affirmative action

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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

The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other issues, such as affirmative action. During the past twenty years, virtually every progressive, national civil rights organization in the country has mobilized and rallied in defense of affirmative action. The struggle to preserve affirmative action in higher education, and thus maintain diversity in the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, has consumed much of the attention and resources of the civil rights community and dominated racial justice discourse in the mainstream media, leading the general public to believe that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations—even as our prisons fill with black and brown men.

In other words, the black middle class does not reflect a lowering of racist barriers in occupations so much as the opposite: racism is so entrenched that without government intervention there would be little ‘progress’ to boast about.”43 In view of all this, we must ask, to what extent has affirmative action helped us remain blind to, and in denial about, the existence of a racial undercaste? And to what extent have the battles over affirmative action distracted us and diverted crucial resources and energy away from dismantling the structures of racial inequality? The predictable response is that civil rights advocates are as committed to challenging mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism as they are to preserving affirmative action. But where is the evidence of this? Civil rights activists have created a national movement to save affirmative action, complete with the marches, organizing, and media campaigns, as well as incessant strategy meetings, conferences, and litigation.

The question posed here is whether affirmative action has functioned similarly, offering relatively meager material advantages but significant psychological benefits to people of color, in exchange for the abandonment of a more radical movement that promised to alter the nation’s economic and social structure. To be clear: This is not an argument that affirmative action policies conflict with King’s dream that we might one day be “judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.” King himself would have almost certainly endorsed affirmative action as a remedy, at least under some circumstances.


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

It is a question that cannot be asked without arousing emotions so strong that one wonders just how far scholarship will be allowed to go on this issue. Truth was among the first casualties of the affirmative action regime. At the simplest level the term “affirmative action” meant discarding prevailing notions of neutrality in order to redistribute educational and employment chances on the basis of race. The idea that it could be a permanent solution to the problem of racial prejudice required doublethink. “Affirmative action requires the use of race as a socially significant category of perception and representation,” as Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues put it, “but the deepest elements of mainstream civil rights ideology had come to identify such race-consciousness as racism itself.”

But he thought it would be okay for UC Davis to achieve the same result by filling its slots the way Harvard’s undergraduate admissions program did—not through quotas but through a “new definition of diversity” that allowed administrators to use race as a “plus factor.” Powell’s suggestion that Harvard College’s experience of affirmative action might serve as a model for provincial public professional schools was, to put it mildly, confused. The basic problem that affirmative action existed to solve was a shortage of blacks qualified to fill leadership positions. With its wealth and prestige, Harvard would have an easier time attracting and forming such people than any other institution in the world. Affirmative action’s most ingenious defender, the Anglo-American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, saw immediately that Powell had mistaken a constitutional question for an administrative one.

Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The “good” civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been “hijacked” in the 1970s by a “radical” one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have the good civil rights regime back. None of that was true. Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association that the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Such proactive measures generally fall under the label of what has become known as affirmative action. Like antidiscrimination laws, the goal of affirmative action policies is to make equal opportunity a reality for members of groups that have historically been the objects of discrimination. Unlike antidiscrimination laws, which provide remedies to which individuals can appeal after they have suffered discrimination, affirmative action policies aim to keep discrimination from occurring and compensate for injustices incurred in the past. Affirmative action can prevent discrimination by replacing practices that are discriminatory, either by intent or default, with practices that safeguard against discrimination.

Although a grateful nation may want to extend preference in hiring to veterans for prior service rendered, veteran status in itself does not qualify as a merit consideration. Although Americans are generally in favor of the ideal of equality of opportunity, they are often opposed to affirmative action attempts to achieve that outcome. The objection is not so much against affirmative action in principle but against specific provisions of some forms of affirmative action, especially those that target minorities and women. As a result, race- or sex-based affirmative action programs are a “hard sell” to the American public, especially during periods of economic slowdown or decline (Wilson 1987; Conley 1999). This is further complicated in the case of race-based programs by increasing rates of racial intermarriage, increasingly blurred racial boundaries, and increasing multiracial identities (Winant 2012).

Rather than a single policy that involves the same procedures, affirmative action comprises a complex set of policies and practices, including admission standards for schools and universities, guidelines for hiring practices, and procedures for the granting of government contracts. Affirmative action grew out of civil rights laws, presidential executive orders, court cases, federal implementation efforts, and voluntary human resource practices implemented by employers. Each has its own characteristics and complex history (Reskin 1998; Waters 2012). In a series of affirmative action cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has progressively limited affirmative action policies and practices.


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

These shifts have led to sharp increases in joblessness and the related problems of highly concentrated poverty, welfare dependency, and family breakup, despite the passage of antidiscrimination legislation to correct discriminatory patterns through litigation and the creation of affirmative action programs that mandate “goals and timetables” for the employment of minorities. Race-based programs have helped to bring about sharp increases in the number of blacks entering higher education and gaining professional and managerial positions. Moreover, as long as minorities are underrepresented in higher-paying and desirable positions in society, affirmative action programs will be needed. Nonetheless, in response to cries from conservatives to abolish affirmative action altogether, some liberals have argued for a shift from an affirmative action based on race to one based on economic class position or need.

Minority individuals from the most advantaged families tend to be disproportionately represented among those of their racial group most qualified for preferred status, such as college admissions, higher-paying jobs, and promotions. Thus, policies of affirmative action are likely to enhance opportunities for the more advantaged without adequately remedying the problems of the disadvantaged. To be sure, affirmative action was not intended solely to benefit the more advantaged minority individuals. As William L. Taylor, the former director of the United States Civil Rights Commission, has stated, “The focus of much of the [affirmative action] effort has been not just on white-collar jobs, but also on law enforcement, construction work, and craft and production in large companies—all areas in which the extension of new opportunities has provided upward mobility for less advantaged minority workers.”

Instead of seeking remedies only for individual complaints of discrimination, as specified in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they sought government-mandated affirmative action programs designed to ensure adequate minority representation in employment, education, and public programs. However, if the more advantaged members of minority groups benefit disproportionately from policies that embody the principle of equality of individual opportunity, they also profit disproportionately from affirmative action policies based solely on their racial group membership. Minority individuals from the most advantaged families tend to be disproportionately represented among those of their racial group most qualified for preferred status, such as college admissions, higher-paying jobs, and promotions.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 36 Ford Fessenden and Josh Keller, “How Minorities Have Fared in States with Affirmative Action Bans,” January 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative-action-bans.html. 37 Wilson Huhn, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, US Supreme Court, No. 572 U.S. 20142013, 2013. 38 Ibid. 39 “Do Affirmative Action Bans Hurt Minority Students?,” IVN.us, April 29, 2014, https://ivn.us/2014/04/29/affirmative-action-bans-hurt-minority-students-states-show-mixed-results/. 40 “Correcting the New York Times on College ‘Enrollment Gaps,’” AEI, June 25, 2013, http://www.aei.org/publication/correcting-the-new-york-times-on-college-enrollment-gaps/. 41 “New York Times Excludes Asian-Americans from Affirmative Action Study,” January 7, 2019, https://dailycaller.com/2014/04/23/new-york-times-excludes-asian-americans-from-affirmative-action-study/. 42 Jamiles Lartey, “US Police Killings Undercounted by Half, Study Using Guardian Data Finds,” Guardian, October 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killings-counted-harvard-study. 43 Jon Swaine, “Police Will Be Required to Report Officer-Involved Deaths under New US System,” Guardian, August 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/police-officer-related-deaths-department-of-justice. 44 Jeanne Bourgault, “How the Global Open Data Movement Is Transforming Journalism,” Wired, 2013, https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/05/how-the-global-open-data-movement-is-transforming-journalism/; Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson, eds., Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation (San Francisco: Code for America Press, 2013). 45 Fagan notes in his study that stop-and-frisk policies stemmed from a form of policing that was focused on policing areas with suspicious for criminal behavior.

The resulting narratives help create a debate on civic topics.35 One notable case in which a New York Times interactive map generated public debate was an infographic titled “How Minorities Have Fared in States with Affirmative Action Bans,” to the point that the graphic appeared in documents used in the Supreme Court. The graphic, developed in April 2014, allowed readers to explore the percentage of Hispanic and black students accepted to state universities in Washington, Florida, Texas, California, and Michigan before and after affirmative action bans were established. At the time the graphic was published, the Supreme Court was set to hear the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014), which would decide whether to uphold the affirmative action ban that had been in place in Michigan since 2006.

The Times generated the visualization so readers could better understand the questions put before the Supreme Court. Overall, the charts and accompanying graphics showed decreases in minority enrollment after affirmative action bans were set in place.36 When Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor used the graphic as part of her official dissent to the ruling to uphold the affirmative action ban, the work became part of a historic debate. She used a screenshot of the New York Times visualization to support her position that the removal of affirmative action does, in fact, affect minority enrollment in college (figure 4.25). She stated: “The proportion of black students among those obtaining bachelor's degrees was 4.4 percent, the lowest since 1991.” 37 Using the graphs as evidence, she went on to say, “At UCLA, for example, the proportion of Hispanic freshman among those enrolled declined from 23 percent in 1995 to 17 percent in 2011, even though the proportion of Hispanic college-aged persons in California increased from 41 percent to 49 percent during that same period.” 38 Sotomayor has always been a supporter of affirmative action, so the graphic most likely did not inform her decision, but she hoped to persuade others by illustrating through data the relationship between policies and minority enrollment. 4.25 Screenshot from Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the Supreme Court case to uphold a Michigan ban on affirmative action.


pages: 165 words: 45,129

The Economics of Inequality by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

affirmative action, basic income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, Gini coefficient, income inequality, low skilled workers, means of production, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Simon Kuznets, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, very high income, working-age population

This economic theory of discrimination is similar in some ways to sociological theories that hold that inequality is often the result of a dominant discourse that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if it is widely believed that the members of certain groups are unlikely to succeed, they will be discouraged from trying (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964; 1970). Affirmative Action versus Fiscal Transfers The political implications of these theories are important. If a significant part of inequality is in fact due to perverse mechanisms of the sort described, then new redistributive instruments are needed. For example, the theory of discrimination suggests that employers should be prohibited by law from discriminating against minorities. One way to do this is to require employers to show that each hiring and promotion decision is based on unbiased objective criteria. Another is to impose affirmative action quotas, requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of minority workers, in order to break the vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

Another is to impose affirmative action quotas, requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of minority workers, in order to break the vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies of failure. Such affirmative action policies became popular in the United States in the 1970s to protect African Americans, women, and other minorities. Affirmative action, which in some ways resembles earlier efforts to use labor law to limit employer discretion in hiring and promotion, is very different from the kinds of policies recommended by human capital theorists, who say that the best remedy for inequality is to make fiscal transfers to social groups whose human capital endowments are too low (within the limits imposed by the elasticity of the supply of human capital), while of course avoiding any interference in the process of production.

