelphia have lost the audio. It’s not a conspiracy against Governor Carter or President Ford… they will fix it as soon as possible.” For hadn’t American know-how always fixed everything? Hadn’t it beat Hitler, delivered the world its first mass middle class, rebuilt Europe, put a man on the moon, fought a war on poverty? It had, once upon a time. O upon a time, the voices of such authoritative gray-haired white men reassured us, soothed us, guided us through the trauma of assassination and riot and Watergate and war, explained the inexplicable to us. Not now. The sound of a phone dialing. Carter gesticulating silently onscreen.

In the early 1960s, he helped found the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom—and proved himself a shrewd enough politician to win office as student body president at liberal Harvard. In 1971 he was appointed by President Nixon to head the Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered the federal war on poverty. Phillips loaded it up with so many young conservatives that veteran OEO bureaucrats started referring to Phillips’ “YAFia.” Then, however, in 1973, Phillips was let go after the press got wind of what Nixon had actually hired him to do at OEO: dismantle it. Phillips believed Nixon had given up without a fight.

Experts began calling this the “American consensus.” * * * AT THE SAME TIME, HOWEVER, a separate anti-liberal backlash was taking root. It was spurred by summer after summer of race riots, and its political base was not business but middle-class homeowners, who blamed civil rights and the War on Poverty for a civilization-threatening breakdown in law and order. Business was largely on the liberal side of this issue—like the author of a 1966 article in the Harvard Business Review predicting “riots and arson and spreading slums” if “the businessman does not accept his rightful role as leader in the push for the goals of the ‘Great Society’ (or whatever tag he wants to give it).”


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

But a key study on that earlier success concluded that macroeconomic conditions played only a relatively small role in getting women back in the labor force, with changes in incentives accomplishing most of that feat instead.1 TWO FINAL COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO HENRY First, his observation about the role of the draft in augmenting skills and training for young men in the early postwar era, while politically incorrect, may be very much on target. Remember, though, that the “selective service” was indeed selective—and as late as the Kennedy administration, one-third of the young men tested failed either physical or cognitive requirements for service. (That finding was ammunition, so to speak, for the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty.”) Thus, the most disadvantaged were also the least likely to avail themselves of such employment-enhancing experience as military conscription could provide. And I am in violent agreement with Henry’s lament that available data can “tell us that a man is disconnected” from the labor force, but “tells us nothing about the mindset of the men who are disconnected.”


9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Berlin Wall, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Since the answers to these questions are rather clear, and are inconsistent with preferred doctrine, it is better to dismiss the questions as “superficial” and “insignificant,” and to turn to “deeper causes” that are in fact more superficial, even insofar as they are relevant. Should we call what is happening now a war? There is no precise definition of “war.” People speak of the “war on poverty,” the “drug war,” etc. What is taking shape is not a conflict among states, though it could become one. Can we talk of the clash between two civilizations? This is fashionable talk, but it makes little sense. Suppose we briefly review some familiar history. The most populous Islamic state is Indonesia, a favorite of the United States ever since Suharto took power in 1965, as army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, with the assistance of the U.S. and with an outburst of euphoria from the West that is so embarrassing in retrospect that it has been effectively wiped out of memory.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

After getting a master’s in foreign service studies from Georgetown University, I had worked on legislation for a fabulous mentor, Hank Lieberman, in the Commerce Department. Then, by happenstance, in 1968 my father ran into fellow lawyer Don Lowitz on LaSalle Street in Chicago, which ended up with my landing a job in the “war on poverty” agency headed by a dashing young ex-congressman from the Thirteenth District of Illinois, Don Rumsfeld, with his even younger assistant from Wyoming, twenty-eight-year-old Dick Cheney. Two years later, my wife—a career foreign service officer with the foreign aid agency—took me along to Zaire as her “dependent husband.”

See Strategic Arms Limitations Talks Schabowski, Günter, 275–76 Schmemann, Serge, 32 Schorr, Daniel (NPR), 37 Schweid, Barry (AP), 37 Selleck, Tom, 339 September 11, 271, 273–74 Sestanovich, Stephen, 13 Sharansky, Natan and Avital, 125 Shevardnadze, Eduard adviser to Gorbachev, 77, 228 expectations for Reykjavik, 33–34, 36, 41 named foreign minister, 17, 24–25 negotiations on strategic defense, 150–51, 158–59, 170 as president of Georgia, 329 relationship with Shultz, 242–43 resignation as foreign minister, 284–85 at Reykjavik, 85–86, 93–95, 328–29 role in ending Cold War, 273, 313–14, 321 Washington summit, 237, 243–53 Shultz, George negotiations on strategic defense, 150–51, 158–59 reflections on Reykjavik, 4–5, 298 at Reykjavik, 12–14, 21, 85–86, 93–97, 328–29 Shevardnadze relationship, 242–43 tenure in government service, 17–19 Washington summit of 1987, 243–53 Shushkevich, Stanislav, 293–94 Simons, Tom, 99 Soderlind, Rolf, 41 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, 263, 264, 326, 341 Souza, Pete, 265 Soviet Union 70th anniversary celebration, 239 about collapse, 3–4, 268 beginning of secessions, 283–85 bugging of U.S. embassy, 221 Chernobyl nuclear accident, 79 disbands Communist Party, 292–93 economic and technology weaknesses, 110, 315–17, 320–21 formation of Confederation, 293 formation of Federation, 293–95 glasnost and perestroika, 228–30, 239–40, 262, 263–64, 317–18 Gorbachev on need for reform, 24–25, 28–33, 75–77, 79 invasion of Afghanistan, 60, 97, 124, 256, 258, 325 Jewish emigration, 116, 124–25, 228 manufacture of missiles, 236 Reagan goal to delegitimize, 38, 73, 77, 79, 154, 235, 319, 321, 323 Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, 64–68, 93, 145, 233, 256, 265, 338 U.S. intelligence assessment, 77, 330–31, 363n320 Yeltsin and the coup, 285–89 See also Gorbachev, Mikhail; individual states; Moscow summit of 1988 Spassky, Boris, 33 Speakes, Larry, 34, 92, 186 Spencer, Stuart, 64–65 Stalin, Joseph, 25–26, 33, 163, 228, 239–40, 245, 260, 266, 283 Stanford University, 297, 308 Steele, Jonathan, 328 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I and II), 59–60, 116–18, 207–8, 305 Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START I, II, and III), 60, 116, 304 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, “Star Wars”) announcement by Reagan, 61–64 criticisms, 175–76, 201–3, 215–16 Gorbachev reaction to, 105–8, 208–9 intelligence failures, 330–31 linkage to ABM, 148–49 Reagan commitment to, 38, 57, 109–11, 205–6, 315 Reykjavik negotiations, 86–89, 99–101, 136–43, 148–51, 198 role ending Cold War, 4 sharing with Soviets, 87, 94, 107, 110, 154 summit insights, 92–94, 108–11, 151–56, 310–12 trying to salvage summit, 168–75 Suslov, Mikhail, 31 Sveinsson, Asmundur, 82 Talbott, Strobe, 67, 215–16, 319 Tarasenko, Sergey, 71 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich, 236 “Tear down the Wall” speech, 232–35 terrorism, responding to, 311–12 Thatcher, Margaret, 38–39, 61, 93, 157, 199, 221, 318–19, 337–38, 341 “the mice,” 16 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 216 “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves” (Nitze), 308 Time (magazine), 49, 58, 147, 177, 186–87, 215, 233, 235, 259, 304, 319 Gorbachev as “Man of the Decade,” 328 Gorbachev as “Man of the Year,” 328 Reagan as “Man of the Year,” 66–67 Tory, Peter, 32 Tower Commission, 225, 232 translation and notetaking, 14, 29, 35, 99, 106–7, 121, 140, 172, 212, 351n84, 352n89 Treaty of Björkö of 1905, R Trotsky, Leon, 326 Trudeau, Pierre, 12 Truman, Harry, 16, 26, 56, 260, 341 Trump, Donald, 250 Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (Shultz), 235 Ukraine, 79, 284, 285, 292–93 United Nations Adelman at, 376 Kirkpatrick at, 20, 120, 197 Shevardnadze visit to, 33–34 Truman and, 56 urinal diplomacy, 69, 162–63 Velikhov, Evgeny, 300 Victoria (queen of England), 203–4 Vietnam War, 88, 314, 327 Vlasov, Albert, 187 Wałęsa, Lech, 268, 280, 337 Wall Street Journal, 20, 308 Walpole, Horace, 186 Walters, Barbara, 250, 337 “war on poverty,” 19 Washington Post, 2, 28, 73, 98, 166, 210, 251, 277, 289 Washington summit of 1987 Gorbachev agreement to, 73, 75 Gorbachev “walkabout,” 251–52 INF signing ceremony, 247–50 Reagan eagerness, 85, 232, 241 Reykjavik as prelude to, 8 summit insights, 261 Weinberger, Caspar, 61, 217–20, 226–27 Weinraub, Bernard, 114 White House East Room history, 246–47 INF signing ceremony, 247–49 Oval Office and Resolute desk, 203–4 Reagan departure for Iceland, 7–9 Reagan departure for Moscow, 256 Reagan final good-bye to, 270–71 Williams, Carol, 259 Williamsburg G-7 Economic Summit (1983), 11–12 Woodward, Bob, 267 “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” (Wall Street Journal), 308 “A World Without Nuclear Weapons” (conference), 309 World Factbook (CIA), 320 World War II actions leading to, 55 Hofdi House use, 52–53 Reagan experiences in, 179 Soviet experiences, 114, 244–45 U.S. experiences, 15, 117–18, 180 U.S.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Instead, the 1963 line has been retained, adjusted only for inflation. Orshansky’s “scientific” derivation of the poverty line—based on the superficially sensible and rhetorically appealing idea of nutritional needs—was little more than a smoke screen. Economists in the Johnson administration, preparing for what was to become the War on Poverty, needed a poverty line, and they were using $3,000 because it seemed like a sensible number. Orshansky’s task was to provide something more readily defensible than a number plucked out of the air around the water cooler. Her first, and preferred, calculation was based on the Department of Agriculture’s “low-cost food plan” and came in just above $4,000.

That would mean that inflation is being overstated, because some of the increase in prices comes from better things, not just from dearer things. If so, the poverty line is being increased too fast, and an ever-increasing proportion of the poor are not poor at all. If we buy this argument—and there is no way of knowing by how much the poor are benefiting from unmeasured quality improvements—we might be winning the war on poverty after all.9 Working in the same direction is the failure of the official measure to incorporate taxes and transfers that are designed to benefit the poor. Doing so not only moderates upticks during recessions, as we have seen for the recent recession, but also would have resulted in a larger decline in poverty over the longer run.10 However, if you believe, as I do, that the poverty line should move up with the living standards of typical households in the population, poverty rates have increased over the past four decades, in stark contrast to the growth of the average economy.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

In 1964 President Johnson pushed passage of two other massive initiatives that would profoundly affect public health: his War on Poverty program and Medicare. LBJ’s overall goal was to create what he called the Great Society through a federal effort akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal. A key difference, however, was that while Roosevelt pushed large-scale federal spending during a time of tremendous economic deprivation in America, LBJ wanted a similar level of spending for social programs at a time when most Americans were enjoying tremendous prosperity. That was a hard sell. When Johnson declared his War on Poverty, twenty-one million people in the United States were living below the administration’s poverty line.

The Health Transition in post-World War II America somewhat blurred the demographic picture, as cancer and heart disease initially appeared to strike equally across social classes, perhaps even tilting a bit toward wealthier Americans. By the mid-sixties, however, most of the chronic diseases were also displaying a social gradient that brought the greatest grief to the poorest Americans. It might have been wise to combine the War on Poverty programs with Medicare and Medicaid, creating a single strategic approach to upgrading the health and well-being of Americans.256 The 1965 Medicare Act was a two-part law that placed authority for the health care program under the Social Security Administration—nor under HEW. Under Part A, hospitals were allowed to designate a third agency or nongovernmental organization to oversee their budgets and negotiate with the Social Security Administration.

Between 1968, when LBJ’s programs were in full swing, and 1975, when budget cuts had whittled such programs to the bone, the overall U.S. annual death rate had dropped 14 percent.323 Every health indicator had shown remarkable improvement. Cardiovascular deaths: down by 23 percent. Infant mortality: dropped 38 percent. Maternal mortality: plummeted an astounding 71 percent. That was the legacy of an aggressive war on poverty and expansion of health services for the poor. It occurred in a period that was denounced by the AMA and American Hospital Association as “regulated,” a code word meaning “very bad” or even “socialistic” in the New Right circles of rising political superstar California governor Ronald Reagan.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

The precise shape of the legislation and regulatory regime to implement the revolution were probably different under Johnson than they would have been under Kennedy, but momentum for major change in 1963 was already too great to stop. Something resembling the War on Poverty would probably have been proposed in 1964, no matter what. Michael Harrington’s The Other America had appeared in the spring of 1962 proclaiming that 40 to 50 million Americans were living in poverty, and that their poverty was structural—it would not be cured by economic growth. Kennedy had read the book, or at least some laudatory reviews of it, and ordered the staff work that would later be used by Johnson in formulating his War on Poverty. How many programs Kennedy could have actually passed is another question, but Harrington’s thesis was already being taken up by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and would have become part of the policy debate even without the assassination.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Toms sells 50% stake to Bain Capital to fund sales growth. Bloomberg, Aug. 20, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-20/toms-sells-50-stake-to-bain-capital.html. Sachs, Jeffrey. (2005). The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime. Penguin. ———. (2008). The digital war on poverty. Project Syndicate, Aug. 20, 2008, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-digital-war-on-poverty. Sachs, Jeffrey D., and Andrew M. Warner. (1999). The big rush, natural resource booms and growth. Journal of Development Economics 59(1):43–76, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VBV-3WMK4TP-3/2/7e2c0030bf45b0f9a0d8cd5b8cbec71e. Saez, Emmanuel. (2013).


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Over more than two decades, both the geographic and organizational bases of the party shifted in ways that reinforced its commitment to an extreme economic platform. Eisenhower, Nixon, and, more ambivalently, even Reagan had felt obliged to accept the New Deal while picking battles with Democrats elsewhere. Now many Republicans revealed a thinly veiled desire to do more than combat LBJ’s War on Poverty. Their ambitions included repeal of huge swaths of not only the New Deal but the Progressive Era: no Social Security, no effective minimum wage, no progressive taxation, no support for employer-provided health care, almost no financial regulation. They sought, in short, to reestablish the policies of the Gilded Age to mirror the emerging Gilded Age economy.

., 165 UBS, 198, 254 unemployment insurance, 86, 89, 189 unemployment rate, 2, 27, 63, 86, 88, 125, 165, 235, 253, 281, 282, 287, 294–95 Unequal Democracy (Bartels), 151–52, 167 unions, labor: business opposition to, 55, 121–24, 127–32, 135, 219, 303 collective bargaining by, 98 decline of, 5, 56–61, 66, 127–32, 139–43, 164, 235, 248, 278, 303 Democrats supported by, 58, 89, 99, 121–24, 126, 129–32, 141, 164, 172, 178, 248, 278–79 financial resources of, 143 laws for, 44, 58, 78, 80, 125–32, 134, 189, 296 membership of, 57–58, 61, 140, 141–42, 248, 278–79, 318n organization by, 127–28, 204 PACs organized by, 121–22, 128, 172 picketing by, 128–29 political influence of, 89, 99, 121–24, 126, 127–32, 139–43, 144, 145, 146, 154, 204, 218, 275, 278–79, 293 in public sector, 56, 142, 278 Republican opposition to, 58–59, 129–32, 186–87 strikes by, 58–59, 60, 186–87, 191 upper class: income levels of, 3, 12–13, 16–18, 18, 20–25, 32, 39–40, 39, 46, 153–55, 194, 290, 311n political influence of, 72, 78–79, 112–14, 147–51, 157–58 Republicans supported by, 110–11, 147–49 taxation of, 3, 5, 14, 20–24, 34, 47–48, 133, 134, 157, 187, 212–13, 215–17, 243–46, 266, 290 wealth accumulated by, 16–17, 24–25, 31, 32, 43, 49–50, 54–55, 56, 74–77, 100, 101, 225–26, 256, 302–3, 306 upward mobility, 14n, 28–29, 152–53 Urofsky, Melvin, 81 Vanguard Group, 229 Verba, Sidney, 144 vetoes, presidential, 84, 85, 98–99, 126, 128, 213, 241, 298 Vietnam War, 95, 101, 216 Viguerie, Richard, 202 Vogel, David, 116 Volcker, Paul, 46, 256 voters: information for, 108–10, 154–58, 214–15, 236–37, 277, 295 median-voter model of, 77–78 misconceptions of, 151–55, 236–37 mobilization of, 107–10, 138–39, 140, 160, 248, 282 participation by, 77–78, 99, 107, 108–10, 113–14, 137–60, 167–68, 174–75, 252, 268, 287 registration of, 99, 140, 142, 203 swing, 109, 159 targeting of, 147–48, 174–75 “unmoored,” 139, 149–51 Wagner, Robert, 306 Wagner Act (1935), 129, 140 Walker, Charls, 120, 124–26, 133–34, 135 Wall Street, 1, 2, 6, 51, 66–68, 70, 104, 194, 195, 197, 209, 221–30, 232, 247–50, 256, 261, 274, 282, 290–91; see also financial services industry Wall Street Journal, 47, 59, 77, 275 Wal-Mart, 32, 64, 104, 240, 318n Walton family, 218, 240 War on Poverty, 200 Washington, George, 269–70 Watergate scandal, 98, 117 Waxman, Henry, 260 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 82 Weber, Vin, 190 Weill, Sanford, 71, 249–50 welfare, 52, 97, 107, 181, 182, 193 What a Party! (McAuliffe), 223–24 What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Frank), 204 White, Maureen, 225 White, William Allen, 79 Williams, Edward Bennett, 125 Williams, Harrison, 131 Wilson, Woodrow, 86, 89 winner-take-all politics: conservatism and, 5, 7, 41–42, 43, 54, 77, 115, 189, 204 Democratic vs.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Another recent and powerful book is Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift, which describes how the United States not only lacks an adequate social insurance system today but has also substantially dismantled the limited system that was in place during the past forty years (with the peak years of social insurance identified as the mid-1960s, during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty). Hacker demonstrates the great rise in risk facing the American middle class as well as the poor and shows the remarkably high proportion of the middle class in the United States who are vulnerable to spells of poverty. He describes vividly and persuasively how a great right-wing attack on social insurance has systematically reduced the scope of the social-welfare system in health care, job protection, child support, housing support, and retirement security.