.* In short, inequalities based on rank discrimination, such as between people of color and whites or men and women, are much more susceptible to remedy by affirmative action and changes in mentality than by any kind of fiscal redistribution. Unfortunately, the fact that an inequality is based on discrimination does not always mean that it is easy to eliminate or even reduce. For example, most observers agree that the results of affirmative action in the United States have been mixed at best. Indeed, quotas requiring employers to hire a certain percentage of people of color can reinforce rather than weaken prejudices against African Americans, “who become employable only when we are forced to employ them,” while at the same time reducing their incentive to compete for jobs like other citizens, which is precisely the opposite of the intended goal (Coate and Loury, 1993).


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

THE SOLUTION THAT IS NOT WITHIN OUR GRASP I will briefly state my own sense of a root policy problem and the required solution. The solution is not politically within the realm of possibility, but I think it is useful to put it on the table. The problem. The phrase “affirmative action” originally referred to initiatives by colleges and corporations to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked for educational and job opportunities. It was a needed policy in the mid-1960s and legally innocuous. But it soon morphed into aggressive affirmative action, meaning government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs. Working-class and middle-class Whites who now see themselves as second-class citizens in the eyes of the government aren’t making it up.

Well-to-do Whites can find ways to circumvent this problem, but working-class and middle-class Whites cannot. It has long been my view, first expressed in these words long ago, that aggressive affirmative action is a poison leaking into the American experiment. We are now dealing with nearly sixty years of accumulated toxin. It is not the only cause of the present crisis, but it is a central one. It also has a side effect that I have never seen or heard discussed in public. Aggressive affirmative action is practiced most sweepingly for government jobs at all levels. At the city level, it affects the selection and promotion of police, prosecutors, public defenders, correctional officers, personnel in the social welfare bureaucracies, healthcare workers on the public payroll, and K–12 teachers in the public schools.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America’s upper middle class. Many of them live in places where affirmative action is not an issue because so few minorities live in their communities. For those who live in multiracial cities, incompetent police and prosecutors can be a problem. Incompetent teachers have driven many of them from the public schools. But upper-middle-class families in urban areas don’t have much to do with public defenders, correctional officers, or personnel in the social welfare bureaucracies. The burden of the substandard government services produced by aggressive affirmative action is borne overwhelmingly by America’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

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

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

If this familiar view is right, then the problem with meritocracy is not with the principle but with our failure to live up to it. Political argument between conservatives and liberals bears this out. Our public debates are not about meritocracy itself but about how to achieve it. Conservatives argue, for example, that affirmative action policies that consider race and ethnicity as factors in admission amount to a betrayal of merit-based admission; liberals defend affirmative action as a way of remedying persisting unfairness and argue that a true meritocracy can be achieved only by leveling the playing field between the privileged and the disadvantaged. But this debate overlooks the possibility that the problem with meritocracy runs deeper.

At first, I assumed this was because they came of age during the era of Ronald Reagan and had absorbed the individualistic philosophy of the time. But these were not, for the most part, politically conservative students. Meritocratic intuitions reach across the political spectrum. They emerge with special intensity in discussions of affirmative action in college admissions. Whether students are for or against affirmative action policies, most voice the conviction that they worked hard to qualify for admission to Harvard and therefore merited their place. The suggestion that they were admitted due to luck or other factors beyond their control provokes strong resistance. It is not hard to understand the growing meritocratic sentiment among students in selective colleges.

Most of our debates about access to jobs, education, and public office proceed from the premise of equal opportunity. Our disagreements are less about the principle itself than about what it requires. For example, critics of affirmative action in hiring and college admissions argue that such policies are inconsistent with equality of opportunity, because they judge applicants on factors other than merit. Defenders of affirmative action reply that such policies are necessary to make equality of opportunity a reality for members of groups that have suffered discrimination or disadvantage. At the level of principle at least, and political rhetoric, meritocracy has won the day.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

This lowest tier is designated by the government as “scheduled castes and tribes” and has been targeted in various affirmative action programs since just after independence. In the middle, some 65 percent of the population belong to what is known these days as the “other backward classes,” lower and lower-middle castes and minorities such as Muslims and Christians. Within this grouping are some clans that have done very well since independence, some that have done very poorly, and some that have simply remained in servitude to their landlords. It was a doomed attempt by India’s crusading prime minister V. P. Singh to initiate for these other backward classes a new, sweeping affirmative action plan in public employment that sparked the caste riots of 1990, including the upper-caste self-immolations that brought the fire-extinguisher salesman to my door.

On the grounds of capitalist egalitarianism, Sri Lanka also abandoned efforts to promote caste- or class-based affirmative action programs. Compared with the rest of South Asia, Sri Lanka is unusual in that the historically dominant caste group is in the numerical majority—the reverse of the situation in India. So even the best-intentioned programs of socialist democracy after independence did not promote a rise of lower castes, as in India. Instead, it reinforced the grip of dominant castes. More broadly, the Sri Lankan government rejected affirmative action during the capitalist boom because “we thought we were a much more enlightened society and ought not to acknowledge caste distinctions,” as Tiruchelvam put it.

South Asians themselves often use the term “elite” in broadbrush fashion to encompass strata of the socially or economically privileged who may have little in common or even be in fierce competition with one another. No single approach to defining or understanding the elites is satisfactory. There are, for example, millions of impoverished high-caste Brahmins in India and a significant number of millionaire “untouchables” made rich by the state’s various affirmative action plans. At the same time, wealth alone by no means guarantees status, except perhaps within the narrow band of one’s own community. One of the richest men in my New Delhi neighborhood earned a fortune by selling tobacco while squatting in a wooden booth. Yet it would be impossible to consider him part of the elite; few of the less wealthy Nehruvian bureaucrats who bought his wares would consider sharing a meal with him.


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

With the “problem solved,” white people could then be framed not as beneficiaries of racial inequality but as the victims of post–civil rights “social engineering” that, they claimed, sought to replicate the unfairness of Jim Crow. In 2009, when a white Connecticut firefighter blamed affirmative action for his failure to win promotion after he passed a qualifying test, he said: “I think we view discrimination as discrimination plain and simple. We were discriminated [against] based upon our race just like African Americans were in the past in other issues. So it’s just plain discrimination.” Similarly, when Jennifer Gratz was not given entrance to the University of Michigan, she sued the university, claiming that she was rejected because of affirmative action, in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court. “They think it’s OK to discriminate against some of us in order to promote diversity on their campus,” she told me.

The misreading is most glaring today in discussions of affirmative action. King was a strong proponent of taking race and ethnicity into account in job appointments and college admissions, in order to redress historical imbalances. “It is impossible to create a formula for the future,” he wrote, “which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.” Yet the Right has come to rely on the “content of their character” line in the speech to use King as an antiracist cover for their opposition to affirmative action. In 1986 Reagan said: “We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas.

In 2010, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the speech, media personality and Tea Party favorite Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, telling a crowd of around ninety thousand that “the man who stood down on those stairs . . . gave his life for everyone’s right to have a dream.” Almost a year later Black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain opened his speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference with the words “I have a dream.” Their embrace of the speech, particularly when using elements out of context to challenge affirmative action and civil rights legislation, has made some Black intellectuals and activists wary. “The speech is profoundly and willfully misunderstood,” King’s longtime friend Vincent Harding told me. “People take the parts that require the least inquiry, the least change, the least work.” Many fear that the speech can too easily be distorted in a manner that undermines the speaker’s legacy.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

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

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

A majority of the American public consistently opposed the idea that some ethnic groups should be held to different standards than others. And the courts progressively narrowed the scope of affirmative action over the years: in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) the Supreme Court established that race could be considered in admissions decisions but only so long as ‘fixed quotas’ were not used. Other rulings, such as Hopwood v. State of Texas (1996), made it harder to take race into consideration. The practice of affirmative action also left much to be desired. Affirmative action had always been intended to be part of a wide range of programmes that universities used to address the problems of non-traditional students, such as mentoring and coaching.

POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION In Chapter Fourteen, I discussed Lyndon Johnson’s landmark speech at Howard University when he declared that you can’t take people who have been hobbled by chains for years, put them at the starting line of a race and then fire the starting pistol. You need a measure of affirmative action to prepare them for the race. Classical liberals have always had problems with affirmative action, worrying that it perpetuates the very racial categories that it’s designed to eliminate, but it’s hard to escape Johnson’s logic: equality of opportunity doesn’t work if some people start a long way behind others not because of their individual merits but because they happen to be born members of a certain group. Sometimes collective wrongs require collective solutions. The case for affirmative action is at its strongest for the group that LBJ was talking about at Howard: African-Americans.

Every attempt that America made to address the problem of racial disparities proved to be more frustrating than it had imagined. The most ambitious attempt was affirmative action, which was intended to compensate for past injustices and present inequalities by providing members of minorities – particularly African-Americans – with a leg-up in the form of preferential treatment in admission to universities and some jobs. Affirmative action certainly changed the face of elite America, as universities and companies enrolled or employed more minorities. It also produced a good deal of unease. A majority of the American public consistently opposed the idea that some ethnic groups should be held to different standards than others.


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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

As a Brookings scholar, I am quite rightly prohibited from supporting a specific piece of legislation—but not from proposing my own. How about an Ending Hereditary Privilege in College Admissions Act? Some fear that killing legacy preferences will damage the argument for race-based affirmative action. There is an unavoidable tension inherent in affirmative action between the meritocratic principle that institutions should not discriminate on grounds of race or other categories and a desire for equality, especially for those from groups who have been subordinated in the past. But there is no such tension for legacy admissions, which are both antimeritocratic and antiequality.

Richard Kahlenberg, “10 Myths about Legacy Preferences in College Admissions,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2010 (www.chronicle.com/article/10-Myths-About-Legacy/124561/). 51. Quoted in Richard Kahlenberg, Affirmative Action for the Rich (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2010), p. 67. 52. Carlton Larson, “Titles of Nobility, Hereditary Privilege, and the Unconstitutionality of Legacy Preferences in Public School Admissions,” Washington University Law Review 84, no. 6 (2006): p. 1382 (http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=law_lawreview). 53. Kahlenberg, Affirmative Action for the Rich, p. 15. 54. Darren Walker, “Internships Are Not a Privilege,” New York Times, July 5, 2016. 55.

Thanks also to Kim Giambattisto at Westchester Publishing and to Valentina Kalk, William Finan, Elliott Beard, and Carrie Engel at the Brookings Institution Press. If you find an error, please let me know and I’ll try to find someone to blame for it. INDEX Absolute vs. relative class mobility, 59–60 Adams, James Truslow, 15 Affirmative action, 91, 144 Affirmative Action for the Rich (Kahlenberg), 108 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, 139 African Americans, 32. See also Race and ethnicity The Age of Reform (Hofstadter), 155–56 Alon, Sigal, 86–87 American Opportunity Tax Credit, 135, 137 Anderson, John W., 112 Apprenticeships, 136 Asian Americans, 32.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

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

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

Wood, Diversity Rules (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 31–32. 39. “California Proposition 209, Affirmative Action Initiative (1996),” Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_209,_Affirmative_Action_Initiative_(1996); cf. recent challenges: Alexei Koseff, “California’s Affirmative Action Ban, Proposition 209, Targeted for Repeal,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-affirmative-action-ban-15121025.php. Cf. the defeat of Proposition 16: David Lauter, “Failure to Bridge Divides of Age, Race Doomed Affirmative Action Proposition,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2020, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-24/age-race-divides-doomed-affirmative-action-proposition. 40.

Currently, however, Latinos make up the largest minority group in California, since 2014 comprising 39 percent of state residents. Only 37 percent of the population is white, with 15 percent Asian American, 6 percent African American, and smaller percentages for other groups and those of mixed race. The nomenclature of identity politics and affirmative action has not yet caught up with reality on the ground. Are Latinos now a minority/majority population or whites a majority/minority? Are reparatory set-asides now to be adjudicated by income and class rather than race or demography? Will neologisms arise such as belonging to a “privileged minority” that might encompass both whites and Asian Americans on the basis of average income?

But when suspected of committing a bad act—such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of second-degree murder—he is damned further by the inclusion of the adjective “white.” The addition is intended to negate what would otherwise be a positive and helpful racial ancestry. Will some working-class whites one day describe themselves as aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, and insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their newfound minority European bona fides, seek segregated European American dorms, and set up Caucasian studies programs at universities, on the logic that the present generation, while not a beneficiary of past discrimination, was born into less privilege in hiring and admissions than other groups?


pages: 271 words: 82,159

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

If someone is going to be cannon fodder in the classroom, the theory goes, it’s probably best if that person has an alternative avenue of fulfillment on the football field. Exactly the same logic applies to the debate over affirmative action. In the United States, there is an enormous controversy over whether colleges and professional schools should have lower admissions standards for disadvantaged minorities. Supporters of affirmative action say helping minorities get into selective schools is justified given the long history of discrimination. Opponents say that access to selective schools is so important that it ought to be done purely on academic merit.

But Brown University made her feel stupid—and if she truly wanted to graduate with a science degree, the best thing for her to do would have been to go down a notch to Maryland. No sane person would say that the solution to her problems would be for her to go to an even more competitive school like Stanford or MIT. Yet when it comes to affirmative action, that’s exactly what we do. We take promising students like Caroline Sacks—but who happen to be black—and offer to bump them up a notch. And why do we do that? Because we think we’re helping them. That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that—as Herbert Marsh says—the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned.

In other words, their numbers aren’t measuring just how many articles an academic can turn out. They are measuring how many high-quality articles an academic can get published. 6 The law professor Richard Sander is the leading proponent of the Big Pond case against affirmative action. He has written with Stuart Taylor a fascinating book on the subject called Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. I’ve provided a summary of some of Sander’s argument in the notes at the back of this book. For example, one of the questions Sander looks at is this. It is harder for a minority student to become a lawyer if he or she goes to a better school.


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

If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.” Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it.

The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.

But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They cannot be extricated from the “whole theory of slavery,” which holds that an entire class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and conceptions were built.


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

States that have reduced imprisonment, turning to alternative punishments such as fines and community corrections programs, have experienced drops in crime similar to those in states that have increased imprisonment.47 If more states followed suit, we could avoid needlessly undermining the employment opportunities of a significant number of young men from less advantaged homes. Third, since the late 1960s, affirmative action programs for university admissions and hiring have promoted opportunity for women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups.48 Affirmative action should continue, but with family background as the focal criterion.49 How to Ensure Shared Prosperity In chapter 2, I described the slow growth of income among lower-half American households since the 1970s. But what if there is no alternative?

Social assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) insure against the risk that you will find yourself unable to get a job but ineligible for unemployment or disability compensation. Even affirmative action programs are a form of insurance; they insure against the risk of being in a group that is, or formerly was, discriminated against. Over the past century, the United States, like other rich nations, has created a number of public insurance programs. But we haven’t done enough. From our own experience and that of other affluent countries, we know there are significant risks we could insure against but currently don’t, and others for which the protection we now provide is inadequate.8 We need the following: • Universal health insurance • One-year paid parental leave • Universal early education • Increase in the Child Tax Credit • Sickness insurance • Eased eligibility criteria for unemployment insurance • Wage insurance • Supplemental defined-contribution pension plans with automatic enrollment • Extensive, personalized job-search and (re)training support • Government as employer of last resort • Minimum wage increased modestly and indexed to prices • EITC extended farther up the income ladder and indexed to average compensation or GDP per capita • Social assistance with a higher benefit level and more support for employment • Reduced incarceration of low-level drug offenders • Affirmative action shifted to focus on family background rather than race • Expanded government investment in infrastructure and public spaces • Increase in paid holidays and vacation time Now, to some, this will look like a predictable laundry list of left goals.

From our own experience and that of other affluent countries, we know there are significant risks we could insure against but currently don’t, and others for which the protection we now provide is inadequate.8 We need the following: • Universal health insurance • One-year paid parental leave • Universal early education • Increase in the Child Tax Credit • Sickness insurance • Eased eligibility criteria for unemployment insurance • Wage insurance • Supplemental defined-contribution pension plans with automatic enrollment • Extensive, personalized job-search and (re)training support • Government as employer of last resort • Minimum wage increased modestly and indexed to prices • EITC extended farther up the income ladder and indexed to average compensation or GDP per capita • Social assistance with a higher benefit level and more support for employment • Reduced incarceration of low-level drug offenders • Affirmative action shifted to focus on family background rather than race • Expanded government investment in infrastructure and public spaces • Increase in paid holidays and vacation time Now, to some, this will look like a predictable laundry list of left goals. Yet I’ve arrived at this list not by consulting the latest edition of the “Progressives’ Handbook,”9 but by examining the problems we face and the experiences of the world’s rich nations in addressing them.


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

These results confirmed what many critics of affirmative action in academia had been saying for years: Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A widely acclaimed attempt to say otherwise, that affirmative action in college admissions was successful— The Shape of the River by former college presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok— had crucial defects: 1. Although the study purported to show that blacks admitted under affirmative action policies with lower academic qualifications did well, the actual samples in the statistics lumped together all black students— those who were admitted with the same qualifications as other students and those admitted under affirmative action with lower qualifications than the other students.56 The absence of data on the group specifically at issue— those particular black students who were admitted with lower qualifications— makes that study the statistical equivalent of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark. 2.

One of these current notions is that lagging groups require a lowering of existing standards, so that more of their members can advance via various forms of “affirmative action.” Yet the fields in which many lagging groups have had their greatest success— especially sports and entertainment— include fields notorious for severe competition, in which even star performers whose performances begin to decline are ruthlessly cast aside. In short, lagging minorities have flourished in endeavors whose conditions are the direct opposite of those of affirmative action. They have had real achievements against unsparing competition, rather than make-believe achievements based on affirmative action quotas. Against the background of British historian Arnold Toynbee’s “challenge and response” thesis, that the necessity to overcome obstacles has spurred human achievements, what income redistributionists propose, in the form of a welfare state guarantee of “basic necessities,” is to remove fundamental and long-standing challenges from the lives of some people by guaranteeing them a livelihood without their having to lift a finger— much less develop human capital, even in the form of common decency.

Poverty Status of Families, by Type of Family, Presence of Related Children, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2013,” downloaded on October 23, 2014: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/historical/families.html 54. John H. Bunzel, “Affirmative-Action Admissions: How It ‘Works’ at UC Berkeley,” The Public Interest, Fall 1988, pp. 124, 125. 55. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (New York: Basic Books, 2012), p. 154. 56. None of the book’s many tables separates black students who were admitted under the normal standards and those admitted under affirmative action standards. See William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. ix–xix. 57.


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

In Suicide of a Superpower, poor Pat Buchanan seemed to believe that the rapidly growing number of Asian Americans in the nation’s top schools had to do with affirmative action. I used to hear the same thing from clueless white people back before the passage of Ward Connerly’s Prop. 209 in 1997, which abolished affirmative action. Of course they were wrong—Asian American students were succeeding the old-fashioned way, with hard work. Since then, of course, the white proportion of UC students has continued to decline, even without affirmative action. Living in California it’s easy to see subtle and not so subtle signs of white status anxiety, real and imagined.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. Working for Johnson, Moynihan proposed public works jobs and affirmative action measures, as well as a guaranteed national income, to lift black families, whether they were headed by one or two parents, out of poverty. The biggest problem with Moynihan’s report was its timing. Written before the Watts conflagration, it was leaked around the same time, and Washington pundits and politicians found in it an excuse to exonerate white America for the urban rebellions that would soon ignite coast to coast.

It would have created a nationwide guaranteed income and provided payments to families with a father at home, reversing the incentives for family split-up he saw in traditional welfare programs. No less a liberal than Ted Kennedy would eventually lament turning down Nixon’s proposals for national health-care reform, which were arguably more far-reaching than the law enacted under President Obama forty years later. The Nixon administration pioneered affirmative action, with its 1969 “Revised Philadelphia Plan,” a proposal to integrate the city’s white building trades while providing government contracts to minority businesses. George Meany’s plumbers and my grandfather’s steamfitters were among the most segregated unions, with “apprenticeships” passed from father to son, uncle to nephew, in an unbroken white chalk line.


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

It is hard to imagine this would have been possible without their father’s public-sector job. When there is a hunger to take advantage of opportunity, affirmative action seems to work. The problem, of course, is who should be allowed to take advantage of such preferences and for how long. From an economic perspective, it is not very helpful to see affirmative action as a righting of the historical wrongs suffered by an ethnic group. Instead, it is best seen as a way of righting current disabilities that hold groups back—and affirmative action should therefore also apply to subgroups within the majority group that are struggling economically and are socially unconnected to the elite.