Figure 12.5: Views of American Influence Source: BBC-PIPA GlobeScan Poll (2007) The most basic norm of cooperation is reciprocity: I will assist you if you will assist me. But the U.S. attitude has been different: “You are either with us or against us,” as President Bush declared, with no recognition of the interests of the other country. The United States has demanded allegiance in the war on terror, without reciprocal support for the war on poverty, disease, or climate change. The UN has been attacked relentlessly by the American right wing as a threat to American sovereignty, as if American objectives could be accomplished unilaterally. This whole approach has by now imploded. PICKING UP THE PIECES The United States must take six steps to transform its security policy into a workable framework for the twenty-first century: Embrace multilateralism and international law Create a Department of International Sustainable Development Shift financing from the military to an international sustainable development budget Address demography and the environment Reinvigorate the framework for nuclear nonproliferation Understand the Middle East and respond appropriately Embrace Multilateralism The neoconservative mistake, at the core, is the misreading of U.S. power.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

For modern purposes, the model for this style of governing was established by the remarkable Howard Phillips, who served as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) for five crazy months in 1973. As we have seen, this man Phillips is renowned for the purity of his right-wing views. The OEO, on the other hand, was set up to administer Lyndon Johnson’s very liberal “War on Poverty”; it included a legal aid program that made lawyers available to people who could not afford them and which had thus led to thousands of lawsuits against landlords, banks, employers, and so on. Johnson had appointed Sargent Shriver to run the OEO. Nixon chose Howard Phillips. What happened next is the stuff of right-wing legend.

See Agriculture, Department of utilities Vanderbilt family Van Scoyoc Associates Vienna, Virginia Vietnam War Viguerie, Richard Vioxx scandal Virginia. See also Loudoun County Statute for Religious Freedom suburbs Virgin Islands “voluntary compliance” wages. See also minimum wage “pay gap” Walker, Robert S. Waller, J. Michael Wallop, Malcolm Wall Street Journal Wal-Mart War on Poverty Warsaw Pact Washington, D.C. conservative railing vs. conservative rule and boom of New Deal and Washington Post Washington Times Watergate scandal Watt, James Wealth and Poverty (Gilder) wealthy We Are the Government (Elting) Weber, Vin welfare policy welfare state.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

In the late 1940s, the federal tier began to direct money to cities in a targeted manner, with money flowing directly from Washington to New York City and others. The City was a major proponent of the new public housing system and succeeded in gaining almost a third of national grants between 1949 and 1964. Under the Johnson administration, New York proved to be a guinea pig for federal War on Poverty projects to tackle crime and cohesion by allowing communities to administer funds (for example, Mobilization for Youth and the Community Action Program). Later, funds from the Urban Development Action Grant passed during the Carter presidency were used to leverage private invest­ ment to stimulate urban renewal in areas of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn (Berg, 2007).

Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 278 Index Egypt, 19 Europe, 15, 19, 20, 36, 46, 47, 52, 55, 127, 164, 234 European Investment Bank, 46 European Union, 15, 43, 220, 224, 227 Federal systems, 9–10, 13, 16, 30, 62, 95, 210, 237, 239 Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 143–144, 147, 237 Fiscal redistribution, 90, 225, 229 Forum for Consultations, 88, 93, 237 France, 8, 10, 20, 21, 55, 57, 58, 60–63, 66, 67, 211, 216, 222, 229, 231, 232, 236 performance of second cities, 231 Frankfurt, 7, 46 Friedmann, John, 23 Fukuyama, Francis, 23 Gatwick Airport, 50 Geneva, 7 Germany, 20, 230 Giuliani, Rudy, 113 Global cities, see World Cities Globalisation, 5–9, 18, 19, 25, 28–30, 36, 43, 75, 85, 100, 179, 181, 203, 216, 221, 224, 227, 231, 237, 239 Greater Manchester, 44, 52, 233, 236 Guangzhou, 21, 155, 157, 159, 180, 184, 230, 231 Haddad, Fernando, 126 Hamburg, 11, 206 Hanseatic League, 20 Heathrow Airport, 50 High Speed 3 (HS3), 46, 234 Holland, 21 Hollande, Francois, 58, 60 Hong Kong, 7, 9, 11–14, 17, 24, 25, 29, 85, 91, 149–162, 184, 186, 190, 199, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213–215, 220–222, 226, 227, 233, 234, 239 advocacy, 221 Chief Executive, 161–162 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), 155 Consultative Committee on Economic and Trade co-operation, 161 density, 13, 157 economic sector output, 25 economic transformation, 154–155 empowerment and centralisation, 211 Financial Services Development Council, 161 future political arrangements, 159 government system, 9, 208 growth and performance data, 152 national tradition in globalisation, 29 in One Belt, One Road initiative, 158 one country, two systems, 152 Pearl River Delta (PRD), 154, 156, 157, 159 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with Beijing, 154–156 size, 12 India, 10, 16, 30, 98–108, 134, 166, 210, 231, 234, 236 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), 103–104 Make in India Week, 103 performance of second cities, 231 Indus Valley, 19 Inter‐governmental conflict, 13, 235 Istanbul, 21, 50, 227 Italy, 20 Japan, 10, 71, 82–94 Meiji era, 83 National Planning Act, 85 performance of second cities, 231 Jinping, Xi, 185 Johannesburg, 8 Johnson, Boris, 41, 42, 92 Khan, Sadiq, 49, 51 King James I, 38 Korea, 69–80, 183, 192, 210, 212, 216, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235 performance of second cities, 16, 231 Lahore, 20 Lastman, Mel, 210 Latin America, 4, 21, 123, 128, 133, 134, 238 Leiden, 21 Lisbon, 21 Lister, Sir Edward, 48 Livingstone, Ken, 41, 210 London, 5, 6, 9, 11–15, 21–27, 29, 30, 33–53, 59, 63, 67, 69, 92, 93, 108, 123, 134, 145, 154, 155, 204–208, 210–216, 220–222, 226–229, 231, 233, 234, 236, 238 Abercrombie Plan, 39 advocacy, 221 air capacity, 50 ‘Big Bang,’ 40 boroughs, 42, 45, 48, 236 Brexit, 36, 42, 46–48, 52, 220 business leadership, 93 Canary Wharf, 39 Channel Tunnel Rail Link, 40 city leadership, 220 Index City of London, 38, 40, 42 city‐state, 27 collaboration with other cities, 236 Crossrail, 1, 2, 37, 51, 205, 216, 221 Davies Commission, 50 de‐industrialisation, 39 density, 13 diversity, 227 Docklands regeneration, 40, 216 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 escalator region, 226 fiscal devolution, 48–49, 69, 145, 212, 216 fiscal outflows, 215 Government Office for London, 22, 36, 40 government system, 9, 208 Greater London Authority (GLA), 40, 41, 50, 209, 210 Greater London Council (GLC), 26, 39, 40 Greater South East, 36, 39, 50, 52, 213, 214 green belt, 39, 52 growth and performance data, 36 High Speed 2 (HS2), 46, 234 Home Counties, 39 housing, 49–50, 206 Jubilee Line, 37, 40 London Assembly, 37 London County Council, 39 London Development Agency, 41 London Docklands Development Corporation, 39 London Enterprise Panel (LEP), 42, 51 London Finance Commission, 48–49, 216 London First, 40, 108, 134, 221, 222 London Land Commission, 50 Mayor, 42, 51, 221, 236 mayoral system, 36, 210, 233 Metropolitan Board of Works, 39 Millennium projects, 37, 40 national tradition in globalisation, 29, 30 performance of second cities, 231 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 50–51, 213 size, 12, 211 South Bank, 40 system of cities, 13, 229–230 Transport for London (TfL), 41, 51 2012 Olympics, 37, 215, 218 world city literature, 23, 24, 27 Los Angeles, 7, 23, 195, 231 Luzhkov, Yuri, 166, 210 Lyon, 21, 61, 231, 232 Madrid, 7, 13 Masuzoe, Yoichi, 92–93 McLoughin, Patrick, 51 279 Mediterranean, 19, 20 Melbourne, 8 Mercantilism, 21 Merv, 20 Mesopotamia, 19 Metropolitan areas, 7, 53, 61, 76, 104, 106, 108, 115, 133, 135, 234, 236 Metropolitan government, 9, 15, 16, 36, 52, 56, 67, 72, 123, 208, 212 Milan, 13, 227 Modi, Narendra, 103 Montreal, 8, 14, 138, 139, 143, 231 Moscow, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 29, 30, 163–176, 204, 205, 208, 210, 212, 215, 216, 220, 221, 226, 229, 236, 237, 239 Central Federal District, 175, 237 city and federal government relationship, 165–169 density, 13, 172 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 financial services, 168 geopolitical tensions, 168 government system, 9, 208 growth and performance data, 164 higher education, 166 mayoral system, 210 Moscow River, 172 Moscow Urban Forum (MUF), 175, 237 national tradition in globalisation, 29, 30 New Moscow, 167, 173 oblast, 166 1980 Olympic Games, 166 patterns of development, 164 population and visitor growth, 204 Rail and road investments, 172 regional governance, 213 Russian spatial hierarchy, 170 size, 12 Skolkovo innovation district, 165, 172 Soviet model, 165–167 tax revenue, 164, 167 transition after 1991, 166–169 transport, 205 2018 football World Cup, 165, 174 Mughal Empire, 20 Mumbai, 14, 16, 30, 97–109, 123, 206, 207, 210, 212, 217, 226, 227 advocacy, 221 Bollywood, 98 Bombay First, 103, 106, 108 Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), 106 density, 13, 101 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 280 Index Mumbai (cont’d) fiscal imbalances, 102 fragmented governance, 105–106 government system, 9, 208 Greater Mumbai, 98 Greater Mumbai Development Plan, 102–103 growth and performance data, 98 High Powered Expert Committee, 101 intergovernmental conflict, 101 investment capacity, 106 Maharashtra state government, 98, 100–102 Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), 99, 214 Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), 99, 100 national tradition in globalisation, 29, 30 Navi Mumbai, 107 constitutional amendment, 100 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with higher tiers of government, 99–101 size, 12, 14 Smart City Mission, 103, 105 Transit Oriented Development, 104 weak growth management, 98, 100 Munich, 7 crime, 113 density, 13 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fiscal crisis, 113 government system, 9, 208 growth and performance data, 111 housing, 118 Housing Authority (NYCHA), 114 Hurricane Sandy, 114, 119 immigration, 116 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), 113 national tradition in globalisation, 29, 30 New York State, 111, 115 9/11, 112, 114 performance of second cities, 231 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 Regional Plan Association (RPA), 120 size, 12 transport infrastructure, 117 tri-state area, 111, 119–120 Urban Development Action Grant, 113 New Zealand, 10 North America, 4, 17, 19, 107, 137, 146, 227 Northern Powerhouse, see North of England North of England, 21, 229 North East, 236 Northern Powerhouse, 45, 228, 234 National Conference of Cities (ConCidades), 128, 134, 237 National frameworks, 29–30, 207, 231–237 National governments, 4–6, 8, 10, 11, 22, 25–32, 46–51, 57–58, 62–64, 70, 72–74, 76–79, 86–92, 99–100, 102–107, 116–119, 130–134, 143–147, 167, 168, 171–175, 183–187, 204, 220–224, 227–229, 231–239 National urban policy, 7, 67, 103, 112, 128, 157, 165, 171, 233, 237 Nation states, 3–4, 6–8, 13, 14, 20–32, 38, 48, 196, 204, 210–212, 220, 225, 229, 231, 236 age of, 3, 6 century of, 6, 239 Netherlands, see Holland New York City, 5, 7, 10, 14, 16, 24, 26, 27, 30, 63, 67, 92, 93, 110–121, 123, 137, 155, 206, 210, 212, 214, 215, 220, 222, 227, 229, 239 advocacy, 221 airport system, 117–118 Bloomberg, Michael, 114, 119 city and nation state relationship, 113–115 Ohmae, Kenichi, 23 One country, two systems, 11, 52, 152, 155, 210 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 22, 26, 30, 74, 75 Osborne, George, 45, 222, 236 Ottoman Empire, 20 Paris, 13, 15, 22, 23, 25, 27, 32, 46, 50, 54–67, 92, 205–207, 211, 212, 214–218, 222, 232, 238 advocacy, 221 APUR (Paris Urban Planning Agency), 67 Chirac, Jaques, 57 density, 13 division of responsibilities, 60 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fragmentation, 56, 62 government system, 9, 208 Grand Paris Express, 56, 59, 64–66 growth and performance data, 204 Ile de France (Regional Council), 56–58, 60, 64 Law for Solidarity and Urban Renewal, 59 Index Maptam law, 61, 66 mayoral system, 210 Metropole du Grand Paris, 56, 59–60, 62 Mobilisation Plan for Development and Housing, 63 national tradition in globalisation, 29 NOTRe bill, 64 Paris‐Saclay, 56, 59 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with national government, 57–60 size, 12 state-region contracts, 63 territorial development contracts, 59, 63, 66 Pearl River Delta, 7, 11, 12, 17, 152, 157, 159, 161, 211, 213 Persia, 20 Provincial governments, see State governments Putin, Vladimir, 167 Rayy, 20 Regional policies, 22, 28 Republic of Ireland, 10 Rio de Janeiro, 6, 123, 129, 130, 231 Russia, 8, 17, 18, 21, 30, 31, 164–172, 174–176, 210, 212–213, 229, 236–237 Rust Belt, 21 Samarkand, 20 San Francisco, 7, 231 São Paulo, 13, 14, 17, 30, 122–135, 206, 207, 212, 215–217, 220, 226, 229, 231, 235 advocacy, 221 business climate, 132–133 density, 13, 124, 133 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fiscal constraints, 130–132 fiscal outflows, 215 government system, 9, 209 growth and performance data, 123 housing, 133 Minha Casa Minha Vida, 126 national tradition in globalisation, 29, 30 performance of second cities, 231 Plano de Aceleracao de Crescimiento, 129 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with its nation state, 125–127 revenue sources, 129–130 São Paulo 2040, 126–127 São Paulo State, 123, 125 size, 12 Urban Mobility Pact, 126 281 Sassen, Saskia, 24 Seoul, 6, 9, 13, 15, 24, 27, 68–80, 85, 210, 215, 218, 227, 231, 235, 238 advocacy, 221 capital region, 69 Cheonggyechoen River regeneration, 72, 73 de-concentration, 68, 71, 75, 76, 80 density, 13 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fiscal devolution, 77–78 fiscal outflows, 215 government system, 9, 209 growth and performance data, 69 jaebol, 71, 72, 76 mayoral system, 210 metropolitan government, 73, 78 national tradition in globalisation, 29 1988 Summer Olympics, 72 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with central government, 70–74 segyehwa, 72 self‐government, 72 Seoul Republic, 71 size, 12 Shanghai, 7, 11, 14, 18, 27, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 177–188, 207, 216, 217, 220, 226, 227, 230, 233, 239 advocacy, 221 bond issuance programme, 184 de-centralisation, 181 density, 13, 184 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 free trade zones, 182, 186 government system, 9, 209 growth and performance data, 178 hukou, 184–185 internationalisation, 181–182 land leasing, 183 national tradition in globalisation, 29 performance of second cities, 231 population and visitor growth, 204 Pudong New Area, 181 region, 7 regional governance, 213 relationship with central government, 179–183 revenues, 187 size, 12 state owned enterprises, 180 treaty port, 180 2010 World Expo, 182, 218 Yangtze River Delta (YRD), 178, 181, 184 282 Index Sheffield, 43, 45, 52, 231, 236 Silk Road, 20, 158 Singapore, 11, 18, 30, 85, 91, 189–200, 206, 207, 215, 219 advocacy, 221 Civil Service, 196 Concept Plan, 192 density, 13, 198, 200 Economic Development Board (EDB), 191, 194 economic development model, 198 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 governance history, 191–193 government linked companies, 194–195 government system, 9, 209 growth and performance data, 191 Housing Development Board (HDB), 191 independence, 191–192 internationalisation, 191–192 land management, 195 Ministry of National Development (MND), 195–196 National Trade Unions Congress (NTUC), 193 national tradition in globalisation, 29 National Wages Council, 193 People’s Action Party (PAP), 191, 195–196 performance of second cities, 231 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 self‐rule, 191 size, 12 water management, 195 Smith, Adam, 21 Sobyanin, Sergei, 167 Soon, Cho, 210 South Africa, 8, 134 Sovereignty, 15, 16, 19, 20, 26, 152 Soviet Union, 23, 166 Special cities, 9, 17, 239 State governments, 7, 10, 100–103, 105, 111, 114, 124, 127, 216, 217, 234 St Petersburg, 21, 164, 168, 170, 175, 236 Sun Yat‐Sen, 154 Switzerland, 7, 20 Sydney, 8, 25 Systems of Cities, 4, 7, 13–14, 28 Taylor, Peter, 21 Territorial development, 8, 22, 73 30 Years’ War, 20 Tokyo, 5, 6, 11, 16, 23–25, 27, 74, 77, 81–94, 207, 210, 215, 220, 226, 227, 235, 238 advocacy, 221 aging population, 92 business climate, 91–92 de‐centralisation, 84, 85 de‐concentration, 84, 88 density, 13 devolution, 89 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fiscal redistribution, 90 government system, 9, 209 growth and performance data, 82 industrialisation, 84–85 metropolitan government, 82, 84, 87, 89, 93 National Strategic Special Zones, 86, 90 national tradition in globalisation, 29 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with central government, 83–88 size, 12 Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 84–85, 88 Tokyo Problem, 88 2020 Olympics, 86, 87, 91 2002 Urban Regeneration Law, 85–86 Urban Renaissance HQ, 87 Toronto, 8, 13, 14, 17, 23, 25, 136–149, 207, 210, 212, 215, 216, 218–220, 222, 227, 231, 234 advocacy, 221 density, 13 economic sector output, 25 empowerment and centralisation, 211 fiscal vulnerability, 145 government system, 9, 209 Greater Toronto Area, 137 Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance, 147 growth and performance data, 137 immigration, 141, 146 infrastructure investment, 144–146 mayoral system, 210 Metrolinx, 140 national tradition in globalisation, 29 1998 City of Toronto Act, 139, 140 Ontario, 137 population and visitor growth, 204 regional governance, 213 relationship with the nation state, 138–143 size, 12 Smart Track, 140 Toronto Board of Trade, 147–148 universities, 137, 141 US–Canada Auto Pact, 139 Waterfront Toronto, 141–142 Trade, 5–7, 20–22, 99, 128, 146, 152, 161, 186, 205, 225–226 Index Travers, Tony, 49 Treaty of Westphalia, 20 Trudeau, Justin, 143 Turkmenistan, 20 UKIP, 46 Unitary systems, 9–10, 15, 21, 238 United Kingdom, 10, 21, 24, 36, 37, 154, 210, 231, 238 United Nations, 21 United States, 7, 10, 21, 24, 26, 71, 112, 231, 235 Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), 115 US federal reserve, 24 War on Poverty, 113 Uzbekistan, 20 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 24 Washington, 27, 113, 114, 116–117, 119–120, 231 The West, 27, 69 Western liberal democracy, 23 West Midlands, 52, 228, 236 Won-sun, Bak, 74 World Bank, 30–31, 157, 174, 196 World cities advantages and disadvantages, 225–231 age of, 5–6, 203–223 collaboration between world cities and other cities, 236–237 definition, 3–4 in the future, 237–239 literature, 22–24, 27–28 typology, 29–31 Xiaoping, Deng, 180 Valls, Manuel, 66 Vancouver, 8, 143, 231 Zurich, 7, 227 283