If, however, an organization does not succeed over time in improving diversity at the top, it has to ask itself whether its systems and processes create blind spots that make it harder for it to nurture or recognize capabilities in others. Otherwise, it is all too easy for monocultures to maintain themselves by saying, “They just did not meet the bar.” In the interests of leveling the playing field, affirmative action for a minority group should eventually end. But when? Some early beneficiaries from affirmative action do well enough to put their children into good schools and colleges, as did our peons at the Reserve Bank. Should affirmative action end for their children (the peon’s grandchildren)? The answer, India has decided, turns on whether the grandchildren continue to be disadvantaged or discriminated against, and whether their parent’s higher incomes are sufficient to get them out of the trap of disadvantage.

ENABLING THE DISADVANTAGED Finally, what about affirmative action, a red rag to populist nationalist groups? Most large diverse countries have minority groups that have been discriminated against, are disadvantaged, and are underrepresented among the elite. Most such countries have scholarship and admission preferences in schools and colleges for these underprivileged minorities, as well as quotas for government jobs and preferences for government contracts. While not all these supports work well, in my previous job as the governor of the Reserve Bank in India, I had firsthand experience of the positive difference affirmative action could make.


pages: 435 words: 120,574

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

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

And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long. When I ask Hardey about his political orientation—he was a moderate Republican—he immediately answers, “I’ve had enough of poor me.” As he explains, “I don’t like the government paying unwed mothers to have a lot of kids, and I don’t go for affirmative action. I met this one black guy who complained he couldn’t get a job. Come to find out he’d been to private school. I went to a local public school like everyone else I know. No one should be getting a job to fill some mandated racial quota or getting state money not to work.” Jindal had reduced state money for “poor me’s.”

The plants allowed him to gather his entire family around him and, on a generous supervisor’s salary, keep them in high comfort. Wherever the top brass of Sasol and other incoming plants lived, Bob Hardey’s large, loving family, his church, his neighbors were all right there in Westlake. Hardey didn’t see how the federal government had helped him; if anything its affirmative action policies had almost gotten in his way. But industry had been hard on Hardey too. “Four generations of Hardeys have lived in Westlake. And now with Sasol expanding,” he tells me, “a lot of my family is forced to move. My brother has already moved. My son and his wife were finished building their dream house, and now they’re moving out.”

I was glad to see him,” Mike said, adding, “He did check if we had safety vests which I guess is okay.” What image of the government was at play? Was it a nosy big brother (the Coast Guard had checked for safety vests)? Was it a remote-controlling big brother (a federal instead of state Department of Education)? A bad parent playing favorites (affirmative action)? An insistent beggar at the door (taxes)? It was all of these, but something else too. Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be “above consumerism,” to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony—even though they often depended on the parental money they were “above”—so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them.


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

What the EEOC implicitly demands is carte blanche powers over the entire job market and thus the destruction of the vital freedom of workers to choose their own jobs from among the competing offers of employers.2 An equal rights effort—even an affirmative action program—was feasible when concentrated on the 10 percent of the American people with real grievances. But affirmative action that potentially involves more than half the workforce is necessarily an exercise in futility regardless of whether thousands of women and lawyers are gratified. The victims of this growing mockery are black men who might have benefited from a disciplined program but are now forced to join an undignified queue with such improbable victims as Yale coeds molested by their tutors, ex-addicts denied re-employment, assistant professors at Smith rejected for tenure, and telephone operators who discover, years later, that what they had always wanted was to climb a pole.

So new approaches emerged, allegedly more enlightened, but with implications equally far-fetched. Slavery, discrimination, and deprivation, it was said, have so abused the black psyche that all sorts of new ministrations and therapies are needed to redeem it; racism and unemployment still inflict such liabilities that vast new programs of public employment and affirmative action are required to overcome them. The reasonable inference arises that even though blacks are not genetically inferior, science proves them to be so damaged by racism and poverty that they are inferior now. Not only do these notions cause serious strain to the spirit of liberalism when confronting specific specimens of this maimed but deserving race, but such attitudes also perpetuate the idea that the poor, for whatever reason, are still very different from us.

But the poor and their children are assumed to be relatively unshaken by a plague of family breakdowns; at least any resulting lower income and employment levels are said to be due to discrimination, and the behavior of the children is regarded to be little influenced by the absence of fathers. Most American men earn more money than their wives; men that don’t tend to leave, or be left, in large numbers. Yet poor men are assumed to be unaffected by the higher relative incomes available to their wives from welfare and affirmative action, which are alleged to have no relationship to high rates of unemployment and illegitimacy. Perhaps most important of all, every successful ethnic group in our history rose up by working harder than other classes, in low-paid jobs, with a vanguard of men in entrepreneurial roles. But the current poor, so it is supposed, can leapfrog drudgery by education and credentials, or be led as a group from poverty, perhaps by welfare mothers trained for government jobs.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

They could not account for the emotions that are revealed in the ethnographies. And it is these emotions, which are unavoidable, that underlie the special case for affirmative action. In contrast, in A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, reporter David Shipler sought out what African Americans say about themselves and about America.17 In his view there is a real divide. There is a we and a they. And affirmative action can play a significant role in breaking down this barrier between the two Americas. First and foremost is its symbolism. Affirmative action indicates that whites care about blacks. Acceptance by whites of this responsibility defuses the view that America is really two countries, with the white majority uncaring about the black minority.

Acceptance by whites of this responsibility defuses the view that America is really two countries, with the white majority uncaring about the black minority. We appreciate that there are objections: that affirmative action is difficult to administer, that it brings up important issues of fairness, and so on. But we view these issues as secondary relative to the role of affirmative action in conveying to African Americans the message “Yes, we can. Yes, we care.”18 The naysayers, like the Thernstroms, declare that affirmative action is wrong, that there is a growing African-American middle class, that government measures are ineffective, that the problem of black-white difference should be left to the market.

This very notion is part of daily reality. This notion —as much as low financial assets and low skill levels—is responsible for the continued poverty of African Americans. So what is to be done? In the 1990s there was a great debate about affirmative action. Two important books appeared at about the same time but reached radically different conclusions. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom wrote an exhaustive history of affirmative action and how it grew out of the civil rights movement.16 They prided themselves on both their factual history and their statistical analysis. But the Thernstroms never came to grips with what the ethnographies reveal.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative about affirmative action after discussion. Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous—and thus squelched diversity.

In the summer of 2005, a small experiment in democracy was held in Colorado.1 Sixty American citizens were brought together and assembled into ten groups, each consisting of five to seven people. Members of each group were asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers engage in “affirmative action” by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of either “liberal” and “conservative” members, the former from Boulder, the latter from Colorado Springs.

Second, deliberation usually promotes uniformity by decreasing the range of views within groups.17 After talking together, group members come into greater accord with one another.18 Recall the Colorado experiment discussed earlier; both liberal and conservative group members showed greater homogeneity on global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples. A central effect of deliberation is to reduce (squelch?) the range of opinions. It is for this reason that statistical groups show far more diversity of opinion than deliberating groups. The Surprising Failures of Deliberating Groups / 55 How should we evaluate these increases in confidence and unity?


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

By 1980, sixteen years of organized activism and formal federal oversight had resulted in remarkable gains for black women, black men, and white women. But progress ground to a halt in the 1980s, with only white women advancing over the next three decades. At the national level, our political debate became increasingly racialized, particularly around the issue of affirmative action. Conservatives successfully recast affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” and when they secured electoral advantage, they were able to transform this rhetoric into action. Upon winning the presidency, Ronald Reagan quickly knocked the teeth out of federal enforcement, slashing the budget of the EEOC and the office responsible for federal contracting.17 He appointed Clarence Thomas (now a Supreme Court justice) to head the EEOC and ordered a near stoppage to enforcement of the law.

On the other hand, most affluent whites lived in communities so far from either black or white working-class people that their children were rarely affected by busing orders.46 The Republican Party used the detachment of white elites from the implementation of integration to charge the Democratic Party with liberal elitism: championing the rights of minorities from a lofty perch on which they remain unaffected. In addition, the Republican Party cleverly began describing affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” arguing that better-qualified whites were losing jobs to less-qualified minorities. It was a cynical and ugly ploy, but it worked. And it’s still working. Charges of reverse discrimination have resulted in Supreme Court rulings that have all but ended affirmative action. The Republicans pursued a narrative of “color blindness,” arguing that the way to overcome past and current discrimination was to bar government from considering a person’s race at all, often co-opting and distorting Martin Luther King’s famous statement that “we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”

Meany became a vociferous advocate for the inclusion of the equal employment opportunity section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, testifying before the House in 1963 that “we need a federal law to help us do what we want to do: mop up those areas of discrimination which still persist in our own ranks.”24 But as I discuss more in the next chapter, racial tensions and discrimination remained deep problems in the labor movement, with many white union members abandoning the Democratic Party as policies around affirmative action and housing integration were implemented. The 1960s were a high-water mark for what is referred to as social movement unionism. Labor was an advocate not just for its members but for the entirety of the working class. In 1967, 25 percent of all political activity, such as voting and contacting legislators, was performed by union members.25 The working class was political, and its voice reverberated through state capitals across the country and through the halls of Congress.


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

Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Anthony S. Chen, “From Fair Employment to Equal Opportunity Employment and Beyond: Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Politics in the New Deal Order, 19411972” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002); Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Paul Frymer, “Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State,” Politics and Society 32 (2004): 475–509. 6.

Employers, as a 1993 survey pointed out, continue to use race to screen prospective employees. Remedies for systematic discrimination have met with limited success, primarily in the governmental sector (a part of the economy that was already opening to blacks after World War II) and in clerical employment. In other sectors, affirmative action has had little impact. Government-enforced affirmative action programs continued the trajectory of the antidiscrimination efforts of the Urban League and the NAACP in the 1950s. They played an important role in opening employment to middle-class blacks, and in breaking the deeply rooted barriers of discrimination in the city’s police and fire departments.

Detroit’s first African American mayor, Coleman Young, much like his white predecessors, used city employment and city contracts to reward loyal supporters over the course of his twenty-year mayoralty (1974–1994). But in the private sector, companies and workers continued to resist affirmative action programs, and blacks have remained underrepresented in skilled and white collar work throughout the post-riot years. By and large untouched by affirmative action programs have been the displaced working-class and poor black Detroiters most in need of assistance.22 Detroit has also remained intensely segregated by race and by class. Open housing and antidiscrimination efforts had little effect on metropolitan Detroit’s housing market.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

“Our diversity is our strength” became a truism not just in universities but across American institutions. And the kind of diversity universities and businesses value happens to be the same narrow kind of diversity that was at issue in the affirmative action cases—in theory, it’s diversity of thought that matters, but in practice, Diversity is all about skin-deep factors like race and sex. Race-based affirmative action has left the incubation chamber of the university and spread to the corporate world, even to my home turf in the biotech industry. When I was a biotech CEO, I was called on by BIO, the industry lobbying group, to support the BIOEquality Agenda, “a national effort… that aims to counteract the systemic inequality, injustice, and unfair treatment of underserved communities.”18 Some of the agenda’s goals are reasonable enough, such as ensuring that racial minorities are adequately represented in clinical trials and making sure underserved populations have access to vaccines and therapeutics—these are certainly pressing needs.

But for a single moment where America’s interest in diversity began to become a formalized obsession, take a look at Justice Powell’s famous concurrence in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. It was here, in an opinion about the constitutionality of racial quotas in university admissions, that American law began to really acknowledge the value of diversity. Over the years, as the Supreme Court’s affirmative action doctrine flourished and gave diversity more weight, Diversity grew strong too, first entrenching itself in universities and soon after that in all companies and institutions. Once we carved the value of Diversity into the Constitution, it became easy for it to spread to the rest of our culture.

Powell argued that the state of California did have a compelling interest in constructing a diverse class of students: “The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body.” The problem was just that a quota system was too crude. He held up Harvard University’s affirmative action program as an example of one that pursued diversity in an appropriately flexible way. Harvard used a policy called “holistic review,” where an applicant’s race was one kind of diversity out of many that could count in their favor.14 Decades later, in the landmark cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v.


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

The UDC contracted with a minority-run operation called the Recruitment and Training Program (R-T-P, formerly the Workers Defense League) to offer technical assistance and job counseling to minority workers on many project sites and with the Contractors’ Training and Development Office to help minority-owned contracting firms acquire skills including bookkeeping, writing proposals, and securing bank loans, all required when working with a state agency like the UDC.145 That Logue made affirmative action a UDC priority was clear in his instructions to Donald Cogsville, the UDC’s African American affirmative action officer. “I want you to go out and look at those sites and make a judgment about whether there are enough minorities on these jobs. If there aren’t, complain … tell him you’ll be back in four weeks more and if you don’t see improvement, the contractor’s not going to get paid.”146 Cogsville indeed credited the agency’s well-recognized success with affirmative action to having “a guy at the head of the organization who says ‘God damn, it’s going to be done,’ and then gives the freedom to do whatever is necessary to get things done.”147 Other developers and even a black activist in fact complained that the UDC was monopolizing the state’s very small number of minority subcontractors and black construction workers.

And in its worst moments, particularly in the years after the UDC collapsed and the HUDC continued to exist as an autonomous community development corporation, it made reckless decisions and often operated as a patronage machine for board members pursuing their own self-interest, taking advantage of HUDC’s access to public and private investment dollars.139 The UDC’s effort to mount a robust affirmative action program proved less controversial and brought more acclaim than the Harlem project. Not only did it fit better with Logue’s integrationist orientation, but he could control it fully through his power as UDC president rather than having to negotiate with a politically complex set of actors, as in Harlem. Governor Rockefeller had sent a strong message that New York State was committed to affirmative action, but Logue—more than most agency heads—took that charge to heart. Of the UDC’s 500 employees, 23 percent were minority, including 15 percent of the 330 professional and technical staffers.140 As early as 1970, nine of the UDC’s fifty-four projects had been designed by minority architects, although only 1 percent of New York State’s architects were black or Puerto Rican.141 By 1973, 16 percent of the UDC’s total construction contracts, worth more than $55.5 million, had gone to minority builders.

At this cornerstone ceremony in 1973, the Clarks are flanked to the right by Logue and William H. Hayden, director of the UDC’s New York City Region field office. A subsidiary, the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, initiated other projects nearby. (URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION) PROMOTING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Logue made a strong commitment to affirmative action, requiring that minorities’ participation in all aspects of UDC projects be proportional to their presence in a local area. UDC-sponsored loans and technical assistance programs helped minorities compete. Here, the architectural firm Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder is working with Gruzen & Partners on Schomburg Plaza.


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

Their history of victimization, they argued, entitled them to revenge, although they indicated a willingness to settle for reparations. For obvious reasons, liberals could agree to reparations in order to escape reprisals; but their sponsorship of busing and affirmative action carried no moral weight as gestures of "compassion." Those who supported busing and affirmative action—comfortable members of the professional and managerial classes, for the most part—did not have to live with the consequences of their actions. The burden of busing notoriously fell on ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, not on suburban liberals whose schools remained effectively segregated or on wealthy practitioners of "compassion" whose children did not attend public schools at all.

Not only did it not solve the problem of black poverty; it did not even address the deeper problem of self-respect. If anything, affirmative action undermined self-respect by creating the impression that black people had to be judged by standards lower than the ones applied to whites. At best, compensatory programs made it possible for talented individuals to escape from the ghetto, widen -409- ing the gap between the black middle class and the poor. The politics of resentment and reparation also widened the gap between liberals and the American public, which supported laws against segregation and disfranchisement but drew the line at busing and affirmative action. In the absence of a public consensus in favor of reverse discrimination, as it came to be called, liberals had to rely more and more on the courts, which proceeded to create a new category of prescriptive rights and to expand their own authority into the field of social engineering.

The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible—ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children—helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories—desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion— were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of seeking to create a popular consensus behind these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

This is a book about the ideas of blackness, how those ideas are changing, and how they differ from the popular ideas promoted in mainstream media and often in the black community itself. You’re probably familiar with the popular concept of blackness: hip-hop, crime and prison, fatherless homes, high blood pressure, school dropouts, drugs, athleticism, musical talent, The Wire, affirmative action, poverty, diabetes, the Civil Rights Movement, and, recently, the U.S. presidency. Some of these concepts are stereotypes. Some are true. Most are negative. But in the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness.

Thanks for joining us, Joe . . . Part 3—Black Issues There are two types of issues: those that have to do with black people and everything else. You must be prepared to comment on both. The following is a media-approved list of official black issues: • Crime. Why do black people do so much? • Affirmative action. Why do black people take jobs from white people? • Poverty. Why are black people poor? • Racism. Why haven’t black people gotten over it already? • Drugs. Why do black people do them? • Sunflower seeds. Why do black people love them? • Welfare. Why are black people on it? • Hip-hop. Why can’t black people just let us have it already?

If you find yourself running out of ways to blame black people, use any of the following tactics to distract your host: • Invoke the success of minority immigrants who came here voluntarily. • Cite the number of decades since the end of slavery. • Blame hip-hop. • Point to the example of Barack Obama. • Blame hip-hop again. This technique works whether for anti–affirmative action crusaders of the 1990s or black Tea Party members of the 2010s. Whichever black spokesperson path you choose, conservative or traditional, take pride in the fact that both can be equally unhelpful to your people. Beyond the Media In all likelihood, you won’t be called to perform such a high-profile task as representing all black people in the media, but you can still use this training in your everyday life.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

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

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

This is why the attempt by the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2017 to force its members to promote diversity is being challenged in the courts.34 In the 1960s, resistance to left-modernism came from formerly socialist, primarily Jewish, intellectuals like Bell, Nathan Glazer and others. Glazer was an especially influential critic of the multicultural resurgence of the 1990s.35 These criticisms shaped intellectual life on the centre-right and informed opposition to bilingualism and affirmative action in the United States. Even so, the multicultural narrative continued in the media while affirmative action was upheld by the courts and practised in elite universities. Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism.

There is also a question of collective dignity: if my group is not treated fairly and experiences poverty, even if I am rich and experience no discrimination, the group’s subaltern condition affects me. I share its pain. Whites generally are not discriminated against, but there are exceptions, such as affirmative action, which could be a source of legitimate white grievance. Here it’s noteworthy that Asian opposition to affirmative action in California is considered legitimate whereas white opposition is not. This is inconsistent. Whites may also lack community structures akin to those for minority groups when they experience failure, depression or loneliness. This is partly the legacy of their individualism and partly because they have not had to develop group institutions in the past to protect themselves.

One often sees this among, say, outsiders who have moved to ethnically distinctive regions like Cajun country or Cornwall and oppose rapid erosion of the Cajun/Cornish share of the local population. At the national level, this means some ethnic minorities – especially Hispanics and Asians in America – have a vicarious attachment to the white majority and support majority ethnic aims like reducing immigration or resisting affirmative action. As minorities increase in size, an important question for electoral politics is whether they will incline towards ethno-traditional nationalism or multiculturalism. MIGRATION AND ETHNIC GROUPS IN WORLD HISTORY In order to understand today’s populist upsurge we must stand back to take in a larger historical drama: the evolution of white-majority ethnic groups in the West.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

However, as another story about affirmative action—the move to redress gender, racial and ethnic inequality—illustrates, the target of grievance is rarely the source of the resentment. In 1995, Jennifer Gratz, a working-class girl who finished in the top 5 percent of her high school class, was rejected by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Gratz assumed she had been denied the place because of something she could not help—her race. The university used a points system when selecting applicants, and those from under-represented minorities automatically received extra points. Concluding that affirmative action had handed her place to a less qualified black student, Gratz turned, crying, to her father, her rejection letter in her hand, and asked, “Dad, can we sue?”

Rather than change the material realities that give the constructs of race and racism their meaning, the tortured logic went that, if you constructed race differently on a form, then maybe those realities and our understanding of them would change. Others, on the Right, saw the introduction of the category as a Trojan horse for the elimination of affirmative action. “The main effect of the multiracial check-off is that it will doom affirmative action, already on the run,” argued James Glassman in the Washington Post. For that very reason, many civil rights leaders argued against the multiracial box, viewing it as a direct assault on their ability to redress racial inequality that would dilute resources earmarked for minorities.

“When a white judge sits on a panel with at least one African-American judge,” the study, conducted by Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles, concluded, “she becomes roughly 20 percentage points more likely to find” a voting-rights violation. One of the most right-wing voices on the court, and a firm opponent of affirmative action, Antonin Scalia effectively confirmed this from his own experience. Referring to the presence of the first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, Scalia recalled: “[He] could be a persuasive force just by sitting there ... He wouldn’t have to open his mouth to affect the nature of the conference and how seriously the conference would take matters of race.”


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

But we need a more transparent social conversation about the design of affirmative action. The current implementation of affirmative action policies, which dances around the concept of race instead of directly confronting it, is probably not anywhere close to ideal. The Harvard challenge is both inevitable and perhaps desirable in that it makes society confront its own inconsistencies. From the perspective of the narrow objective of affecting preferences by increasing contact between social groups, the growing resentment of affirmative action poses a problem. Allport’s original hypothesis was that contact would reduce prejudice, but only if some conditions were satisfied.