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Kennedy, from 1961 until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, and then as the thirty-sixth president of the United States, from 1963 to 1969. 21.John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908–April 29, 2006). 22.The Affluent Society (1958) described how the U.S. private sector had become more prosperous since World War II but the public sector lacked adequate social and physical infrastructure, which caused intolerable income disparities; the book anticipated President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” 23.John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy (May 29, 1917–November 22, 1963), the thirty-fifth president of the United States, from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. 24.The brief, glamorous presidency of John F. Kennedy was widely likened to the idyllic world of King Arthur’s Camelot, portrayed in 1960 in an eponymous Lerner and Loewe musical, then a 1967 movie starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. 25.Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915–December 13, 2009), the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Gottesman, eds., Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century (New York, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. xxv. 62.The post was eventually taken by the Keynesian economist Walter Heller (August 27, 1915–June 15, 1987), who is credited with suggesting to Lyndon Johnson that he wage a “war on poverty.” CHAPTER 3: PARADISE LOST 1.Friedman’s biographical note for the Nobel Prize committee. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1976/friedman-bio.html. 2.John B. Taylor interview with Friedman. http://web.stanford.edu/~johntayl/Onlinepaperscombinedbyyear/2001/An_Interview_with_Milton_Friedman.pdf. 3.Interview with Friedman for the WGBH economics series Commanding Heights, 2002. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html. 4.Aaron Director inspired a generation of conservative jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. 5.Friedman’s biographical note for the Nobel Prize committee. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1976/friedman-bio.html. 6.David Friedman (born February 12, 1945), American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist, followed his parents into economics, sharing their belief in free markets and libertarian thinking.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

Institute, East Lansing, Mich. 1999, p. 2. MAGICAL URBANISM 160 Transnational Suburbs Chapter 8 Miguel Szekely, "Economics of Poverty, Inequality and Wealth Accumulation in 119. Mexico," Inter-American Development Bank study cited in Los Angeles Times, 7 Jan. 1999. Moguel, "SaUnas' Failed 120. Julio Quly/Aug. 121 War on Poverty," NACLA Report on the Americas 28:1 1994), p. 39. For a summary of the changed dynamics of emigration, see Wayne Cornelius, "From . Sojourners to States," in J. The Changing Settlers: Profile of Labor Market Interdependence, Stanford, Calif. 1992, pp. 122. Monsivais, "Dreaming of Utopia," 123.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In this sense, the fatally overpaid workers of the past forty years, as they have been conceived of across the political spectrum, might be reconceived as fatally underpaid, not just from their own point of view but from the standpoint of systemic requirements for sustained growth. To draw this consequence from Brenner’s argument is to turn the received idea of the Golden Age on its head. After all, even in the legendary days of “full employment” joblessness in the US was often three or four times higher than in Sweden, and Johnson’s War on Poverty hardly named a phantom enemy; it was never the case that all who wanted a job could get one, or that fear of hardship had ceased to exert its discipline. Might it be that the era’s fatal flaw lay not in excess compensation for workers and over-full employment, but in insufficient wage growth and not-full-enough employment?


pages: 178 words: 47,457

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

Jack Levine, who is with the Florida Center for Children and Youth, said, "'None of us is immune to the concerns of children who aren't ready for education, whose health needs are served in emergency rooms and who do not have the family support to keep them out of trouble.' " In the 1964 State of the Union address, the war on poverty was declared. The President's Council of Economic Advisors reported there was "an inverse relationship between the extent of education of family heads and the incidence of poverty." Causes of poverty include poor education, obsolete skills, ill health, divorce, desertion, alcohol, and drugs.


pages: 454 words: 139,811

Woman On The Edge Of Time by Piercy, Marge

clean water, impulse control, planned obsolescence, sugar pill, War on Poverty

If too many in a village cut off, the neighboring villages send for a team of involvers.” “Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín … He got killed. I was young and naïve and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty … . But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us … idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up right back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off.”

She herself could be such a person here. Yes, she would study how to fix the looted landscape, heal rivers choked with filth. Doctor the soil squandered for a quick profit on cash crops. Then she would be useful. She would like herself, as she had during the brief period she had been involved in the war-on-poverty hoax. People would respect her. There’s Consuelo, they’d say, doctor of soil, protector of rivers. Her children would be proud of her. Her lovers would not turn from her, would not die in prison, would not be cut down in the streets, like Martin. How she had stood over him in the morgue, shaking with rage—yes, rage—because he was dead without reason.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

“You bet,” the president-elect replied: “that people who work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything they want in America.”2 The myth has its value. It sets a demanding standard, both for the nation and for every resident. The nation has to strive to make itself the fabled land of opportunity; the resident must strive to use that opportunity. The ideal has inspired a Civil Rights Movement, a War on Poverty, and a continuing search for ways to ease the distress that persists in the midst of plenty. But the American Myth also provides a means of laying blame. In the Puritan legacy, hard work is not merely practical but also moral; its absence suggests an ethical lapse. A harsh logic dictates a hard judgment: If a person’s diligent work leads to prosperity, if work is a moral virtue, and if anyone in the society can attain prosperity through work, then the failure to do so is a fall from righteousness.

The individual is a victim of great forces beyond his control, including profit-hungry corporations that exploit his labor. In 1962, Michael Harrington’s eloquent articulation of the Anti-Myth in his book The Other America heightened awareness; to a nation blinded by affluence at the time, the portrait of a vast “invisible land” of the poor came as a staggering revelation. It helped generate Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. But Johnson’s war never truly mobilized the country, nor was it ever fought to victory. Fifty years later, after all our economic achievements, the gap between rich and poor has only widened, with a median net worth of $1,589,000 among the top 10 percent and minus $4,900 for the bottom 25 percent, meaning that they owe more than they own.3 Life expectancy in the United States is lower, and infant mortality higher, than in Japan, Hong Kong, Israel, Canada, and all the major nations of Western Europe.4 Yet after all that has been written, discussed, and left unresolved, it is harder to surprise and shock and outrage.


pages: 162 words: 51,445

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

Who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it!” One may argue about the degree to which, on the domestic front, Obama has attempted to shift the balance in the direction King would have endorsed. But given that King stepped up his campaigning for the poor at the very point when President Johnson was launching his War on Poverty and creating the Great Society, it is unlikely that King would have found the pace and scale of Obama’s reforms sufficient. Meanwhile, the views of King and Obama on foreign policy are quite different. In King’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1964, he said: “Violence never brings permanent peace.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

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

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

As the party of Abraham Lincoln, Republicans had traditionally been receptive to black civil rights, and the Republican leadership in Congress supported Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Barry Goldwater was an early dissenter, but in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson easily defeated him. Johnson’s victory did not, however, signal widespread support for his civil rights initiatives, and after he passed the Voting Rights Act and launched the War on Poverty, a popular backlash grew. Wallace turned the backlash into a populist crusade. Wallace was raised in a rural small town in Alabama. His father and grandfather dabbled in politics. They were New Deal Democrats under Roosevelt’s spell. Wallace would eventually make his name as an arch-segregationist, but he was initially a populist Democrat like Long for whom race was strictly a secondary consideration.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

Similarly, it may be true, in the abstract, that “the techniques of economic stimulation and stabilization are simply neutral administrative tools capable of distributing national income either more or less equitably, improving the relative bargaining position of either unions or employers, and increasing or decreasing the importance of the public sector of the economy.56 But in the real world, as the same author points out, these “neutral administrative tools” are applied “within the context of a consensus whose limits are defined by the business community.” The tax reforms of the “new economics” benefit the rich.57 Urban renewal, the war on poverty, expenditures for science and education, turn out, in large measure, to be a subsidy to the already privileged. There are a number of ways in which the intellectual who is aware of these facts can hope to change them. He might, for example, try to “humanize” the meritocratic or corporate elite or the government bureaucrats closely allied to them, a plan that has seemed plausible to many scientists and social scientists.


pages: 196 words: 53,627

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

And although a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, gave us the Great Society, its programs expanded exponentially during the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Welfare becomes a problem when people become habituated to it, when dependency isn’t kept to a minimum and benefits become more attractive than a paycheck. The historical tendency to keep immigrants out of welfare programs began to fade during the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Means-tested programs were added and enhanced but legislation was usually silent on whether citizenship was required to participate. Some states moved to bar noncitizens from public assistance, but a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Graham v. Richardson, reversed those efforts, holding that only the federal government could regulate immigrants’ use of welfare.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Harrington’s book, written at the peak of American post-war prosperity and optimism, declared that there were forty to fifty million Americans living in poverty, but that “The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.” Harrington’s description of the other America moved a nation. President Kennedy read it, and mapped plans to eradicate poverty. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, seized on it and declared a war on poverty with a parade of programs—Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid, Head Start, legal services for the poor. He also increased funding for a welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, begun in 1935 and aimed at children in the country’s poorest households. Kennedy’s brother Robert traveled through Appalachia as a senator and presidential candidate making the poor visible to the journalists who followed him as he vowed to surge Johnson’s war.

The converse would also be true: Higher middle-class wages would trickle down to help the poor. However, a safety net of special programs to help the poor has always been there, too. Support for these programs in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s was mostly bipartisan. After Presidents Kennedy and Johnson began the war on poverty following Harrington’s book, President Nixon followed up in ways that might shock the next generation of Republicans. Even before he took office in January 1969, Nixon approved a proposal from his transition staff that called for a guaranteed national income—a set amount to be paid to every American as a floor of available funds to protect them from poverty.*1 He was unable to get Congress to approve it, but he did initiate a variety of other programs.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But I was dismayed when President Bush declared that America was now in a “global war on terror.” By this time, I had left the State Department and become a member of the law faculty at the University of Virginia, where I taught and wrote about international legal issues and human rights, and I understood immediately that the war on terror was no mere metaphor—no “War on Poverty” or “War on Illiteracy.” A global war on terror, I intuitively knew, was a war that could, by its nature, have no boundaries: no geographic limits, no limits on who could be targeted, captured, or killed, and no end. All the same: if there was going to be war and struggle, I wanted somehow to be part of it.

We can denounce U.S. government practices and legal interpretations that undermine human rights and the rule of law, and insist that the root of the problem is a simple category mistake: the United States has labeled as “war” too many things that should correctly be labeled “crime” or “social problems,” and labeled as “military” too many tasks that should properly be labeled “civilian.” If the root of our current problems is a category mistake, the way to remedy these problems is to urge politicians, policymakers, military leaders, and judges to recognize that counterterrorism should not truly be conceived of as war, any more than the “war on drugs” or the “war on poverty” led us to apply the law of armed conflict to those efforts. Similarly, this argument would suggest that we should stop viewing cyber threats, economic threats, and a dozen other threats through the lens of war, and return to our pre-9/11 understanding of the world. This is the approach that has been taken by many in the human rights and civil rights communities since 9/11.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

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

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

But nearly all the big 1960s changes, the various different varieties of new, had a common source, in addition to the deep-seated national predisposition: after twenty-plus years of exceptional prosperity and increasing economic equality that were both still going strong, a critical mass of Americans felt affluent and secure, which made their native self-confidence and high expectations for the next new thing still more intense. That run of shared affluence allowed the grown-ups in charge to decide we could afford Medicare and Medicaid and the various War on Poverty experiments, and it eased the way for more people to obey the better angels of their nature concerning equality for African Americans and women. After a generation of Depression and world war, the thriving new political economy also inclined people to have lots more children. Those children were raised almost as if they were a special new subspecies who required more tenderness and understanding than previous humans, the new approach famously codified by Dr.

He disparaged liberals who thought that “if there is a problem, [you] create an agency and throw money at the problem,” who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it ceased to relate to reality”—and to that he added some sexist shade, calling them “the Eleanor Roosevelt wing” of the party. “The ballyhooed War on Poverty” of the 1960s, the Democratic programs that included Medicaid and food stamps, “succeeded only in raising the expectations, but not the living conditions, of the poor,” he said inaccurately. “This nation desperately needs a new breed of thinkers and doers who will question old premises and disregard old alliances.”


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

It was all rather good politics, in the sense that it made the Republicans appear to be in favour of poverty, which, said Johnson’s rival, Hubert Humphrey, would, if allowed to go on, become hereditary. It turned out, despite his efforts, that that indeed happened, the inheritance being from the lone-maternal side: a later book, by Allen Matusow, had the title How Not to Fight Poverty (1985). As Ronald Reagan later put it, ‘We declared war on poverty, and we lost.’ But such discoveries were a good decade in the future. Roosevelt had had much trouble with the Supreme Court in the later 1930s. Johnson found that he could get around this, because he had an astute legal ally, Abe Fortas, and he could in effect ‘pack’ the Court. States’ rights were overborne, and so too, on occasion, were the provisions of Congress.

There were other ideas around at this time, often of great interest, and reflecting the disillusion of men and women who had regarded the sixties as a time of hope. Much of the inspiration, and even some of the money, came from North America. There, the disillusion had also run deep, and Johnson’s idea of a ‘Great Society’ had disintegrated: as Ronald Reagan put it, ‘We declared war on poverty, and we lost.’ Daniel Moynihan, originally a New Dealer and a Democrat, made himself very unpopular at Harvard (they threatened to burn down his house) because he said that welfare was causing black girls just to do without husbands, and bringing about the disintegration of the black family; that was producing an ‘underclass’ of hopeless misfits who, again through welfare, were paid to reproduce themselves.

Then there was the extraordinary deterioration of the conditions in which big-city Americans lived: squalid housing, grotesque crime rates. Myron Magnet, a scholar of English literature who knew his nineteenth century, wrote (in 1993) The Dream and the Nightmare and it was easy for him to catalogue the failures of the ‘Great Society’: as Reagan said, ‘We declared war on poverty, and we lost.’ There was also a failure, though a more complicated one, as regards America’s racial problem. ‘School bussing, more public housing projects, affirmative action, job-training programs, drug treatment projects . . . multi-cultural curricula, new textbooks, all-black college dorms, sensitivity courses, minority set-asides, Martin Luther King Day, and the political correctness movement at colleges’ had only led, all in all, to rather greater apartheid than before.


pages: 214 words: 57,614

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

American politics had shifted dramatically by the late 1960s: as a result of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, the old communist and fellow- n The Neoconseiuative Legacy traveling Left of the 1930s had been replaced, temporarily at least, by the New Left of Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society. This was also the period of the revival of large-scale social engineering on the part of the U.S. government, in the form of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society programs. Figures like Bell, Glazer, and Lipset were by now all ensconced in universities and found themselves in opposition to a new generation of student radicals who, in addition to supporting a progressive social agenda with which their professors were vaguely sympathetic, attacked the university itself as a handmaiden of American capitalism and imperialism.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

After World War II, America went on an almost uninterrupted growth binge. Per capita economic output, adjusted for inflation, tripled between 1950 and the end of the century. The stock market rose about fortyfold. Mutual funds and tax-sheltered retirement accounts spread stock ownership to the masses. In the 1960s, the federal government launched an all-out War on Poverty. And yet, at the end of the century, the distribution of private wealth was more unequal than it had been in 1950. In cold numbers, the top 5 percent owned more than the bottom 95 percent (see figure 2.3). Figure 2.3 WEALTH DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES, 2001 P E R C E N T O F W E A LT H O W N E D 100 75 Top 5% 50 25 Next 15% Bottom 80% 0 Poorest 2 3 4 Richest F I F TH S O F U.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

At the same time, reserves of oil, natural gas, and in the longer run even coal, are going to be depleted. How can we hope to face these challenges if our economy is in decline and the bulk of our population is focused almost exclusively on the continuity of individual incomes? A similar point can be made regarding the global war on poverty. How can we hope to win this war, if we ourselves are not prosperous? We know that poverty is one of the primary drivers of war, conflict and terrorism. In a long-term stagnant or declining economic environment, these problems will only grow. The answer cannot be to attempt to halt technological progress.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

They saddled their companies with costs that kept growing when the burden might have been spread through public funding, as was the New Deal’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Aside from the expansion of higher education, the engine of social reform had an uphill push in the 1960s. Progressive income tax rates and rising wages shrank the gap between rich and poor for twenty years while the economy moved ahead at full tilt. President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, but the real war in Vietnam undercut many of his domestic goals. The quest for acknowledgment of labor has been made more difficult by the language of economic analysis that depersonalizes workers. Labor is bundled with land and capital as the principal components of enterprise. In a subtle way, this has a dehumanizing effect, for it obscures the enormous difference between the human and material elements in production.

A contender with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for the title of the world’s wealthiest person, Slim has been a great benefactor. He has poured money into foundations, but as a monopoly owner of many sectors of the economy he is also part of the problem of Mexican poverty. He employs a quarter of a million men and women. Like Yunus, he has declared war on poverty and is turning his attention to helping fund Mexican health and education programs. “My new job,” Slim says, “is to focus on the development and employment of Latin America.” Critics ask if he intends to pay a working wage commensurate with the rest of North America.27 Yunus understands that one of the underpinnings of poverty is the widespread conviction that it is an ineradicable evil, like dying.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

The key, he believed, was in nationalizing congressional politics through confrontations with the ruling Democrats that would clarify the differences between the two parties. A liberal consensus had dominated Washington since the Depression, when FDR combated economic crisis with a massive expansion of the federal safety net. In the sixties, LBJ added to it with Medicare and his “war on poverty,” but his presidency coincided with explosive civil strife, including riots in Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles, and other cities; waves of antiwar protests; and the rise of a counterculture. A backlash was building in blue-collar and middle-class white America, which Nixon nodded to with his talk of “the great silent majority.”

Technically speaking, “welfare” was a catchall term for an array of programs aimed at helping the impoverished meet their basic needs. As a political issue, though, the action revolved around Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was conceived during the New Deal and expanded dramatically under LBJ’s “war on poverty.” AFDC provided monthly cash assistance to households with children in which the principal earner was either absent or jobless. It was the largest single component of the welfare system. The surge in spending on AFDC since the 1960s coincided with alarming cultural trends. By the early nineties, the rate of violent crime was four and a half times what it had been three decades earlier, and out-of-wedlock births had jumped sixfold.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

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

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

From the 1930s onward, the state guaranteed against disaster. In 1966, Medicare debuted, providing funds for senior health care, so the elderly were supplied with both a modest income and a certain minimum level of medical care and insurance against catastrophic illness. As part of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, funds were also extended regardless of age to poor populations for both health care and income assistance—welfare, in short. So, the bulk of what we think of as the social safety net was therefore in place by 1966, along with growing protections to ensure that classes of people other than comfortable whites could participate, at least in a partial way, in national prosperity and politics.

Some failed to remit only the temporary 10 percent tax enacted as part of war policy, which while self-serving and illegal was at least tailored to the political issue; others, like the singer Joan Baez (who provided some theme music to antiwar protests), refused to pay the majority of their bills, even though at most a quarter or so went to defense and the rest to benign enterprises like the War on Poverty (apparently, “antiwar” was a fairly expansive concept). The widespread manufacture, distribution, and use of recreational drugs was, of course, also plainly illegal, and more aggressive and less successful than the efforts of later generations to legalize marijuana through the conventional political process.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

But Johnson privately assured Heller that it would be easy to increase spending after the votes were counted. “Once you have the tax cut,” Johnson said, “you can do what you want.”37 Johnson did. With the tax cut in hand, federal spending rose sharply as the administration pursued a war in Vietnam and what Johnson called an “unconditional war on poverty.” About a fifth of the American population, some 30 million people, then lived in destitution with little prospect of betterment. Both liberal and conservative administrations had taken the view that poverty was best treated by pursuing broad economic growth.38 But by the early 1960s, scholars and journalists were focusing public attention on the inadequacy of this strategy — a project intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, since deprivation was concentrated in minority communities.

But we have not banished air crashes from the land, and it is not clear that we have the wisdom or the ability to eliminate recessions.” See Okun, The Political Economy of Prosperity (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1970), 33–34. 42. In 2014, on the fiftieth anniversary of Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, then chairman of the House Budget Committee, declared that the war had “failed.” The available evidence suggests a different conclusion. See Christopher Wimer et al., “Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure,” December 2013, Columbia Population Research Center, Columbia University. 43.


pages: 605 words: 169,366

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

By the end of the 1970s, McNamara’s rural development projects had ended in failure, and the Bank’s project managers were grumbling behind his back. After more than three decades of continuous expansion—in staff numbers, loan volumes, and ambition—the World Bank had begun to seem overextended. The institution’s war on poverty, like America’s war on communism in Vietnam, was proving all too much for it. Without pressure from outside, McNamara might have soldiered on, preaching the cause of development at the Bank’s annual meetings each autumn, and driving his staff to come up with new ways of advancing it. But outside pressure did arrive—in the form of two successive oil shocks.

Development would be sustainable only if it included political and institutional progress; and it must advance on all fronts. Roads, education, legal reform, women’s emancipation, corruption fighting, a sound banking system, environmental protection, child inoculation: all were essential. In the absence of a silver bullet, only a broad war on poverty could help the Ugandan woman he remembered, who baked green banana skins into charcoal briquettes. “Mr. Chairman,” Wolfensohn declared portentously, “we need a new development framework.” Wolfensohn’s speech attracted modest attention in the following day’s headlines. The world was understandably more interested in Brazil’s immediate instability than in Wolfensohn’s musings about long-run “holistic” development.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

In 1913 income tax was introduced and the Federal Reserve Bank was created to manage the dollar. In 1932, to generate the funds he wanted for his New Deal, Roosevelt confiscated Americans’ gold, gave Americans dollars in exchange and then devalued the dollar. In the 1960s, under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the American state grew even further. Johnson’s War on Poverty saw the Social Security Act, the Food Stamp Act, the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act signed into law. But these reforms, together with America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, cost money. The US began printing dollars – many more dollars than its gold supply could back.


pages: 182 words: 64,847

Working by Robert A. Caro

carbon footprint, desegregation, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, rent control, Southern State Parkway, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Another proof of the speech’s power I got from Busby and Goodwin: when the limousine was coming back to the White House and turned in to the White House gates, the turn was made in silence. The pickets were gone. In that year Lyndon Johnson passed Medicaid, Medicare, a slew of education bills, Head Start, the immigration bill, many War on Poverty bills. So how do you write about the Sixties? You could say that if you were just going up to July, 1965, it was a decade of great strides toward social justice. That it was sort of a decade of hope, and of the song that embodied that hope, “We Shall Overcome.” * * * — BUT THAT WAS NOT all the Sixties were.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

But a compromise was achieved, and subsequent Republican presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—ended up expanding the programs during their terms. (This prompted Nixon’s famous “I am now a Keynesian in economics” line.) There was the formation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the War on Poverty. All of them were worked on as compromises. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act was sponsored by Dan Rostenkowski, who was a Democratic representative. The art of compromise—really, the art of the executive branch of government working with the legislative one to conquer evil, fix problems, and respond to constituents—continued all the way into Bill Clinton’s second term.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

While hardly glamorous, manufactured housing is often a substantial step up from the alternative, which in rural areas is often an informal shack. The Appalachian trailer that my mother grew up in was hardly luxury, but compared to the shacks that much of the Fletcher clan lived in, it was a clear improvement. President Lyndon Johnson would use one such Fletcher clan shack for a photo opportunity announcing the War on Poverty in 1964. 18. See Charles Haar, “Zoning for Minimum Standards: The Wayne Township Case,” Harvard Law Review 66, no. 6 (April 1953). 19. Shoup, High Cost of Free Parking. 20. Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government Planning Office (2021), Sections 8-21, 8-33, and 8-39. 21. Assuming two standard 8'6" by 18'4" parking spaces and an adjacent 12' travel lane, the total space consumed is roughly 650 square feet.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

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

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

Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson to put together an ambitious anti-poverty agenda. A. H. Raskin, a veteran labor reporter for the New York Times, said that Harrington’s book was nothing less than “a scream of rage and a call to conscience.” In the end, it fell mostly on deaf ears. The government’s War on Poverty “never truly mobilized the country, nor was it ever fought to victory,” David Shipler concluded in his 2004 book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. “Forty years later,” he wrote, “after all our economic achievements, the gap between rich and poor has only widened.… Yet after all that has been written, discussed, and left unresolved, it is harder to surprise and shock and outrage.”


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

By 1970, many people familiar with the industry believed the semiconductor market was fully saturated.45 In the summer of 1968, however, life was so good for most electronics companies that firms up and down the Pacific Coast, flush with success, feeling generous, and hungry for employees, trained “young people from disadvantaged minorities” and “hard-core unemployed” as part of President Johnson’s War-on-Poverty programs. In Europe, student protests turned violent. In Chicago, police clubbed Vietnam War protesters at the Democratic National Convention, while in Washington, the United States Army, citing the “large number of civil disturbances” around the country, began construction on an “emergency action headquarters” anchored by a series of computers running on integrated circuit technology and designed to coordinate military action at as many as 25 domestic “hot spots” simultaneously.

Failures of companies: “Electronics Industry Failures Fall to Lowest Level Ever,” Electronic News, 10 June 1968. Age of Electro-Aquarius: “The Splintering of the Solid-State Electronics Industry.” Notes to Pages 168–172 341 45. The last year: “Where the Action is in Electronics,” Business Week, Oct. 1969, 86. Market fully saturated: Jackson, Inside Intel, 47. 46. Participation in War on Poverty: Neil Kelly, “Coast Firms Eager in Poverty Fight,” Electronic News, 22 July 1968. Army’s computerized facility: Heather M. David, “Army Opens Riot Control Center,” Electronic News, 14 July 1969. 47. Knew Intel would lose money: “Intel Corp $2,500,000 Convertible Debentures,” IA. More aggressive: Gordon Moore, interview by author. 48.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In the end, the Johnson administration secured passage of the Appalachian Regional Development Act, providing infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. The president subsequently stated that seeing the poverty there firsthand had convinced him of the necessity of the Medicare Act. And so fighting rural poverty remained a central plank in Johnson’s overall “War on Poverty.” But even these bold policies proved inadequate to manage the massive devastation that the blighted regional economy had already experienced.81 Lyndon Johnson was aware of every detail as he went about fashioning his public image. The hat he wore was not a ten-gallon cowboy, but a modified five-gallon version with a narrower brim.

On poor white images, also see “Johnson’s Great Society—Lines Are Drawn,” New York Times, March 14, 1965; and John Ed Pearce, “The Superfluous People of Hazard, Kentucky,” Reporter 28, no. 1 (January 3, 1963): 33–35; Homer Bigart, “Kentucky Miners: A Grim Winter,” New York Times, October 20, 1963; Robyn Muncy, “Coal-Fired Reforms: Social Citizenship, Dissident Miners, and the Great Society,” Journal of American History (June 2009): 72–98, esp. 74, 90–95; and Ronald Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 20, 23–25, 30–32, 36–39; David Torstensson, “Beyond the City: Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in Rural America,” Journal of Policy History 25, no. 4 (2013): 587–613, esp. 591–92, 596, 606. 82. On Johnson’s hat, see “Random Notes from All Over: Johnson Says Aye to LBJ Hats,” New York Times, February 17, 1964. On the poor, see Marjorie Hunter, “President’s Tour Dramatized Issue” and “Johnson Pledges to Aid the Needy,” New York Times, April 26, 1964, and September 21, 1964; Franklin D.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

THE ABLEST MEN TRAGEDY HAD BROUGHT Lyndon Johnson to the presidency in November 1963. And he would not feel himself fully in charge until he had faced the voters the following year. But his ambitions for his country were as great as those of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt. In his first State of the Union address he declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and during his years in the White House he would lead the struggle to win passage of more than two hundred important pieces of legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal aid to education, Head Start, Medicare, and a whole series of bills aimed at ending poverty in America—all components of what he called the “Great Society.”

He never forgot the care with which Shade calmed him down or the skill with which he tended to the wounds in his arm and hand. A STEP FORWARD LIKE LE DUAN, Lyndon Johnson found himself in trouble during the summer of 1967. He had always maintained that the United States was “rich enough and strong enough” simultaneously to fight both the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty. That no longer seemed to be true. The steadily climbing cost of the war had sparked worrisome inflation. To offset it, Johnson proposed a 10 percent income tax surtax. Before conservatives in Congress would approve it, they forced him to accept cuts in the antipoverty programs that meant the most to him.