HARVARD One implication of this evidence is that diversity in the student body of educational institutions is valuable in and of itself, because it durably affects preferences. Affirmative action was originally envisioned in the United States partly as compensation for historical injustice, and partly as a way to level the playing field between the whites, who had the advantage of many generations of advanced education, and the rest. But it goes much beyond that. What the twenty-seven RCTs on the effect of contact on tolerance imply is that this mixing is one of the most powerful instruments we have for making society more tolerant and more inclusive. The problem is that affirmative action itself is now a polarizing idea. In the spring of 2018, New York City struggled with the redesign of the admission system for its elite public schools, which is currently based on an exam and lets in very few Latinos and African Americans.

For example, the wage gap between the traditionally disadvantaged castes (SC/STs) and others dropped from 35 percent in 1983 to 29 percent in 2004.14 This does not look so spectacular, but is more than the improvement in the wage gap between blacks and whites in the United States over a similar time period. In part this is the result of the affirmative action policies Ambedkar put into place, which gave historically discriminated groups privileged access to educational institutions, government jobs, and the various legislatures. Economic transformation also helped. Urbanization, by making people more anonymous and less dependent on their village networks, has permitted greater mixing of the castes.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

They advocate for colour- and culture-blind access for all, while overlooking the built-in structural biases of service systems. The charge of preferential treatment of minorities flies around and feeds a political backlash. Recently, the tide has been turning against affirmative-action policies. The US Supreme Court in 2014 restricted affirmative action in admissions to schools.24 In 2009 the Supreme Court invalidated New Haven, Connecticut’s preferential promotion of non-White firemen over twenty White applicants.25 Canadian human rights tribunals are inundated with claims and counterclaims of discrimination by persons of both the minority and majority The Pluralism of Urban Services 213 backgrounds.

See Michael Ornstein, Ethno-racial Groups in Toronto 1971–2001: A Demographic and Social-economic Profile (Toronto: Institute for Social Research, York University, 2006) and Camille Zubrinsky Charles, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 300 Notes to pages 212–18 24 Bill Mears, “Michigan’s Ban on Affirmative Action Upheld by Supreme Court,” CNN News, 22 April 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/04/22/justice/ scotus-michigan-affirmative-action/. 25 Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Finds Bias against White Firefighters,” New York Times, 29 June 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/us/30scotus .html. 10. Urban Planning for Cultural Diversity 1 These goals of planning are not always compatible in all situations.

Although there are some disquieting questions about the segregationist consequences of ethnic agencies, they are particularly useful in the delivery of services to new immigrants and marginalized communities.15 By providing culturally and religiously appropriate services, ethnic agencies empower these groups and enhance the adequacy of services for them. 206 Multicultural Cities Yet it is the induction of minorities and excluded groups into decision making that consolidates the cultural responsiveness of service organizations. On this score, the past fifty years have witnessed steady progress in the enactment of anti-racism laws, human rights legislation, affirmative action policies, and employment equity programs. Minorities have not achieved full equality, but the barriers to their inclusion have come down. The City of Toronto undertook a comprehensive exercise in instituting access and equity policies in its municipal operations in 1998. Not that, before this exercise, Toronto was a city of indifference to racial and ethnic inequities.


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

Robert, 139 Abourezk, James, 168, 258, 382, 395 Abrams, Morris, 883 Abscam sting, 729, 769, 814 Abzug, Bella, 84, 92, 99, 131–132, 133, 148, 150, 156, 173, 175, 178, 182, 265, 820, 821 academic academics, 286, 287 Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) program, 350 Accuracy in Media, 857 Ackley, Gardner, 292 The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (Tim & Beverly LaHaye), 155 ACTION (agency), 264–265 Action Committee for Long Island, 753 Adams, Brock, 588 Adrian, Ron, 236 Advocacy for Children’s Television, 463 Advocate (newspaper), 92 affirmative action, Bakke case, 164–167 affirmative action tests, 354 Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer), 165 Afghanistan, 696–701, 700, 710–711, 711, 719 Africa Dan Crane on, 384 Reagan on racial issues, 221–222 African Americans affirmative action tests, 354 Bakke affirmative action case, 164–167, 482 Black Woman’s Agenda, 183 California anti-smoking proposition, 399 California Propositions 8 and 13, 324 Carter and, 214 Ku Klux Klan, 830–832, 851–852, 858–859 Reagan and, 368, 522, 884–885, 909 RNC recruiting black Republicans, 220 Roots miniseries, 66, 165–167 segregation academies, 349 women’s conference, 183 Agee, William, 801–802 Agent Orange, 556 Agnew, Spiro, 454, 455 agriculture, 428–431 Ahearn, Rick, 735 Ailes, Roger, 754 AIPAC.

Reported the Washington Post in its article on the amicus arguments in Bakke, “What potentially is the most influential brief has yet to be filed by the Justice Department, which has been struggling with the language of its arguments under intense pressure from civil rights leaders and the administrators of affirmative action plans in a number of federal departments.” Affirmative action was the perfect issue to keep the Democratic Party divided—which was why Richard Nixon had advocated expanding the Johnson administration’s Philadelphia Plan. On Monday, September 19, the Justice Department released its seventy-four-page Bakke brief. It was another hedging Carter administration performance. It endorsed the principle of “reasonable goals or targets,” but rejected “rigid exclusionary quotas”—without which, civil rights groups protested, the principle of affirmative action was moot. The argument was considerably to the left of an earlier, leaked draft.

Senator Helms convened Thomson, The Price of LIBerty; Marjorie Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 84. Allan Bakke Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 98–100. more friend-of-the-court briefs “57 Law Briefs on Bakke,” WP, September 17, 1977. Supporters of affirmative action For overview see John David Skrtenty, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). World of Our Fathers Jacobson, Roots Too, 18, 79, 269. “Everyone wants a ghetto” Ibid., 18. Jews, themselves victims “Rights Groups Divide Over Quotas,” NYT, June 12, 1977.


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We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Beginning with a 1978 case, University of California v. Bakke, the court began to insist that affirmative action policies, such as minority set-aside programs, satisfy constitutional law’s hardest test, “strict scrutiny.” Bakke suggested strict scrutiny was necessary because race-based affirmative action was another form of racial discrimination, raising the same concerns as Jim Crow laws. The effect of Bakke was to make it easier to challenge affirmative action polices as unconstitutional.27 Although strict scrutiny for affirmative action grew out of Bakke, that case split the justices and, as a result, there was no controlling majority opinion.

Stone’s justification for stricter judicial review of laws burdening minorities was grounded in political power: minority groups were easily victimized by the majority. Yet in the affirmative action cases, the justices abandoned that rationale, giving special judicial protection to the white majority. It was another example of reform adopted to help the powerless that was exploited and transformed by corporations to benefit the powerful. The Supreme Court justice who first suggested that race-based affirmative action be subject to strict scrutiny was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who authored the Bakke opinion. Another area of constitutional law in which Powell would have a tremendous influence was corporate rights.

And he did it because the company was owned and operated by Sikhs. As a result, the court said, “Flying B undoubtedly acquired an imputed racial identity.” Here, ascribing a racial identity to a corporation was necessary to give teeth to antidiscrimination law. Corporations today can also have a legally recognized racial identity under affirmative action policies. Federal law provides that companies with 51 percent minority control and ownership can be certified as “Minority Business Enterprises,” which qualifies them for a variety of contracting, banking, and training programs for economically and socially disadvantaged groups. States have similar programs, the result of which is effectively to classify particular companies as African American, Hispanic American, or Native American.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Since blacks are locked into a spiral of negative incentives, we need to work out how to change those incentives. Affirmative action programs are often thought to dampen the incentives of minority groups to work hard. If you’re going to get the job anyway through some affirmative action program, why work? A badly designed program certainly could have that effect, but it doesn’t have to. Instead, affirmative action could make the difference between a young black kid giving up because he thinks he has no chance and striving on because he realizes that he does have a chance if he studies. Not all affirmative action programs are alike; what matters is what impact the program has on incentives.

Fryer instead used a survey: Roland Fryer, with David Austen-Smith, “An Economic Analysis of ‘Acting White,’” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (May 2005): 551–83, post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/ papers/as_fryer_qje.pdf, and Fryer, “Acting White.” Fryer points to analogues: Roland Fryer, “A Model of Social Interactions and Endogenous Poverty Traps,” NBER Working Paper W12364, post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/papers/cultural_capital_final.pdf, forthcoming in Rationality and Society. Not all affirmative action programs: Roland Fryer and Glenn Loury, “Affirmative Action and Its Mythology,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3(Summer 2005): 147–62. Roland Fryer, who was recently: On Fryer’s randomized trial, interview with Roland Fryer, January 2007. On his appointment by the New York City education department, see Jennifer Medina, “His Charge: Find a Key to Students’ Success,” The New York Times, June 21, 2007.

Not all affirmative action programs are alike; what matters is what impact the program has on incentives. Given the complexities, I am not sure what a successful affirmative action program would look like, but I am sure that randomized trials, “Moving to Opportunity”–style, could pick out some success stories. Roland Fryer, who was recently appointed “chief equality officer” of New York City’s education department, has also been thinking about more direct incentives. What about paying kids to read? Or paying them more if they get better grades? He has secured the funding to run a big randomized trial with tens of thousands of kids, of all races. Some kids will be paid for their own achievements—say, two dollars to read a book.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

Indeed, an official report on the Jayson Blair episode included “A Note on Affirmative Action,” an appendix by Roger Wilkins, an activist who had become an urban affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board. Wilkins maintained that staff recruitment occurred within a culture where it was taught that “white men were the only people qualified to carry out the serious business of the world.” Thirty-five years of affirmative action had “blunted” but not eradicated “the preferences and prejudices that produced such results,” he argued, and therefore, “The countercultural forces of affirmative action and diversity programs are still necessary to assemble the kind of news gathering staff required to produce excellent journalism.”

Instead, he displayed a righteous, even sanctimonious insistence that he was “setting a moral standard.” Not surprisingly, the diversity dissidents in the newsroom—and there were quite a few—became skittish. As John Leo of U.S. News and World Report put it, the paper’s “hardening line on racial issues, built around affirmative action, group representation and government intervention,” was difficult for staffers to buck. “Reporters do not thrive by resisting the deeply held views of their publisher.... When opinionated publishers are heavily committed to any cause, the staff usually responds by avoiding coverage that casts that cause in a bad light.”