Vong Tang Vo Nguyen Giap, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1, 10.2 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1 Vung Ro Bay Vung Tau, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Wallace, George, 2.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 Wallace, Mike, 8.1, 8.2 Wall Street Wall Street Journal Walt, Lewis W., 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 6.1 Walter, Sonny War of 1812, itr.1, 4.1, 10.1 War on Poverty War Powers Act (1973), 9.1, 10.1 Warren, Earl War Resisters League War Within: The: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Wells) Washington, D.C., 1.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 9.1 antiwar protests in, 3.1, 3.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.1 October 21, 1967, antiwar rally in, 5.1, 5.2 post-King assassination riots in, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Washington Mall Washington Monument Washington Post, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1, 9.1, 9.1 Washington Star Watergate scandal, 9.1, 9.1, 10.1 Watts, William Wayne, John Weathermen (Weather Underground), 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.1 Weigl, Bruce Weiss, Cora Welch, Raquel Wells, Tom Wesak Day West, Philip West Berlin West Germany, 2.1, 6.1 Westmoreland, William, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 additional troops requested by, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 6.1 appointed MACV commander congressional speech of, 4.1, 4.2 Khe Sanh as focus of, 6.1 optimistic statements by, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 pacification program and, 3.1, 4.1 in recall from Vietnam Tet Offensive and, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 three-phase strategy of, 3.1, 4.1 U.S. troops requested by, 3.1, 3.2 West Point, U.S.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Now, the population Hving below the poverty Hne is disproportionately urban, and hving in families headed by single women (Levy 1998, chap. 2)—though poverty now, hke the rest of America, has recently been moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. The U.S. didn't get an official poverty line until 1965, as part of the target practice for the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, but the concept has a long history.'^ The broad project of studying the household budgets of the poor and working class goes back at least to the 1870s, a project motivated in large part by fear of unrest from below. In the U.S., immigrants w^ere bringing radical ideas w^ith them, which fermented dangerously in urban slums; unions were being organized and strikes being conducted—with the nationwide riots following the railway strike of 1877 having a particularly great impact.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books. Waldfogel, Jane. 2006. What Children Need. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waldfogel, Jane. 2009. “The Role of Family Policies in Antipoverty Policy.” Focus 26(2): 50–55. Waldfogel, Jane. 2010. Britain’s War on Poverty. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Waldfogel, Jane and Elizabeth Washbrook. 2011. “Income-Related Gaps in School Readiness in the United States and the United Kingdom.” Pp. 175–207 in Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility. Edited by Timothy M.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

If the Great Inflation had a single author, his name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. A New Dealer to the bone and a master of getting things done in Congress, he believed there was no excuse for persistent poverty amidst plenty in a country as rich as the United States. So, he launched the Great Society and the War on Poverty, vastly increasing the size and spending of the federal government in the process. At the same time, he expanded the war in Vietnam, which he inherited from Kennedy. This explosion in federal spending was unlike those of the Roosevelt years in one key aspect. They were not nearly as fully financed by taxation.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

Skip Notes *1 The more extreme gastric bypass surgery reroutes the tubing, bypassing the shrunken stomach altogether. *2 Critical question, after being utterly polite: “What would you do if you were me?” CONCLUSION WHEN OUR GRANDEST dreams went up in smoke, they left behind shame machines. Consider a few of the various “wars” our political leaders have declared over the past decades: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on obesity. Each was launched with great fanfare and the hope that with resolute leadership, intelligence, and sufficient funds, these evils could be vanquished. If we could send a man to the moon, the thinking went, of course we could fix these scourges. Once the complexity and cost of these problems became apparent, though, we had a change of heart.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Edwin Meese, Reagan’s key legal staffer and his future attorney general, had known Uhler at Boalt Hall, and in 1968 invited him to join Reagan’s gubernatorial staff. Uhler’s first major assignment was to challenge California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit organization established by Lyndon Johnson as part of the War on Poverty to provide legal aid to the poor, mostly agricultural workers, regarding housing, wages, and health care. The program was a thorn in the side of Reagan’s backers, and especially the politically powerful farm community. Uhler wrote a report charging the program’s legal staff with serious improprieties.

His political future, indisputably bright to that point, was now uncertain, as was the conservative political movement itself. Nixon, who became president in 1969, signed legislation to start the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, froze prices and wages, provided generous funds to the War on Poverty, aggressively expanded Social Security, and spent federal funds prodigiously to stimulate economic growth. Even though he tried to limit civil rights in the South, Nixon was still not the conservative Uhler had hoped for as the next Republican president. But Reagan, like the army of the committed of which Uhler was a tireless member, kept sowing the truly conservative fields.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The Great Society will be remembered for its effective dismantling of American apartheid, especially in the southern states. Between 1964 and 1966, four pieces of legislation saw to this major transformation of American society. Moreover, the Great Society had a strong Keynesian element that came to the fore as Johnson’s unconditional war on poverty. In its first three years, 1964–66, $1 billion were spent annually on various programmes to boost educational opportunities and to introduce health cover for the elderly and various vulnerable groups. The social impact of the Great Society’s public expenditure was mostly felt in the form of poverty reduction.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

The county reluctant to cite me with anything more than vandalism of state property and me trying to convince them that even if crime had gone down in the neighborhood since the Wheaton Academy went up, what I did was still a violation of the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Code, and, unless there’s been an armistice in the War on Poverty, at least four articles of the Geneva Convention. The paramedics arrived. Once I’d been stabilized with gauze and a few kind words, the EMTs went through the standard assessment protocol. “Next of kin?” As I lay, not exactly dying but close enough, I thought about Marpessa. Who, if the position of the sun high in the gorgeous blue sky was any indication, was at the far end of this very same street taking her lunch break.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

That was an era of consolidation, when small entities seemed to be drawn ineluctably together to form big entities—big trusts, big bureaucracies, big cities. But we no longer feel we are living in an age of consolidation; on the contrary, deconsolidation seems to be the order of the day. So upscale Americans, like most Americans, show little desire to launch a new set of massive political enterprises, whether it is another liberal War on Poverty or a grand conservative War on Cultural Decay. They tend to distrust formal hierarchies that are imposed from above and Olympian lawgivers who would presume to govern from glorious heights. They are generally disenchanted with national politics. They tend not to see it as a glorious or capital R Romantic field of endeavor, the way so many people did earlier in the century.


pages: 244 words: 85,379

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Bonfire of the Vanities, Day of the Dead, fear of failure, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, old-boy network, pink-collar, telemarketer, traveling salesman, War on Poverty

Durham and Lisbon Falls and the University of Maine at Orono were part of a small world where folks neighbored and still minded each other’s business on the four- and six-party lines which then served the Sticksville townships. In the big world, boys who didn’t go to college were being sent overseas to fight in Mr. Johnson’s undeclared war, and many of them were coming home in boxes. My mother liked Lyndon’s War on Poverty (“That’s the war I’m in,” she sometimes said), but not what he was up to in Southeast Asia. Once I told her that enlisting and going over there might be good for me—surely there would be a book in it, I said. “Don’t be an idiot, Stephen,” she said. “With your eyes, you’d be the first one to get shot.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

As you might expect, the first group proofread much more accurately and solved five times as many puzzles. But the twist is they never once pushed the button. Simply knowing they could, that they were in charge, was enough to help channel their problem-solving mojo. Empowering the little people can also help in the war on poverty. Many traditional aid projects fail because they are conceived, developed and implemented by experts based in air-conditioned offices hundreds or even thousands of miles away, leaving the poor as little more than bystanders, or pawns on a chessboard. When drought ravaged the Horn of Africa in the 1980s, killing livestock and threatening famine, Norway’s development agency came to the rescue with what looked to outsiders like a clever fix.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

This bright idea started at the weekly Tilba Growers Market in Central Tilba, located in the southeast of New South Wales province, and has now spread to other regions. TIME DOLLARS—TIME- BACKED CURRENCY The time dollars system was created by attorney Edgar Cahn. As a Fulbright scholar, cofounder of the National Legal Ser vices, a speechwriter and counsel to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and a close associate of Sargent Shriver on the War on Poverty and the Peace Corps, Cahn has dedicated much of his life to those less fortunate than himself. He had the idea for the time dollar program while recuperating from an illness. “There were two separate forces coming together at the time. It was less a matter of coping with my convalescence, but more of my reaction to feeling useless and helpless.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

But the added ambitions of the LBJ administration taxed the resources of the American democratic socialist ideal to the breaking point. President Lyndon Baines Johnson doubled down on FDR’s commitments, now suggesting that America could become a “Great Society” only by launching a multiplicity of major government spending initiatives, fighting a “war on poverty.” Government encroached into nearly every arena of American life, offering subsidies and threatening prosecutions and fines. Government promised housing; it offered instead government-run projects, which quickly degraded into dystopian hellholes. Government promised welfare; it offered instead the prospect of intergenerational poverty through sponsorship of single motherhood.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

A senior airpower advocate and Reader’s Digest editor called the US space program too peaceable and “the wrong race with Russia.”137 Goldwater lost, overwhelmingly. Once elected, Johnson—an arm-twisting, New Deal kind of Democrat and as anti-Communist as his predecessors—presided over the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Food Stamp Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, all part of his “War on Poverty.” On his watch, Medicare and Medicaid were introduced, the federal minimum wage was increased, thirty-five national parks were established, and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were created. Also on his watch, the country would witness the escalation of the Vietnam War, the ostracizing of Cuba by nearly every nation in Latin America, eruptions in America’s cities and on America’s campuses, and, shortly before the end of his term in office, the successful launch and return of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and its three-astronaut crew, who became the first humans ever to orbit the Moon—the first humans ever to leave Earth for another destination.

arms control treaties, 273, 289, 500n cooperation promoted at United Nations, 280 laws and programs during presidency, 287, 288–89 militarization of space, 273–74, 287, 291 nuclear weapons and, 287 Outer Space Treaty, 273, 292–93, 501n peaceful uses of space, 291–92 Senate hearings after Sputnik, 270, 279–80, 287–88, 490n, 495n space budget, 289–90, 500–501n space control as “ultimate position,” 157, 279–80 space program during presidency, 286–87, 289–91 vice presidency, 286 Vietnam War and, 289, 290, 500n War on Poverty, 288 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), 335, 336 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW), 335, 336 Joint Vision 2020 (Joint Chiefs of Staff), 302, 505n Jones, Alexander, 44, 422n Judt, Tony, 386 Jung, Carl, 426n Jupiter’s moons discovered, 52, 103, 109–10 K-2 and K-3 chronometers, 97 Kalhu, Iraq (Nimrud), 33, 34 Kalic, Sean, 290 kalpa, 40 kamal, 75, 339 kavengas, 68 Kazakhstan, 362, 522–23n KBR, 11 Kendall, Frank, 481n KENNAN (KH-11) satellites, 204, 205, 343, 471n Kennedy, Anthony, 53 Kennedy, John F.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Most of those elected in this Democratic resurgence at the state and congressional level—politicians like Gary Hart, John Culver, Dale Bumpers, Jerry Brown, Ella Grasso, Richard Lamm, Tom Downey, Christopher Dodd, Toby Moffett, Paul Simon, Paul Tsongas, Les AuCoin, James Blanchard, and Tim Wirth—came out of the "new politics" of the sixties and early seventies. They were graduates of the Peace Corps, the War on Poverty, the antiwar movement, and the McGovern campaign. Their opposition to the war in Vietnam, their commitment to feminism and civil rights, their impatience with the "special interests" that allegedly controlled the party (including labor), their enthusiasm for advanced technology, and their emphasis on professional competence as opposed to ideology distinguished them from older liberals like Edward Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

., 495, 505, 525; on "pseudo-intellectuals," 38 Walling, William English: on syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, 332 -36; on syndicalism in France, 330 Wall Street Journal, 516, 522 Walpole, Horace, 195 Walsh, David, 419 Walsh, Mike: on wage labor, 203 Walzer, Michael: on social criticism, 423 -24 Warner, Lloyd: on working-class culture, 488 War on Poverty, 507 War over the Family, The (Bergers), 517 Warren, Donald, 506 Warren Report, 471, 472, 473, 474 n. Watergate, 30 Watson, Thomas E., 223, 543 Way to Wealth, The (Franklin), 256 n. "Wealth" (Emerson), 271, 272, 273, 274 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 54, 56 Webb, Beatrice: on syndicalism, 317 -18 Webber, Charles: on frontiersmen, 95, 97 Weber, Max, 153, 528 ; on disenchantment of the world, 144 ; on scientific and political vocations, 148 -49; on sociological concepts, 162 Webster, Samuel: on infant damnation, 247 -590- welfare state, 179, 207, 328, 340, 343 -44, 428-29, 517 Wendell, Barrett, 353 West: industrial conditions in, 336 -37; symbolism of, in popular culture, 92 -100, 299, 301 Western Federation of Miners, 336 Weyl, Walter: on distributive democracy, 342-44 Weyrich, Paul: on populism of new right, 505-6 Wharton, Edith, 281 n.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Even so, in the old industrial- The End of Welfare 127 ised countries we seem to have an inefficient welfare state. What it provides by way of a safety net comes at a high price, with high government spending and high taxes but at the same time declining social cohesion and no sign of an end to the war on poverty. The excess baggage that we are paying for now consists for the most part of additional entitlements not included in the original vision. Of course, high unemployment in Europe is costing governments large amounts in benefit. However, the greater long-term financial burden is concentrated in pensions, health and social security benefits of various types.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

[back] *** 3 "The Relation of Taxes to Economic Growth." Address by Ernest L. Swigert, before the National Association of Manufacturers, December 6, 1956. [back] *** 4 Alice Bourneuf, Norway: The Planned Revival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). [back] *** 5 The so-called war on poverty of the Johnson administration was instructive: income redistribution was to be limited to the very poor. The more important improvement in the incomes of the poor was to come from the increased productivity of that group. The ability of all shades of political opinion to endorse aspects of this program suggests the mildness of the effort.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“Poverty Status of People by Family Relationship, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2012” by the U.S. Census Bureau, accessed on December 13, 2013. It’s worth noting that poverty rates since the Great Society have fluctuated—as Eduardo Porter pointed out (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/business/economy/in-the-war-on-poverty-a-dogged-adversary.html?ref=economicscene). But even during that period, the figure has fluctuated, falling by nearly a quarter during the Clinton years, then rising by more than 15 percent during George W. Bush’s presidency, http://www.dlc.org/documents/TheLostDecade.pdf. 9Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 123-24. 10Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

The lessons of Sesame Street, were strongly influenced by the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, and from the beginning Sesame Street’s producers, the Children’s Television Workshop, made a huge effort at outreach to young children and their families in low-income areas. The show was, in fact, considered to be an extension of the 1960s “War on Poverty,” funded in part by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as if it were a social program. But in a certain sense, the early debates that swirled around Sesame Street are echoed today in the debates over the Baby Edutainment Complex. Sesame Street’s critics argued that young children benefit from imaginary play rather than watching television.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

The societal gains massively outweighed the cost. Even the government came out ahead, with the participants paying more in additional taxes than the housing vouchers cost to provide. In the United States, large-scale social experiments date back to the 1960s. As President Lyndon Johnson announced a ‘war on poverty’, policymakers considered whether providing a guaranteed income equal to the poverty line might discourage people from working. From 1968 to 1982, experiments across nine sites randomly assigned families into treatment and control groups, and then surveyed their work patterns. The experiments showed that providing a guaranteed income reduced time spent working, but the impact was smaller than many critics expected – around two to three weeks per year.12 In coming years, the experiments helped shape reforms to the welfare system, including a massive expansion to wage subsidies in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton.13 Promising that ‘If you work, you shouldn’t be poor’, Clinton doubled the size of the Earned Income Tax Credit, pointing to the strong economic evidence that the program helped the poorest families.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Panel Study of Income Dynamics brochure at http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Guide/Brochures/PSID.pdf; and PSID video at http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/videos.aspx. The PSID was created as an outgrowth of some research undertaken by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the short-lived federal agency tasked with conducting President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But where the OEO research had focused on low-income families, the PSID expanded the sampling group to include households at all income levels. 7. Interview with Isabel Sawhill, Feb. 4, 2011. 8. Chul-In Lee and Gary Solon, “Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility” (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2006), 16. 9.


pages: 270 words: 88,213

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, coronavirus, feminist movement, fixed income, gentrification, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, medical residency, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, obamacare, San Francisco homelessness, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Soul of a New Machine, War on Poverty

On one of those occasions, he cited large population studies about the tight connection between health and educational status. If he had the power, he said, he’d pay public school teachers $200,000 a year and maybe thirty years later homelessness would become a rarity. Maybe what he called “the faucet” would be turned off. More often, he spoke of a more general solution—“What we need is a new war on poverty.” In Los Angeles and many other locales, the chasm was widening between those who could afford the necessities of life and those left in poverty. But the problem of homelessness had become too large, too visible, too offensive to be ignored. And it was clear that public support for remedies could be marshaled.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” The two kinds of visionaries thereby line up on opposite sides of many issues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies—namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms—and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests.

People also enjoy watching the stylized combat we call “sports,” which are contests of aiming, chasing, or fighting, complete with victors and the vanquished. If language is a guide, many other efforts are conceptualized as forms of aggression: intellectual argument (to shoot down, defeat, or destroy an idea or its proponent), social reform (to fight crime, to combat prejudice, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs), and medical treatment (to fight cancer, painkillers, to defeat AIDS, the War on Cancer). In fact, the entire question of what went wrong (socially or biologically) when a person engages in violence is badly posed. Almost everyone recognizes the need for violence in defense of self, family, and innocent victims.


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

She also named him an editor of The Objectivist and of its scaled-down successor publication, The Ayn Rand Letter, until late 1974, when the Letter was discontinued. “I am tired of saying ‘I told you so,’” she wrote. The essays she contributed to almost every issue were not the sweeping policy statements of the 1960s; they were sometimes illuminating, more often bitter assessments of current events. She published position papers against the war on poverty, “selfless” hippies, affirmative action, government funding of the arts, international relief aid, the Watergate Committee—as well as in opposition to the Vietnam War and a wave of 1970s anti-obscenity legislation. She crafted a brilliant and farsighted critique of B. F. Skinner’s 1971 behaviorist manifesto, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which she aptly quoted Victor Hugo: “And he [the student Marius in Les Misérables] blesses God for having given him these two riches which many of the rich are lacking: work, which gives him freedom, and thought, which gives him dignity.”