Touching on the combustible issue of racial preferences as a factor in Blair’s rise, the report explained that he had joined the Times through a minority-only internship and then was promoted to full-time reporter in January 2001, and that his immediate supervisor, Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor, objected but ultimately deferred to the paper’s “commitment to diversity.” Landman did warn his higher-ups that editors had to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times,” but that memo had little effect. Although the Times denied any connection between Blair and the broader issue of affirmative action, such a conclusion was hard to get around. The recently retired Times columnist William Safire said, “Apparently, this 27-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious black journalist to succeed.” As part of its lacerating self-inquiry, the paper held a special off-site “town meeting” of newsroom employees to address the worsening staff morale and many still-unanswered questions.


pages: 166 words: 52,755

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

affirmative action, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, clean water, Donald Trump, white flight, white picket fence, working poor

It is also something many don’t care to do anyway—and for good reason. The direct solution we offer for minorities is affirmative action, an accelerated boost to the front row for a lucky few, and although justifiable in the short term, it is a Band-Aid for a system needing surgery. For one thing, it still presumes that the main problem is a lack of education or credentialed achievement, implying that people who value less measurable forms of meaning get what’s coming to them. For another, affirmative action inflames racial tensions as it drives another wedge between the white and black members of the back row.

In the back row, it can feel as though everyone is sinking, making it the perfect environment for the politics of blame. That all anyone does is throw out a few lifesavers, providing an escape to a small group, makes it even more appealing. That the lifesavers are seen to unfairly go to minorities via affirmative action makes it even easier. Affirmative action is the right short-term way to try to deal with the long history of structural racism, yet if everyone—black, white, Hispanic—is sinking, it can feel unfair. If it is more about getting a larger share of a shrinking pie than a larger share of a growing pie, then it can inflame hate.

I could point to my childhood and say I was different from the rest of the whites in the front row, a more nuanced version of “I have black friends.” And I could tell myself I was doing everything I could for minorities. I voted for and argued for policies I saw as fighting the remaining problems—I supported criminal justice reform, I supported affirmative action, I supported expanding the social safety net, and I supported increasing my own taxes for all of this. Then I did more than drive through the Bronx or East New York. I spent time in each, and I listened, and I saw it wasn’t any better. It was just the same ol’ thing, dressed up differently.


pages: 476 words: 138,420

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation: A Case Study (Cambridge, MA, 1956). CHAPTER 13: LENIN’S VICTORY Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001); idem, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Sunny and Terry Martin (Oxford, 2001), 67–92; Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (New York, 2012); Vasyl Shakhrai and Serhii Mazlakh, On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, ed.

“In departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and expand the Union of Republics,” declared Stalin. “We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill that commandment of yours with honor!” Lenin’s vision of Great Russian chauvinism as the main threat in domestic politics, countered by the affirmative action for non-Russians, would characterize Stalin’s nationality policy for the rest of the decade. Stalin was loyal to some of Lenin’s ideas but not to others. Stalin adopted Lenin’s model of the Union but adapted it to his needs. His policy of “autonomization” of the republics was now dressed up as a federal union.

Adopted by the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, when Lenin had already left the political scene, the policy was rooted in Lenin’s writings on the Ukrainian question, particularly his texts of December 1919, when the Red Army had recaptured Ukraine from the armies of Denikin and the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic led by Symon Petliura. Back then, Lenin had argued for bringing local cadres into Soviet institutions. Now the party launched an affirmative-action program to staff party and government structures with non-Russians, thereby creating local elites loyal to the regime in faraway Moscow. The cultural component called for the promotion of local languages and cultures, which began with support for education, publishing, and theatrical performances in those languages and ended with the obligatory Ukrainization, Belarusization, and so on of the party and government apparatus, first on the local level and then in the major cities and capitals as well.


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

How it works as a practical matter can be tricky. I don’t think there are any simple mechanical rules for it. The attack on affirmative action is, to a large extent, an attempt to justify the oppressive, discriminatory patterns that existed in the past. On the other hand, affirmative action should certainly be designed so that it doesn’t harm poor people who don’t happen to be in the categories designated for support. That can be done. There have been very effective applications of affirmative action—in the universities, the construction industry, the public service field and elsewhere. If you look in detail, you find plenty of things to criticize, but the main thrust of the program is humane and appropriate.

Suppose you have two runners who start at exactly the same point, have the same sneakers, and so on. One finishes first and gets everything he wants; the other finishes second and starves to death. One of the mechanisms to address inequality is affirmative action. What do you think of it? Many societies just take it for granted. In India, for example, a sort of affirmative action system called reservations was instituted back in the late 1940s, at the time of independence, in an effort to try to overcome very long-standing and deep-seated caste and gender differences. Any such system is going to impose hardships on some people, in order (one hopes) to develop a more equitable and just society for the future.

Italics indicate brief identifications of people and organizations (often supple mented by other information as well). abortion Abrams, Elliott Acheson, Dean ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) Adams, John Quincy ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) aerospace industry, socialization of Aetna Life Insurance affirmative action Afghanistan Africa catastrophe of capitalism in deaths due to debt service in devastation by slave trade racist atrocities in African-American mortality rateSee also racism Africa Watch agro-export model of development Ahmad, Eqbal AIDS AIPAC Alabama Albanians Albright, Madeline alcohol Algeria Al Haq Allende, Salvador “alliance capitalism,” Alliance for Progress Alliance, the Allon plan alternative media.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

First . . . all construction and permanent jobs in the project area, both public and private, must go, wherever possible, to qualified residents of San Francisco—and half of these jobs must go to minority residents of San Francisco through an affirmative action program. All parties must agree that the San Francisco Coalition, backed by an adequate budget, will set up and monitor the affirmative action program for the jobs and contracts in the public and private blocks of YBC. . . . Second, the City must guarantee that the 400 or more units of lowincome housing struggled for and won by the people of South of Market will be built. . . .

The most concrete issue—regarding TOOR’s housing—was whittled down to a commitment to release only one hundred of the four hundred units from the tie-in to construction of the convention center. The affirmative action hiring demand rapidly boiled down to how much money the San Francisco Coalition would get to undertake recruitment and monitoring activities. The squeeze the City and agency faced was that the construction trade unions were not wild about affirmative action demands to begin with; as the April 17, 1975, Chronicle noted, “Labor unions have resisted giving the group [the S.F. Coalition] that much power over jobs. . . . ” A buy-off of the coali- The Redevelopment Agency Flounders / 125 tion seemed the easiest way out, and, according to the April 21, 1975, Chronicle, “The proposed agreement would give the coalition the money it had been seeking, but would not otherwise change the programs the unions have agreed to for minority workers on the project.”

The coalition’s original demand for an annual budget of $369,000 dropped to $251,000, and they finally settled for $180,000 annually for five years—$40,000 in cash and fourteen CETA positions worth $140,000. (Up through the time the agency ended its contract with the San Francisco Coalition, in January 1981, payments totaled $459,469. The actual number of placements was minuscule;22 few community organizations participated in coalition activities, and the more important ones—Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Mission Hiring Hall, Women in Apprenticeship— had resigned; board membership was constantly changing, and there was no board control of staff;23 funds were egregiously mishandled; and some of the key figures had been convicted of various crimes.24 It was a sad story: In its eagerness to build support for and remove obstacles to the YBC project, the agency, where African Americans and other minorities had played a major role as commissioners and staff, set up a sham response to a legitimate community demand for minority jobs.)


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

Arguably the most skillful parliamentarian in American politics since Woodrow Wilson, LBJ pushed one initiative after another through a Congress disoriented by the scale of civil rights protests, on the one hand, and the assassination of President Kennedy, on the other.8 A believer in the Keynesian principles of the New Deal order, LBJ was confident that he could use government to correct the ills of the American economy and society. LBJ also understood that he would need to attack and remedy racial inequality, a task that FDR had scrupulously evaded. Indeed, Johnson’s Great Society committed itself both to dismantling Jim Crow and to remedying through affirmative action the institutional racism that coursed its way through so many American institutions, private and public, North as well as South. In two landmark pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson delivered the strongest measures of their kind since Reconstruction.

His executive order 11246 committed his administration and subsequent ones to a vast project of social engineering: the elimination of racial, religious, and sexual bias from all institutions, public and private, that received significant amounts of federal funds. This program came to be known as affirmative action. Johnson did all this knowing that such an ambitious program of racial remediation, entirely deserving of the name “Second Reconstruction,” would probably cost the Democratic Party the white South, one of the key constituencies on which the New Deal order had built its power. That constituency included Democrats in Johnson’s home state, Texas, who had propelled him into public life and had facilitated his ascent to the presidency.9 If he perceived this outcome presciently, Johnson was also distracted from thinking about it by a war in Vietnam that he inherited from Eisenhower and Kennedy.

The crucial initiative in this regard was President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order 11246, little noticed when it was issued in 1965, which barred employers from “discrimination in employment decisions . . . on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The executive order affected contractors with fifty-one or more employees and doing business with the federal government worth more than $50,000 per year; they were required to develop affirmative action plans, based on whether analysis of their hiring practices showed disparities between the percentages of qualified minority and female applicants and the percentages actually hired. These new rules applied to thousands of employers who together (in the 1960s) employed 23 million workers spread out among 73,000 work sites.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

As the London Times c07.qxd 6/25/03 62 8:17 AM Page 62 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL editorialized at the time, “It is hard to see how the Arab world, still less the Arabs of Palestine, will suffer from what is mere recognition of accomplished fact—the presence in Palestine of a compact, well organized, and virtually autonomous Jewish community.”24 Even for those who reject any blameworthiness on the part of Palestinians and Arabs for the plight of the Jewish refugees from Nazism and Islamic apartheid—an untenable position in light of the history of widespread Palestinian support for Nazism—the case for some affirmative action for a people who suffered so grievously at the hands of others is powerful. Those of us who support affirmative action with regard to African Americans do so, at least in part, on a theory of reparation for past wrongs. Although our own forebearers may bear none of the responsibility for slavery, since they were not even in the country, we must all be willing to share some of the burdens of reparation.

Certainly those who directly benefited from slavery bear a special responsibility for making reparations, just as those who benefited from the Holocaust bear special responsibility to those who were its victims. But in a larger sense, the entire world owes the victims of slavery, the Holocaust, and other humanly imposed genocides a special form of affirmative action. Even the Peel Commission seemed to recognize an affirmative action component in its decision to recognize the existence of a Jewish national home: It is impossible, we believe, for any unprejudiced observer to see the National Home and not wish it well. It has meant so much for the relief of unmerited suffering. It displays so much energy and enterprise and devotion to a common cause.

In so far as Britain has helped towards its creation, we would claim, with Lord Balfour, that to that extent, at any rate, Christendom has shown itself “not oblivious of all the wrong it has done.”25 The Muslim world too should recognize all the wrong it has done to the Jews it historically treated as second-class noncitizens (Dhimmi). Even for those who did not believe in 1947 that partition of Palestine was just to the Palestinians, when the partition is viewed as a form of international affirmative action it seems more than fair. For those who support affirmative action based on the need for diversity, a Jewish state certainly adds considerable diversity to a world with more than forty Muslim states and numerous Christian, Hindu and Buddhist states. Although there already exists a state with a majority of Palestinians in Jordan, a new Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, governed by Palestinians, would also add an element of diversity.