The ring had forty rubies, one for each year she had been married to Frank, and she told the family that he had given it to her for their wedding anniversary in April. On Rand’s return to New York, Barbara Weiss reflected that she had never seen the great woman in a better frame of mind. And yet there was unremitting anger. “Those who suggest we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded,” she wrote in The Objectivist. This, like her praise, was a scrap of old rhetoric, and was unseemly.


pages: 339 words: 95,988

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

THE SHRINKING OF VARIOUS BLACK-WHITe GAPS, PRE-CRACK: See Rebecca Blank, “An Overview of Social and Economic Trends by Race,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), pp. 21–40. / 103 Regarding black infant mortality, see Douglas V. Almond, Kenneth Y. Chay, and Michael Greenstone, “Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in Mississippi,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003. THE VARIOUS DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF CRACK are discussed in Roland G. Fryer Jr., Paul Heaton, Steven D. Levitt, and Kevin Murphy, “The Impact of Crack Cocaine,” University of Chicago working paper, 2005. 4.


pages: 287 words: 99,131

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Celebration, Florida, desegregation, double helix, estate planning, feminist movement, invention of writing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“I mean, there was a belief that it was really going to be possible to fix the things that were wrong.” “Absolutely!” Jim said. “That was before cynicism.” “We really believed things were going to be fixed.” “And then everybody got killed. There was a loss of courage and a loss of hope that things could change. The War on Poverty—that was a big sign of hope, hope, hope, and then the tremendous amount of internal graft and sloppy stuff—very few of those projects really did much good.” After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a series of events began that gradually changed the atmosphere. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

American Economic Review 81, 1068–1095. Rothschild, Michael, and Stiglitz, Joseph E. 1976. “Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90, 629–650. Rozelle, Scott, Zhang, Linxiu, and Huang, Jikun. 1999. “China’s War on Poverty.” Typescript, University of California, Davis. Ruhm, Christopher J. 1996. “Alcohol Policies and Highway Vehicle Fatalities.” Journal of Health Economics 15, 437–456. Russell, Marcia. 1996. Revolution: New Zealand from Fortress to Free Market. Auckland, Hodder Moa Beckett. Sachs, Jeffrey. 1992.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Despite the persistence of Bretton Woods into the 1970s, the seeds of Currency War II were sown in the mid- to late 1960s. One can date the beginning of CWII from 1967, while its antecedents lie in the 1964 landslide election of Lyndon B. Johnson and his “guns and butter” platform. The guns referred to the war in Vietnam and the butter referred to the Great Society social programs, including the war on poverty. Although the United States had maintained a military presence in Vietnam since 1950, the first large-scale combat troop deployments took place in 1965, escalating the costs of the war effort. The Democratic landslide in the 1964 election resulted in a new Congress that convened in January 1965, and Johnson’s State of the Union address that month marked the unofficial launch of the full-scale Great Society agenda.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Guilty of being skint The story seemed so absurd that, when I awoke this morning ready to write about it, I wondered if I had simply dreamt it. During my fact checking, it not only proved true, but worse. When the story started, I assumed that it was part of a drive to prevent homelessness: Outlaw Homelessness, like a War on Poverty. However, this is not the case. Hungarian capital Budapest has circa 10,000 homeless people attempting to survive in it. The Conservative government has declared this too much for Budapest to bear, and therefore banned it. The law has been passed. Its implications? If you are found homeless in Hungary, you get a warning.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

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

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

The president never followed up on the premise of a new start for the nation, never engaged in epic combat against the dead hand of history. His mode of governing was wordy, tactical, splintered among many objectives. He wanted every deserving cause to get a donation. The stimulus never came close to matching the razzle-dazzle of Brasilia or the war on poverty, and it attracted a fierce, determined opposition from the start. The president pitched his rhetoric on an ambitious high modernist plane, but he directed the actions of his administration with late modernist timidity, constrained, to be sure, by pressure from a restless public. The profound disconnect between talk and action gives the game away.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

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

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

In 1962, a young writer named Michael Harrington wrote an enormously influential book called The Other America, pulling back the curtain on poverty in the United States. Harrington laid bare misery, writing not as a scold but as someone who believed in the capacity for change. Though we disagree with some of Harrington’s political views, his book opened eyes and galvanized a national debate about injustice and poverty; it helped midwife the War on Poverty a few years later. Likewise, we hope in this book to remind fellow citizens that there is another America where people are struggling and dying unnecessarily, often invisibly. “That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,” Harrington noted, and as long as that remains true their problems simply won’t be addressed.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In 2022 the misery index was back to double digits in spite of a low unemployment rate as inflation got above 8 percent. We are due for lasting turmoil. Remembering the past can help us predict what will happen in the future. The seventies began on the heels of robust economic growth after World War II, tempered by two ultra-expensive initiatives: the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty along with the expansion of the welfare state. Investors who expected the seventies to resemble the two previous decades soon experienced disappointment. Economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan label the period from the end of the Korean War until 1973 “a golden age for macroeconomics.” Monetary and fiscal strategies produced expected results.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Nathaniel Comfort, “How Science Has Shifted Our Sense of Identity,” Nature 574, no. 7777 (October 2019): 167–70, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03014-4. 8. “Excuse Me, Mr Coates, Ctd,” The Dish, December 13, 2014, http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/23/excuse-me-mr-coates-ctd/. 9. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019). 10. Douglas Almond, Kenneth Y. Chay, and Michael Greenstone, “Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in the Rural South and Mississippi,” MIT Department of Economics Working Paper no. 07-04, SSRN (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, February 7, 2007), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=961021. 11. “Flint, Michigan, Decision to Break Away from Detroit for Water Riles Residents,” CBS News,” March 4, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flint-michigan-break-away-detroit-water-riles-residents/. 12.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

An analysis by the economist Gary Burtless has shown that between 1979 and 2010 the disposable incomes of the lowest four income quintiles grew by 49, 37, 36, and 45 percent, respectively.51 And that was before the long-delayed recovery from the Great Recession: between 2014 and 2016, median wages leapt to an all-time high.52 Even more significant is what has happened at the bottom of the scale. Both the left and the right have long expressed cynicism about antipoverty programs, as in Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.” In reality, poverty is losing. The sociologist Christopher Jencks has calculated that when the benefits from the hidden welfare state are added up, and the cost of living is estimated in a way that takes into account the improving quality and falling price of consumer goods, the poverty rate has fallen in the past fifty years by more than three-quarters, and in 2013 stood at 4.8 percent.53 Three other analyses have come to the same conclusion; data from one of them, by the economists Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan, are shown in the upper line in figure 9-6.

Why the United States doesn’t have a European welfare state: Alesina, Glaeser, & Sacerdote 2001; Peterson 2015. 51. Rise in disposable income in lower quintiles: Burtless 2014. 52. Income rise from 2014 to 2015: Proctor, Semega, & Kollar 2016. Continuation in 2016: E. Levitz, “The Working Poor Got Richer in 2016,” New York, March 9, 2017. 53. C. Jencks, “The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?” New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015. Similar analyses: Furman 2014; Meyer & Sullivan 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017; Sacerdote 2017. 54. 2015 and 2016 drops in the poverty rate: Proctor, Semega, & Kollar 2016; Semega, Fontenot, & Kollar 2017. 55. Henry et al. 2015. 56.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos tend to be less trusting of government, corporations, and the media, as well as less trusting of other people. At the same time, many whites see some minority Americans as not doing their part to uphold the social contract. The powerful white backlash following the Civil Rights movement and the war on poverty was partly rooted in plain racism; but it was also rooted in concerns about higher crime in communities of color and a perception of a lax work ethic, low levels of personal responsibility, and little commitment to self-improvement. Carol Swain's book The New White Nationalism in America provides a troubling look at how these sentiments are playing out today in different ways than in the past.12 While there is much evidence that the racial polarization of American society is ebbing, vast divisions persist.


pages: 364 words: 108,237

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, job-hopping, mass affluent, payday loans, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

This year, ECHO is giving away 1.4 million pounds of food—nearly twice as much as two years ago and six times as much as the year before that. For the first time, a few people who have been ECHO’s donors are standing with shame in its early-morning line to get bread and meat and canned goods. Marv knows that need has been showing up, too, at Community Action, Inc., part of a string of antipoverty nonprofits born in the federal War on Poverty of the mid-1960s. This need seems different than the kind that Community Action staffers have grown accustomed to seeing walk into their Milwaukee Street office over the decades. The staffers are now seeing new poor who, unlike the old poor, don’t want to hear about FoodShare, as food stamps are called in Wisconsin, or BadgerCare, as Medicaid is called, or any other kind of government help for people low on money.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The baby-boom generation’s dramatic move away from traditional forms of authority—the patriarchal family, militaristic government, authoritarian schooling, and corporate hierarchy—in search of authenticity, spirituality, personal creativity, and a connection to the nonhuman world was made possible by the fact that those young people had not only met their basic material needs but had overcome the first level of postmaterialist desires for self-esteem, status, and recognition. By the time President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, America was well on its way to becoming what sociologists call a postscarcity society. In 1964 and 1965 the government established Medicare and Medicaid, created a food-stamp program, extended greater assistance to schools in poor communities, and expanded job training. In the late sixties, President Nixon proposed laws giving automatic cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and expanding welfare.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Almost two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson was famously making war on the Bank of the United States, indulging in legally problematic uses of executive power to withdraw federal deposits from The Enemy, headed by the evil one, Nicholas Biddle. To be sure, the “war on terrorism” isn’t as much of a stretch, say, as the “war on poverty” or the “war on drugs.” Classical wars traditionally involve sovereign states attacking one another’s territorial integrity, and it may seem a small matter to expand the paradigm to cover non-state actors engaging in similar assaults: is there really such a big difference between December 7th and September 11th?


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

A year later, Italy granted all older people state-funded pensions, even if they had paid little or nothing into the pension schemes. France and Great Britain boosted child allowances much faster than inflation.13 The universal welfare state did not stop with direct payments. In January 1964, just six weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, declared war on poverty. Congress responded by enacting food assistance for the poor and taxpayer-funded medical care for the poor and the elderly. The United States, Great Britain, and several other countries debated the virtues of a “negative income tax,” which would have ensured each household a basic level of income, funded by the government, without requirements or restrictions.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

The early 1960s were the heyday of “welfare capitalism,” an era of benign big business when many executives felt an obligation to a wide range of stakeholders, including workers and the communities in which they operated. Friedman would have none of it. He kept up his attack during the 1960s, as some businesses moved in an even more liberal direction, heeding calls by President Lyndon B. Johnson to join the war on poverty with voluntary actions to lift up the poor and minorities. It would not be until the early 1970s that a real opening emerged for Friedman’s arguments. This period saw rising foreign competition, a falling U.S. stock market, and new regulations around the environment and consumer product safety.


pages: 376 words: 118,542

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Allen Wallis put it in a somewhat different context, socialism, "intellectually bankrupt after more than a century of seeing one after another of its arguments for socializing the means of production demolished—now seeks to socialize the results of production." 2 In the welfare area the change of direction has led to an explosion in recent decades, especially after President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" in 1964. New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and direct relief were all expanded to cover new groups; payments were increased; and Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and numerous other programs were added. Public housing and urban renewal programs were enlarged. By now there are literally hundreds of government welfare and income transfer programs.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

McKinsey Global Institute. 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/future%20of%20organizations/what%20the%20future%20of%20work%20will%20mean%20for%20jobs%20skills%20and%20wages/mgi-jobs-lost-jobs-gained-report-december-6-2017.ashx. 69. Mason, E. A., “A.I. and Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty,” New York Times. 2018. 70. Nedelkoska, L., and G. Quintini, “Automation, Skills Use and Training,” in OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 202. 2018: OECD, Paris. 71. Gibney, E., “AI Talent Grab Sparks Excitement and Concern.” Nature News & Comment, 2016. 532(7600); Metz, C., “N.F.L.


pages: 312 words: 114,586

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty by Harry Browne

do what you love, full employment, independent contractor, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, military-industrial complex, Ralph Waldo Emerson, source of truth, War on Poverty

Back in 1964, the government started promising an "early end" to the Vietnam War, but the promises and realities were far, far apart. At home, look at the many housing projects that were going to do away with slums. Where can a government point to a slum-free big city as proof of its effectiveness? Remember the War on Poverty? The Alliance for Progress? The Full Employment Act of 1946? Grand dreams, lots of money spent, no success. Governments have a consistent record of failure in their endeavors. Even if you're willing to force others to pay for what you want, no government is going to solve the ecology problems, make women professional equals, prevent monopolies, or fulfill any other objective you may have in mind.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

But the real point of the story about what Washington allowed to happen to the minimum wage is what it betrays about the official attitude to poverty since the 1970s. Withholding from the smallest pay packets all the benefit of the last 60 years of economic growth indicates a malign passivity towards the lowliest living standards – an attitude that has prevailed ever since Ronald Reagan shrugged off the activism of the 1960s with the claim ‘we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won’.9 Such defeatism has gone on to infect the range of public policy. Ever since the 1970s, the real value of the American safety net, such as it was – always strictly limited to families with children – was allowed to sag steadily as prices rose, losing as much as 40% of its purchasing power by the mid-1990s.10 The most devastating damage, however, was done with the welfare ‘reform’ legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Bill Hoffman, the parent with whom Reid lived for most of his childhood, wound up working for a prominent corporate law firm, but he stayed fixed in Reid’s mind as the Berkeley-dwelling firebrand who had represented Black Panthers and spent time as a legal foot soldier in the waning days of the federal government’s War on Poverty. Reid liked to think of himself, too, as a crusader on behalf of the outsider and the underdog, but he found quite a different channel for those impulses than his father had. At the age of eight or nine, he became a devoted player of fantasy board games, especially Dungeons & Dragons. One of his classmates at Martin Luther King Jr.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

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

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

COVID-19 hot spot Rikers Island jail: Nick Pinto, “If Coronavirus Deaths Start Piling Up in Rikers Island Jails, We’ll Know Who to Blame,” Intercept, March 23, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/23/coronavirus-rikers-jail-de-blasio-cuomo/. including Harry Truman: Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Truman, Lyndon Johnson: Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). “action to end the AIDS crisis”: ACT UP, last modified 2019, https://actupny.org/. according to the New York Times: Philip Hilts, “Clinton’s Director of Policy on AIDS Resigns Under Fire,” New York Times, July 9, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/09/us/clinton-s-director-of-policy-on-aids-resigns-under-fire.html.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Only on a rare occasion did Ryuk stray from its usual brevity to explain why it was hammering Western businesses. “À la guerre comme à la guerre,” it wrote to a victim, quoting a seventeenth-century French idiomatic expression: in times of hardship, make the best of what you have. The phrase is also the title of a 1920 essay by Vladimir Lenin, urging a war on poverty, hunger, and disease. * * * Michael first encountered Ryuk when someone uploaded to ID Ransomware a file encrypted by an unfamiliar strain that had just struck three large corporations, including two in the United States. The gang was demanding six-figure payments. He and the Ransomware Hunting Team immediately recognized that they were up against a dangerous adversary.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare’s objective—to ensure that all Americans have access to health care—has been stymied: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest. We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be newfangled. Far from it. Making markets act like markets would be a good place to start. We must end the rent-seeking society we have gravitated toward, in which the wealthy obtain profits by manipulating the system.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

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

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

Versions of this concept have bounced around public policy circles for many decades. President Richard Nixon asked Congress to legislate what he called a Family Assistance Plan, an annual cash income guarantee: the House and Senate, then both Democratic, said no. A reader of Friedman, Nixon thought eliminating the complex War on Poverty regulatory bureaucracy and simply giving cash to the disadvantaged would end dependency while encouraging new businesses in run-down urban areas. At the time, big cities were viewed as about to become ungovernable, if not uninhabitable, owing to crime, drugs, unemployment, pollution, and the continuing influx of rural residents who were leaving the countryside as automation in agriculture eliminated farmhand jobs.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

According to 1990 census figures, roughly 396,000 Chicagoans lived in tracts with a poverty rate of 40 percent or above, making the city the third-largest site of concentrated deprivation in the United States. It was impossible for the city government to adequately address such inequality with the resources made available to it by the federal and state governments, and it would be unreasonable to expect Daley’s administration to wage a full-fledged war on poverty on its own. But, according to studies by the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, a local organization that monitors the use of the city budget and works on other issues of redistribution, during the 1990s the city government proved unwilling to make the fiscal contributions to the urban poor that it could have afforded.


Policing the Open Road by Sarah A. Seo

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, jitney, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, strikebreaker, the built environment, traffic fines, War on Poverty

On Judge Simeone, see “Remembering Joe Simeone,” Saint Louis University School of Law, May 5, 2015, https://perma.cc/2C3K-NAGW. 13. Franklin E. Zimring, “Continuity and Change in the American Gun Debate,” in Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 29–30; see also Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). On gun control laws in the 1930s, see Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: W.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

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

Undoubtedly, the Conservative government had no choice but to enact the most dramatic expansion of the state in peacetime, which included paying the wages of half the country’s workforce. Yet this move was designed to preserve the existing failed model of capitalism, not to lay the foundations of a better alternative. A Corbyn premiership would have transformed the lives of the struggling and the insecure: from a war on poverty, to the provision of affordable housing, to the scrapping of tuition fees, to the Green Industrial Revolution which would have combatted the climate emergency, created skilled jobs and raised people’s standard of living. More to the point, it would have done all this without being compelled by an unprecedented national trauma, but out of conviction.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The Democratic party was more responsive to these Americans, on whose votes it depended. But its responsiveness was limited by its own captivity to corporate interests, and its domestic reforms were severely limited by the system’s dependency on militarism and war. Thus, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the sixties became a victim of the war in Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter could not go far so long as he insisted on a huge outlay of money for the military, much of this to stockpile more nuclear weapons. As these limits became clear in the Carter years, a small but determined movement against nuclear arms began to grow.

Steel, 257, 331, 350, 363, 381 Van Buren, Martin, 130, 146, 148, 217, 224 Vandenberg, Arthur, 415 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 262 Vanderbilt family, 242 Van Every, Dale, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 142, 143, 146 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 376 Vesco, Robert, 544, 547 Vesey, Denmark, 171, 173–74 Vietnam/Vietnam war, 9, 366–67, 411, 469, 472–501, 542, 549–54, 556, 558, 563, 618, 618–19, 631, 652 opposition to, 461, 484–94, 500–01, 516, 518, 523, 541, 542, 554, 567 Pentagon Papers, 412, 470, 472, 473, 474, 476, 481, 488, 499, 500 War Powers Act, 588 Vincent, Henry, 286 Vinson, Fred, 434, 435 Virginia (Colonial era), 12, 13, 18, 25, 41–47 passim, 50, 55, 56, 68, 78, 82, 84, 86 Bacon’s Rebellion, 37, 39–42, 45, 54, 55, 59 House of Burgesses, birth of, 43 slavery, 25, 30, 32–38 passim, 47, 72 see also Jamestown Vogel, Virgil, 15 voting: blacks, 65, 88–89, 198, 199, 203, 207, 291, 449, 454–55, 456, 458, 459, 461, 465–66, 610 Constitution, 96 15th Amendment, 198, 449 Indians, 65, 96 low voter turnout, 563 1960s and 1970s, 562 property qualifications, 49, 65, 83, 96, 214–16, 291 women, 65, 96, 110, 114, 123, 342, 343, 344–45, 384, 503 see also civil rights/civil rights movement Wadsworth, James, 359 Wake Island, 312 Walker, Charles R., 394 Walker, David, 180, 184 Walker, Margaret, 446 Wall, John, 618 Wallace, Henry, 428, 449 Wampanoag Indians, 15–16, 40 War of 1812, 127 War on Poverty, 601 War Powers Act, 553, 588 War Resister’s League, 437 Washburn, Wilcomb, 40 Washington, Booker T., 208, 209, 348 Washington, George, 85, 91, 95, 97, 125, 126 Revolutionary War, 79–80, 81, 82, 145 Washington, Mrs. George (Martha), 110 Watergate, 488, 542–49 passim, 554, 558, 631 Watergate scandal, 563, 618 Watson, Tom, 291–92 Wayland, Francis, 156 Wayne, Anthony, 81, 87 wealth distribution, 571, 612, 629, 662–64, 668 Weatherby, William, 404 Weaver, James, 289 Webster, Daniel, 142, 145, 181, 216 Weems, John, 162, 166, 167 Weil, Simone, 420 Weinberger, Caspar, 584, 585, 605 Wiener, Jon, 595 Weinstein, James, 351, 353, 365 welfare, attack on, 578–79, 647–50 Welles, Sumner, 412 Welter, Barbara, 112 West Germany, 591 Westmoreland, William, 500, 550 Wheeler, Burton, 385 White, Walter, 419 Whitman, Walt, 154 Wicker, Tom, 521, 566 Wiebe, Robert, 350 Willard, Emma, 117–18 Williams, Roger, 16–17 Williams, William Applernan, 301–02 Wilson, Charles E., 425 Wilson, Darryl B., 530 Wilson, Edmund, 237–38 Wilson, James, 70, 80 Wilson, James Q., 587 Wilson, Woodrow, 347, 349, 350, 356, 362, 381 World War I, 361, 362, 364, 365 Winthrop, John, 13, 14, 48, 108–09 Winthrop, Robert, 158 Witt, Shirley Hill, 533 Wittner, Lawrence, 419, 425 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 111 women: abolitionists, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124 abortion, 509–10, 511 blacks, 32, 103, 105–06, 184–85, 193, 202, 347, 504 change in status, 503–14 Colonial Era, 43, 44, 49, 72, 73, 102, 104–11 passim Declaration of Independence and Constitution, 72, 73, 96, 102 education, 110, 115, 118, 123, 509 exploitation and oppression, 9, 103–24 passim feminist movements: 19th century, 117, 119–23 passim, 184–85, 202; early 20th century, 342–46, 349; 1960s and 1970s, 504–14; 1980s and 1990s, 616 Indians, 5, 7, 19, 20, 104 in antinuclear movement, 603 labor, 10, 32, 43, 44, 103, 104–05, 110, 111, 114–15, 123, 228–31, 234–35, 240–41, 253, 257, 267–68, 324–27 passim, 336, 338–39, 347, 406, 504, 506–11 passim; see also labor, factory and mill system property ownership denied, 114, 123 rape, 510, 511 socialists, 341–46 passim voting, 65, 96, 110, 114, 123, 342, 343, 344–45, 384, 503 World War II, 416 Wood, Leonard, 311, 312 Woodford, Stewart, 304 Woodward, C.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Weren’t those noble undertakings for the common good of the kind that could only be provided by a collective organization such as the state? ‘Those ideas have been tried and some would say they didn’t work out as planned,’ he said, with a smile. ‘In what way didn’t they work?’ ‘Well, we had a so-called war on poverty in the US. Poverty is still there.’ ‘But isn’t it also simply about giving people on the bottom of the socio-economic pile a basic standard of living? There doesn’t have to be an end goal beyond making sure they’re not completely miserable.’ ‘But we still have that, to some extent.’ He seemed functionally unable to accept what I was saying, as if the continuing existence of poverty and misery was an argument against trying to altruistically lessen their effects.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

This “new wave of democracy” has “shifted politicians’ priorities” from the days when they “traditionally represented the established order.” The proof is that they have now dedicated themselves to serving the poor with an imaginative new approach: “Central Americans to use Trickle-down Strategy in War on Poverty,” the headline reads. “Committed to free-market economics,” the Presidents have abandoned vapid rhetoric about land reform and social welfare programs, adopting at last a serious idea: “a trickle-down approach to aid the poor.” “The idea is to help the poor without threatening the basic power structure,” a regional economist observes.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

So they scream their defiance against “The System,” not realizing that they are its most consistently docile pupils, that theirs is a rebellion against the status quo by its archetypes, against the intellectual “Establishment” by its robots who have swallowed every shopworn premise of the “liberals” of the 1930’s, including the catch-phrases of altruism, the dedication to “deprived people,” to such a safely conventional cause as “the war on poverty.” A rebellion that brandishes banners inscribed with bromides is not a very convincing nor very inspiring sight. As in any movement, there is obviously a mixture of motives involved: there are the little shysters of the intellect, who have found a gold mine in modern philosophy, who delight in arguing for argument’s sake and stumping opponents by means of ready-to-wear paradoxes—there are the little role-players, who fancy themselves as heroes and enjoy defiance for the sake of defiance—there are the nihilists, who, moved by a profound hatred, seek nothing but destruction for the sake of destruction—there are the hopeless dependents, who seek to “belong” to any crowd that would have them—and there are the plain hooligans, who are always there, on the fringes of any mob action that smells of trouble.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Fortunately, there was a governmental response to these grave inequities: Progressive Era legislation and the New Deal curbed the exploitation of market power and tried to address the failures of the market that had been exposed—including the unacceptable levels of inequality and insecurity to which it had given rise.28 Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US passed its public old age and disability program (Social Security, officially called OASDI, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance). Later in the century, President Lyndon B. Johnson provided health care for the aged and waged a war on poverty. In the UK and most of Europe, the State ensured that all had access to health care, and the US became the only major advanced country not to recognize access to medical care as a basic human right. By the middle of the last century, the advanced countries created what were then called “middle-class societies,” in which the fruits of that progress were shared, at least to a reasonable degree, by a majority of citizens—and were it not for exclusionary labor market policies based on race and gender, even more would have shared in this progress.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Of Johnson, on the other hand, Hunt in 1964 said that he ‘wouldn’t mind seeing him in there for three terms’.77 If in the meantime the Vietnam war had not been decided upon by the remaining liberals in Washington, this wish might well have been fulfilled. ‘Liberalism’ at home, embodied in such programmes as the ‘War on Poverty’ which particularly infuriated conservatives, was in fact necessary to allow the offensive turn of foreign policy. The outward thrust of the Kennedy policy was based firmly in domestic reforms and expansionary measures, even if it was often left to his successor to win final congressional approval.


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

When he was in the middle of a tough primary fight in 1992 and came out with a speech promising to “end welfare as we know it,” he could immediately smell the political possibilities, and it wasn’t long before this was a major plank in his convention speech (and soon in his first State of the Union address). Clinton understood that putting the Democrats back in the business of banging on black dependency would allow his party to reseize the political middle that Democrats had lost when Lyndon Johnson threw the weight of the White House behind the civil rights effort and the War on Poverty. If you dig deeply enough in America, the big political swings always have something to do with race. And Clinton’s vacillating but cleverly packaged campaign to “end welfare as we know it” was a brilliant ploy by the man Toni Morrison called the “first black president” to take back the southern white voters the Democrats had seemingly lost forever when they sent the FBI into Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.


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

Montalvo, and Marta Reynal-Querol, “The Curse of Aid,” World Bank mimeograph, April 2005. 42.Nancy Birdsall, Adeel Malik, and Milan Vaishnav, “Poverty and the Social Sectors: The World Bank in Pakistan 1990–2003,” prepared for the World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department, September 2004. 43.World Bank Ethiopia report, 2001. 44.OECD, Poor Performers: Basic Approaches for Supporting Development in Difficult Partnerships, Paris: OECD, 2001. 45.World Bank PRSP Sourcebook 2001. 46.Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, Joint Staff Assessment, Ethiopia, 2001. 47.http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27716.htm. 48.http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,, menuPK:258652~pagePK:146732~piPK:146828~theSitePK:258644,00.html. 49.http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/news/pressrelease.nsf/673fa6c5a2d50a67852565 e200692a79/6b834179b3fd616b85256b990077a8a7?OpenDocument. 50.Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty, New York: Free Press, 1969. 51.Ronald Herring, “Making Ethnic Conflict: The Civil War in Sri Lanka,” in Milton Esman and Ronald Herring, eds., Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking Development Assistance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 52.Sara Grusky, ed., “The IMF and World Bank Backed Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.”


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

And after a couple months, they could be U.N. translators, if their current jobs don’t work out. Or books on tape. Extreme Commuters are the transportation equivalent of speed readers. They could get through War and Peace in twelve days, or The Da Vinci Code in five. Lyndon Johnson said he was declaring war on poverty and beginning massive urban renewal because, he predicted, 95 percent of Americans were going to live in cities. But in fact, people have spread out across the country to suburbs and exurbs faster than anyone could have predicted. (This just proves how hard it is to make assumptions about what America will look like fifty years from now—while you’re focused on a few big trends, other microtrends seep in and upset your expectations.)


pages: 513 words: 141,963

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

You can only lose it yourself.” He had a deeper ambition, one he kept to himself and told to nobody. He hoped that one day, he might write one poem that did for another human being what their poetry had done for him. Bud volunteered for VISTA, one of the antipoverty programs set up by Lyndon Johnson as part of his War on Poverty, before it was replaced by Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. He arrived at his posting in East Harlem a year after rioters had tried to burn it down, and the block he was assigned to—at the very top of Central Park—consisted of five stories of narrow apartments with long, snaking fire escapes, and stoops facing the street that were always thrumming with people.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

He argued that a permanent peacetime was only viable in a society devoted to something more than pleasure, that there must be causes, hardships, demands, common struggles. He had been born into pleasure and had to struggle for meaning himself. He proposed something akin to the Peace Corps or the War on Poverty—if “there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature,” then even privileged youths would understand “man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

We’re a militaristic society, born in battle, defining our historical periods through war. Bloody G. W. enthroned as our first president, the War of 1812, Baby’s idée fixe of Mr. Lincoln’s agony, WWI, WWII, Vietnam. Our silly little history ain’t much but war history. Our entire dialogue is a reference to war. The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. Link that with our present-day empire in decline, our high point hit around 1963, and armies of animated corpses begin to make a semiotic sense. I’m not a girl who holds much truck with allegory, intentional or otherwise, but one can’t miss the equation. War culture + societal death trip = a nation enthralled with images of the walking dead.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

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

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

A California food company needed help in getting payment for $200,000 in ingredients for the federal school lunch program, and paid a $10,000 retainer in return; Kellogg Company wanted to get its cereals into school cafeterias and paid $5,000 for assistance; the National Livestock and Meat Board paid $25,000 for a report on how congressional nutrition policy might affect the cattle industry; Mead Johnson paid $10,000 for insights into the new food program for women and infant children, which bought a lot of its baby formula. Soon, Pillsbury, Nabisco, and General Mills came knocking as well. Like that, Schlossberg and Cassidy were making enough money lobbying for businesses around War on Poverty programs to be able to afford a proper, albeit small, office at L’Enfant Plaza. The pair’s real breakthrough came in a different realm: higher education. The new president of Tufts University, nutritionist Jean Mayer, was eager to raise the profile of a college in the shadow of bigger Boston-area institutions.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

‘This Nation is mighty enough,’ he thundered, ‘its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.’12 None of the Congressmen present could have doubted the strength of the President’s conviction or the vigour of his idealism. In the course of his address, Johnson challenged Americans to ‘prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty’. He urged them to ‘rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities’. But his address acknowledged the continuing effects of the Vietnam War. Despite his enthusiasm for the Great Society, the war meant that he could not achieve ‘all that we should’, or indeed all that ‘we would like to do’.


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

In such an event "simple causes seem to be evident for all to see, ... simplistic Crisis and Leviathan 251 solutions lie near at hand and command consensus, and ... the upper and middle classes of the population can identify with efforts to solve someone else's problems." In Brown's view the urban crisis of the sixties exemplifies a good crisis: its causes were taken to be poverty and racism; a "war" on poverty and racial discrimination would eliminate them once and for all; both the legislators and the poverty fighters liked this kind of war. 37 (By such criteria World War II was an even "better" crisis.) Whether one views the twin crises of the mid-sixties as especially "good" or not, they were clearly fundamental in the creation of sociopolitical conditions favorable to the regulatory outburst that began then.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

More or less the entire urban population of Ethiopia lives under slum conditions, while sub-Saharan Africa is home to more of the world’s worst slums than any other region.8 While the absence of a baseline until recently makes it difficult to assess trends, U.N.-Habitat suggests there is little evidence that things are improving or that the underlying conditions are being addressed. The New York Times reported recently that since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty fifty years ago, “despite the expenditure of more than $16 trillion on means-tested programs . . . the portion of Americans living beneath the poverty line, 15%, is higher than in the Johnson administration.”9 Depressing as these American statistics are, comparing figures from around the world with those from the United States suggests that there is not one planet of slums, but two.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

LBJ believed, with some justification, that Kennedy’s assassination required a grand gesture in response. He also believed, with less justification, that his own genius deserved to be memorialized in great legislation. Standing before Congress six weeks after the assassination, he declared “unconditional war on poverty.” “The richest nation on earth can afford to win it,” he said. “We cannot afford to lose it.” In the space of a single Congress, in 1965–66, LBJ passed a raft of laws committing America to create nothing less than a new society—“We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society, and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.”


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

By watching two outcomes, real growth and inflation, the central bank might pursue a flexible path that responds to market conditions, 76 ENDLESS MONEY yet telegraphs to market participants that credit growth might be restrained within a friendly channel. Thus, in periods such as the 1960s when President Johnson pressured the Fed to monetize government spending for the war on poverty and the Vietnam conflict, the central bank might defend maintaining a prudent stance with this institutionalized formula. But a larger theoretical question gnaws at the accepted convention of inflation targeting, even if it is improved through considering real growth as well. Is the primary outcome being targeted—inflation—really the underlying problem, or is it a symptom?


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

The US had $13.2bn of gold reserves, but only $3bn of that was available to pay foreigners; the rest was needed to back the domestic money supply.71 At the time, the US was pursuing an expansionary fiscal policy (with spending outstripping tax revenues), as President Lyndon Johnson tried to finance both the Vietnam War and his “war on poverty”, including the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programmes. The American authorities tried various expedients to stop the dollar outflow. In 1963 and 1964, they passed the Interest Equalisation Tax, making it less attractive for Americans to buy overseas assets. But that change merely encouraged the development of a new financial market, whereby foreigners lent and borrowed dollars from each other.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

But once you move the bulk of people out of destitution those who remain will be harder to help, and increasingly people still left in poverty are there largely because of their inability to function or make good decisions. In the US absolutely poverty declined from 25 per cent in 1950 down to 19.5 per cent in 1963 and 14.7 per cent in 1966, after which the Democrats launched the ‘War on Poverty’; in 2013, after $15 trillion had been spent on this war, the rate was 14.5 per cent.22 Diminishing returns are probably most keenly felt in attempts to achieve gender equality in employment, which conservatives believe to be literally impossible so long as people will keep having children. By allowing women freedom to work you will rapidly increase their share of the labour market from 0 per cent but that figure will increasingly slow down as it reaches 50 per cent, and in some professions will not get anywhere near that.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

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

v=HytBikkoTyc; Isaac Shapiro et. al, “It Pays to Work: Work Incentives and the Safety Net,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 3, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/it-pays-to-work-work-incentives-and-the-safety-net; Jordan Weissmann, “It’s a Trap! Paul Ryan’s Theory on Poverty Is Tricksy—and Wrong,” Slate, March 5, 2014, https://slate.com/business/2014/03/paul-ryan-war-on-poverty-federal-programs-are-not-a-poverty-trap.html; and “Read the House GOP’s Poverty Report,” Washington Post, March 2, 2014, http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/politics/read-the-house-gops-poverty-report/850/. 20. Sharon Parrott, “Rubio Proposal to Replace EITC Would Likely Come at Expense of Working-Poor Families with Children,” Off the Charts (blog), Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 9, 2014, https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rubio-proposal-to-replace-eitc-would-likely-come-at-expense-of-working-poor-families-with. 21.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Tobacco’s sway was no less apparent in the White House, where Lyndon Johnson had become the first President from a state of the old Confederacy since the antebellum era (not counting Wilson, a transplanted Virginian). Johnson was much in need of votes from his fellow Southerners to put across his ambitious social programs, including the broadening of civil rights, medical care for the elderly, and a war on poverty—none of them issues likely to stir an outpouring of affection in Dixie. A heavy smoker himself until he suffered a serious heart attack while serving as Senate majority leader in 1955 and was ordered by his doctors to quit the habit, the President told reporters a few months after the Surgeon General’s panel had reported, “I’ve missed it [smoking] every day, but I haven’t gone back on it, and I’m glad that I haven’t.”

In this age of domestic turbulence, there was no discrete “health lobby” with its champions in Congress—only a far-flung and unorganizable assortment of individual Americans worried about the cigarette habit. And there was no leadership on the issue from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, engaged in the fight for social justice and its war on poverty. “We were in monumental battles,” recalled Joseph A. Califano, Jr., then a key (and heavy-smoking) White House aide. “Our focus in the South was on desegregation—we were making enough enemies as it was,” and so to have pushed for regulation of the tobacco industry would likely have compounded the problems besetting the administration.


Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Probably we were both right.” Cheney went to work instead for another Republican congressman, William Steiger. The next year, as Cheney’s family grew with the birth of another daughter, Mary, Rumsfeld was tapped by President Richard Nixon to run the Office of Economic Opportunity overseeing the war on poverty. Cheney took it upon himself to write a twelve-page memo with suggestions. Rumsfeld summoned him back with equal brusqueness but a different outcome. “You,” Rumsfeld barked at Cheney, never looking up. “You’re congressional relations. Now get the hell out of here.” An FBI background check later turned up Cheney’s drunk-driving arrests, which he had disclosed.

At the same time, he emphasized that Arab Americans should not be scapegoated. Tom Daschle grew concerned by the talk of war. Not that he did not regard what happened as a singular assault on the United States, but he noted that the term “war” had been used indiscriminately over the years—the war on poverty, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. Daschle felt they should avoid once again using a term that might not result in a tangible victory. “War is a very powerful word,” he told Bush. “This war is so vastly different. Take great care in your rhetorical calculations.” Some Bush advisers were quietly stunned.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

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

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

There, he assumed the title of dean. The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, and the Gilded Age was the country’s golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, and the Progressive movement, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the school’s view, were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government. The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn’t have been fought; instead, the South should have been allowed to secede.


pages: 532 words: 162,509

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, Columbian Exchange, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Jones Act, planetary scale, Right to Buy, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty

The plaintiff also claimed that he had been punished and threatened, charges the ranch owner denied. By way of context, Gonzales’s lawyer added that in some counties of northern New Mexico, as many as forty to fifty percent of rural workers lived in what he characterized as “a state of semi-peonage.” Not everyone agreed with such a high amount. The War on Poverty administrator in New Mexico, Alex Mercure, estimated the number of agricultural workers living in “economic peonage” to about 120,000 in the entire state.29 Epilogue IN THE LATE nineteenth century, as the United States emerged as an economic superpower and a magnet for workers from around the world, new forms of the other slavery arose all across the nation.


pages: 512 words: 162,977

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

backtesting, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black-Scholes formula, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, currency risk, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, full employment, implied volatility, interest rate swap, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, paper trading, pattern recognition, placebo effect, prediction markets, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, the map is not the territory, transaction costs, uptick rule, War on Poverty

I know what I’m going to say can be easily misconstrued, but if 1 could set up a system where I could make money off the poor, then I would have achieved my goal. I know that sounds crass. Of course, my objective is not to make money off the poor, but the point is that charity tends to spawn dependency. That’s why the Great Society war on poverty was such a failure. In contrast, if I can establish someone in a business where he can return my money, then I know his situation is stable. 338 / The New Market Wizard Would you mind saying roughly what percentage of your income you funnel into these efforts to help the poor? As a sweeping generalization, roughly one-third goes to Uncle Sam, onethird I put back into my account to increase my trading size, and one-third I dispense to these various projects.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

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

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

As we saw in Chapter 2, these decades also saw substantial increases in Black Americans earning high school degrees. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination based on race, opened up more opportunities for Black people, particularly young Boomers. The same year, President Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908) declared a “War on Poverty,” introducing programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, and the Head Start preschool program. Child poverty had already been falling in the early 1960s, and then dropped even more, with much of that decrease driven by a huge drop in poverty among Black Americans. In the space of just five years from 1965 to 1970, poverty among Black children dropped 37%, with poverty sinking from a shocking 66% of children to 40% (see Figure 3.16).


pages: 662 words: 180,546

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

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

Staged acts of everyday sadism do not seek to confront the audience with an inconvenient truth they refuse to recognize; rather, they promote the reign of a double truth by appealing to a convenient rationalization that the audience can feel under its skin: If the losers, the poor, the lost, the derelict, and the dissolute would only exit the stage after their fifteen seconds of notoriety, having abjectly accepted their status, never to be heard from again, the world would seem a much better place, wouldn’t it? To drive these lessons home, a spectacle must be made out of random outbreaks of misfortune. Thus the erstwhile war on poverty has become a guerrilla war on the poor in the contemporary theater of cruelty. Past standard harassment, there really would otherwise be very little point in subjecting the destitute to further irrational punishment, unless, of course, the purpose of the exercise was instead to exemplify, titillate, and instruct an audience.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Dwight Eisenhower had already moved in the same direction, defining himself as a “modern Republican,” meaning that he was going to maintain most of what was left of the New Deal. It was not just regulation. The 1960s witnessed the success of the civil rights movement and greater mobilization among left-wing Americans supporting civil rights and further political reforms. Lyndon Johnson initiated the Great Society program and the War on Poverty, adapting some key tenets of a European-style social safety net to the US context. Not everyone saw these changes as beneficial. Constraints on business conduct often benefited workers and consumers but were resented by business owners and executives. Segments of the business sector had been organizing against regulations and legislation strengthening labor unions since the beginning of the twentieth century.


pages: 619 words: 197,256

Apollo by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cuban missile crisis, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, index card, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, old-boy network, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ted Sorensen, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty, white flight

“I watched no television, read no newspapers, came to work at six in the morning and worked until nightfall, six or seven days a week for years.” The people of Apollo were barely aware that the Vietnam War was going on, barely aware that this was a Presidential election year, barely aware that there was such a thing as a War on Poverty or L.S.D. or Sgt. Pepper or race riots. Had one of Chris Kraft’s flight controllers been asked about the most important event so far of 1968, he would probably have said that it had occurred on January 22, when the unmanned Apollo 5 had carried a lunar module on its first test flight. Today, April 4, was going to be the next important date of 1968: the unmanned flight of Apollo 6, the second flight of a fully operational Saturn V.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

As the “experiments in material and human resources control” collapse and “revolutionary development” grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of “pacification.” When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of “limited warfare” translates neatly into a system of domestic repression—far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seems all too plain. *The quoted testimony is from September 1, 1937; presumably, the reference is to September 1936. *Orwell had just returned from the Aragon front, where he had been serving with the POUM militia in an area heavily dominated by left-wing (POUM and anarchist) troops.


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

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

In the mid-­1950s, the Democratic Party started to shift its position on civil rights, a critical issue dividing Northern liberal representatives from Southern segregationists. In the 1960s, during the era of President Johnson, Congressional Democrats from Northern states moved in a more socially liberal direction on issues such as the War on Poverty, Civil Rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment. When the liberal wing of the Democratic Party pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it began shifting their core 334 Trump’s America base toward African-­Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic minorities. Segregationist white Southerners, who previously provided a solid bloc of support for the Democrats, increasingly shifted to the Republicans.13 During these years, the Republican Party remained fairly moderate and mainstream – with the notable exception of the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, in which the Republicans suffered a crushing defeat.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Eisenhower had always been anxious about the influence and expense of the defense complex, and he had ordered DOD to trim its budgets toward the end of his term. His Democratic successors accelerated the cost-cutting—less out of nervousness about the power of the generals, and more because they had so much else they wanted to do. Kennedy and Johnson had bold ambitions to wage war on poverty, deliver new social programs, go to the moon, and cut taxes at the same time. And then there was that increasingly expensive little war in Vietnam. Deficit spending could only go so far; more fiscal reshuffling needed to happen, particularly in the defense and aerospace budget, where uncapped, sole-source contracts had led to ballooning project costs that the military wasn’t well-equipped to control.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

‘White Americans fear (probably rightly) that “black power” ideology may make some Negro youths feel that robberies and assaults on white women are almost a noble act of black revolution.’ White students egging on black comrades at protests, as well as the ‘temporary tolerance of violence by many American white liberals’, particularly incensed him. Stimulus was needed on a scale unimagined even by Johnson’s War on Poverty, to head off ‘mortal peril’. America ‘would be wise to give almost overstrained priority to maximum economic growth, even though this will mean tolerating more inflation than its middle classes will like’.58 But just as important was reassuring those middle classes by empowering police and suppressing locally elected community action programs, to ‘encourage an exodus from the ghettos at all deliberate speed’.59 Macrae’s strong feelings about law, order and local democracy in the US had a personal element, which he disclosed towards the end of the survey.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

After the shocking assassination of President Kennedy the previous November, Johnson had skillfully redirected the nation toward fulfilling the martyred leader’s congressional agenda. LBJ had capably assumed the mantle of trustee for the country’s lost captain. Johnson had been a masterful majority leader of the Senate during the 1950s. He knew how to manipulate the levers of power in Washington, especially in the Congress. In January 1964, he called for a war on poverty and began mobilizing his social service vanguard through the Economic Opportunity Act. In February, the president steered JFK’s stalled tax bill to passage. That same month, the House passed LBJ’s far-reaching Civil Rights Act, and by May the president was maneuvering to end the Senate debate on the bill; early in June, Johnson overcame a filibuster on civil rights legislation for the first time in the Senate’s history.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Few problems turned out to be as 'intolerable' as they seemed to people at the time, and many 'problems' were better than the alternative. Countries that 'did nothing' about poverty during the twentieth century frequently became rich through gradual economic growth. Countries that waged 'total war' on poverty frequently not only choked off economic growth, but starved. Along these lines, one particularly scary scenario for the future is that overblown doomsday worries become the rationale for world government, paving the way for an unanticipated global catastrophe: totalitarianism. Those who call for the countries of the world to unite against threats to humanity should consider the possibility that unification itself is the greater threat. 22.4 Totalitarian risk management 2 2 . 4 . 1 Tech n o logy Dwelling on technology-driven dystopias can make almost anyone feel like a Luddite.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The “development of the modern business enterprise can be understood only as a comprehensive effort to reduce risk,” wrote economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also a notable dissenter from the prevailing opinion that government efforts to provide security for the broader public—via unemployment compensation or Social Security, to name just two—were contrary to the national ethos.20 Even a few ’49ers thought so. In 1968, Roger Sonnabend, who had taken the reins of his family’s hotel business (later renamed Sonesta International Hotels), signed on as regional chairman of the National Alliance of Businessmen, a rare corporate partner in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and he explained his reasons in terms his fellow HBS grads could understand. “Social responsibility—and expanding profitability—are not intrinsically at odds with one another,” he said. “Quite the contrary—they are two faces of the same coin.”21 If the majority of those associated with HBS never stopped insisting that what was good for business was good for America, Sonnabend saw it the other way around, arguing that “what is best for America is best for business.”22 When David Callahan writes that the ’49ers “laid the groundwork for the great boom of the 1990s,” he has a point, but only insomuch as the ’39ers, ’29ers, and ’19ers did, too.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

{649} Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 14. {650} Tyler Cowen “Public Goods and Externalities,” The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David Henderson (New York: Warner Books, 1993), pp. 74–77. {651} Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. xv. {652} Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, pp. 62–63. {653} Ibid., p. 63. {654} Herbert Stein, “Wage and Price Controls: 25 Years Later,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1996, p. A10. {655} Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, p. 313


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Entitled The Stove and the Cannibal: An Essay on the Connections Between the State, Marxism, and the Concentration Camps, the book argued that Marxism in any form led to totalitarianism. In the United States, too, former socialists—like Georgetown professor Jean Kirkpatrick, and radicals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the architects of Johnson’s War on Poverty—began stressing individual rights and choices over welfare provisions. Some of the reinvigorated preoccupation with personal liberties in the West linked up with the critique of Stalinist society coming from Soviets and east Europeans. The Soviet Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood out as one of the bravest investigators of his government’s crimes.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

‘there was no flailing.’ ”20 Another aide, Bill Moyers, said after JFK’s assassination, “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self-disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week.”21 Johnson plunged into the presidency with “cyclonic vigor.”22 Determined to outdo his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he launched a “war on poverty” that was to result in the creation of the Job Corps, the Community Action Program, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and many other idealistic and costly initiatives designed to foster a “Great Society.” Johnson also won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark pieces of legislation that the less Machiavellian Kennedy had not been able to pass in the face of Southern filibusters.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Benefiting from his coattails, more Democrats dominated the Senate (68 to 38) and House (295 to 140) than under any President since Franklin Roosevelt. In his speech, opposite to Kennedy’s in 1961, he spoke exclusively of domestic affairs, for he planned to make fundamental changes in American life—with his War on Poverty, voting guarantees for all Americans, Medicare, aid to education, and other initiatives—that would install the architect of the Great Society in the record books. Three days after being sworn in, at 2:26 on Saturday morning, Johnson was hurried by ambulance from the White House to Bethesda Naval Hospital.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Bobby Seale, for example, was an air force vet studying engineering and design at Merritt while he worked at Kaiser Aerospace.33 Huey Newton was in and out of prison as a kid, and he disdained the substandard Oakland schools until he made his way to Merritt, where he studied law and thrived. There they got pulled into the RAM milieu, from which Newton and Seale spun off their own, distinct local analysis. Democrats were not totally insensitive to the situation’s perilous dynamics. Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to alleviate the urgent pressure in the ghetto as unemployment mounted, partly by hiring black college students and recent graduates to do community work. Critics on the right called the programs bribes to the black communities, while critics on the left said they were the state’s one step forward to go along with capitalism’s two steps back.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

activist lawyer, business cycle, call centre, card file, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, job satisfaction, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero day

We’re involved in picking up basic skills that others have neglected to teach the kids. Some of them have feelings of rage, undefined, and they’re acting it out in school—dangerously. We try to calm them down. In a neighborhood like ours it’s very dangerous. It’s low income and there are many ethnic groups. This community has experienced its war on poverty and hasn’t changed. The kids now don’t believe in politics. They don’t believe things will get better for them. There’s a feeling of hopelessness and despair. They’re from ages six to seventeen. The age difference doesn’t really . . . Certainly a fifteen-year-old kid is not going to see an eight-year-old as his equal.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A focus on direct action added to the polarization, alienating whites and “breeding despair and impotence” among blacks.14 He agreed with Martin Luther King that poverty and unemployment were significant triggers of race riots, but that led him to explore how blacks and whites could be united in struggle under the aegis of the labor unions. His conviction that the big issues were economic, requiring federal programs, meant that it was vital to support a government prepared to fund a “war on poverty.” This led to another disagreement, which included most of his former colleagues, over whether protest against the Vietnam War should be a priority. The case for coalitions was made with particular force and provocation in a February 1965 article. Rustin observed the “strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.”


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Dow one thousand! The market would not break through the barrier again that year, but the euphoria carried on anyway. Buffett had been worrying all year about disappointing his partners. Although he started his latest letter to them cheerily with the news about the huge profits on American Express—“Our War on Poverty was successful in 1965,” he wrote, alluding to President Johnson’s program to bring about a “Great Society” through a vast array of new social-welfare programs—he then delivered the real news in what would be the first of many similar warnings: “I now feel that we are much closer to the point where increased size may prove disadvantageous.”