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

These groups are ostensibly committed, sometimes subconsciously, to safeguarding privileges rooted in history. The identitarian alliance makes itself felt most prominently on college campuses and in entertainment. Its causes include multiculturalism, the sexual revolution, curriculum diversification, and affirmative action based on identity rather than economic status. Such causes face opposition, which identitarians struggle to silence through political correctness. As they see it, policing speech and behaviors offensive to their constituents enhances study and work environments; it levels an economic, social, and intellectual playing field that has long been tilted in favor of whites, men, and heterosexuals.8 In the 2010s, political correctness shifted emphasis from suppressing hate speech targeted at its constituents to creating safe spaces that shelter them from discomforting acts and expressions.

Loose-knit coalitions opposed to identitarian causes were forming, many centered in conservative churches. Televangelists such as Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck were ringing alarm bells about the prevailing social and political trends. The most worrying transformations involved feminism, abortion, affirmative action, drug abuse, growth in government, environmental regulation, and restrictions on religious practices. On these issues, TV networks, leading newspapers, government agencies, career politicians in Washington and state capitals, the higher-education community, Hollywood, and labor unions all tended to be on the wrong side.

The internal exchanges of political communities hide complexities, nuances, and variations. They tend to turn ranges of similar views into a single position immune to compromise. Just as a gun rights advocate may also believe in banning the private ownership of assault rifles, so a supporter of affirmative action may believe that without income thresholds, its benefits will go primarily to already privileged applicants. However, for fear of reprisals from their own political soul mates, both will self-censor. Hiding their private preferences and private knowledge about their group’s agenda, they will pretend to share its public consensus.


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

Sam's unfortunate position, considered to be emblematic of his race, wasn't the result of "white racism," which "was not a significant problem of American blacks in 1978, and white racism had nothing to do with the problems of my lumpen-hero Mitchell 'Sam' Brewer. To the contrary, his problem was the fantasy world of bizarre expectations and entitlements fostered by constant state indulgence and favoritism towards him" (ibid, pp. xiv, xv). It was "affirmative action and Marxist teaching" that did black Americans vvTX)ng. Those and the welfare state, which Gilder found irrationally generous, and fatal to the male authority necessary to keep social discipline, since it provided a check to women independent of husbands. Gilder never repudiated any of his early positions.

Since 1993, even the poorest fifth of black households have enjoyed stronger income gains than whites. The gap remains huge, with average black incomes just 64% of non-Hispanic whites in 2001, but there's no denying progress over the past decade. (It remains to be seen whether this progress will survive the attack on affirmative action.) For "Hispanic" households—a Census Bureau name and classification that many people object to, since it lumps together a highly diverse population into a single category—the news is mixed, with a bounce in recent years only partly compensating for a long earUer sHde. That sHde is the result of recent immigrants, many of them quite poor, bringing down the "Hispanic" average.

Until recently, women had been entering the labor force at progressively higher wage rates relative to men. Women aged 20—24 earned 76% as much as men the same age in 1979, and 96% in 1993; those between 25 and 34 went from 67% to 83%—but by 1999, both numbers had slipped a bit. It may be that weakened affirmative action programs and the male bias of the higher paying new jobs are responsible, or it may be that the predominant maleness of higher-paying jobs in high tech are the culprits, but we don't know for sure yet. Putting race and sex together, we discover that white men, though still the best paid demographic group on average, have been sHpping over the last two decades; white women have been gaining; some black men have been entering high-wage work, while others have been sHpping into 94 After the New Economy low-wage work, chronic unemployment, and prison (though the tight labor markets of the late 1990s helped narrow the racial/ethnic gap in male earnings rather sharply); some black women have been trickling into high-wage employment, though most remain concentrated in low-wage sectors; and Latino men and women have been entering the workforce in large numbers, though mostly at the poorly-paid end, with minimal penetration of higher-wage sectors (Williams 1999).


End the Fed by Ron Paul

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

The flawed concept of economic equality through force, a socialist notion, prompted legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, which was really a way of institutionalizing affirmative action in the financial sector, since the borrowers who temporarily benefited (or were exploited) were disproportionately minorities. The very most one might concede is that affirmative action in making loans is based on the good intentions of many who support the programs. But as with all government actions, unintended consequences and new problems result. The problem is that, in the early stages, government economic planning and affirmative action lending look appealing. More homes are built and more people purchase homes that they otherwise would not have qualified for.

The process of monetary debasement, by inflating the money supply, redistributes wealth unfairly and dangerously from the middle class to the wealthy. It’s based on the principles of fraud and is equivalent to counterfeiting. Its goals are achieved through stealth and are difficult for the masses to recognize. Instead, the people are conditioned to believe that easy credit, monetizing debt, and affirmative action loans are reflective of good economic policy and are morally motivated. The tragedy is only recognized when the fraud of an immoral, unsustainable monetary inflation comes to an end. That is what we’re suffering from today. When arguing for sound money, the great concern I hear from the Keynesians is for the loss of the “benefits” of inflation; the people and the special interests argue that more of the same is needed.


pages: 369 words: 90,630

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

The most compelling evidence, however, comes from experiments in which we manipulated people’s own beliefs and measured how it affected what people think God and others believe. In one, we showed volunteers persuasive arguments either in favor of or opposed to affirmative action. The arguments worked: those who read the pro–affirmative action information became more in favor, whereas those who read the anti–affirmative action arguments became more opposed. More important, our manipulation moved our volunteers’ estimates of God’s beliefs in lockstep with their own, whereas estimates of other people’s beliefs were unaffected by the arguments the volunteers read.

The American electorate has also exaggerated the magnitude of these differences, particularly in recent years, as elected officials have become more polarized in their own behavior.30 Graphical depictions that highlight the differences between “red states” and “blue states” only make matters worse, according to research, increasing the perceived differences between groups rather than merely reflecting them.31 And on specific issues ranging from affirmative action to welfare policies, people on opposing sides of each issue consistently assume that the other side is more extreme than it actually is.32 The sad fact is that real partisanship increases partly because of imagined partisanship on the other side. Disputes about abortion rights, for instance, focus both on the rights of the mother and on the rights of the unborn.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68: 404–17; Farwell, L., and B. Weiner (2000). Bleeding hearts and the heartless: Popular perceptions of liberal and conservative ideologies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26: 845–52; Sherman, D. K., L. D. Nelson, and L.D. Ross (2003). Naive realism and affirmative action: Adversaries are more similar than they think. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 25: 275–89. 33. Fiorina, M. P., and S. J. Abrams (2008). Political polarization in the American public. Annual Review of Political Science 11: 563–88; Seyle, D. C., and M. L. Newman (2006). A house divided? The psychology of red and blue America.


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

When Martin Luther King Jr. argued that people should not be judged “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he was asking to be judged. But other progressives took a more utopian approach, demanding “equality of result.” This unleashed a huge amount of state activity. The British replaced grammar schools with comprehensives and decreased streaming by ability. The Americans introduced an increasingly aggressive form of affirmative action. Fighting discrimination no longer meant just getting rid of restrictions on people’s ability to express their ­talents. It meant ensuring proportionality: Blacks and other ethnic minorities needed to be awarded places in universities and government contracts in line with their overall numbers.

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. Britain’s decision to abolish the grammar schools reduced social mobility. America’s enthusiasm for affirmative action increased the number of academic dropouts, as minority students who might have done perfectly well in less-demanding colleges struggled in elite institutions.17 A. H. Halsey, one of the ­leaders of the educational Left, was forced to declare in 1972 that “the ­essential fact of twentieth century educational history is that ­egalitarian policies have failed.”18 By the time Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power, Friedman’s barbs about big government no longer seemed far-fetched.

Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 38. 16. Quoted in John Samples, The Struggle to Limit Government (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2010), p. 54. 17. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 18. A. H. Halsey, ed., Department of Education and Science, Education Priority, vol. 1, Problems and Policies (London: HMSO, 1972), p. 6. Cf. A. H. Halsey, “Sociology and the Equality Debate,” Oxford Review of Education 1, no. 1 (1975), pp. 9–26. 19.


pages: 230 words: 71,320

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

law school, we see that the white students do better. That's not surprising: if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than the other, it's almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well. This is one reason that affirmative action programs are so controversial. In fact, an attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action program recently went all the way to the US Supreme Court. For many people it is troubling that an elite educational institution lets in students who are less qualified than their peers. A few years ago, however, the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school's minority students had fared after they graduated.

A s Hudson writes (and keep in mind that he did his research at elite all-male English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s), “Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with aformful of clever boys.”'' Let me give you an example of the threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan law school, like many elite US educational institutions, uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school did not significantly relax its entry requirements for those studentsadmitting them with lower undergraduate grades and lower standardized-test scores than everyone elseit estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent.

That's the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn't selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” testand maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability. It's also the second reason Michigan Law School couldn't find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni. Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ. It involves having the kind of fertile mind that Poole had. And just because Michigan's minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn't mean they don't have that other critical trait in abundance.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

Furthermore, all else being equal, attractive high school girls probably receive more favorable treatment from many of their male teachers; to think otherwise is to come close to basically rejecting evolution. Elite colleges also use affirmative action to guarantee that their schools have an “acceptable” number of minority students. Since most couples probably want an egg donor of their own race, an egg-desirability-maximizing college would also use affirmative action as part of their admissions criteria so that they could serve minority egg buyers. Colleges often justify affirmative action by explaining that it “levels the playing field,” making up for the discrimination and inferior education that unjustly handicaps many minority applicants.

But a college genuinely interested in helping high school students who have faced unfair disadvantages would give admissions preferences to unattractive, autistic, or low-IQ applicants—all traits which, coincidentally, egg buyers would find undesirable. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, colleges never give students with these traits affirmative-action consideration. Colleges claim that they give admission preferences to poor students, but a study by a Princeton sociologist found that “whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage . . . compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds.”201 Egg buyers would probably not consider an impoverished background an attractive feature and might even find it undesirable if it meant that the donor was raised in an unhealthy environment in which she received suboptimal nutrition.

See also amphetamines; cognitive-enhancement drugs author’s use of, 104–5, 112 black market for, 102, 163, 212 focus-improving drug, xv high achievers and grade grubbers benefit from, 163 SAT tests and, 102, 162–63 at Smith College, 102–7, 112, 163 ADHD. See Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Advanced Micro Devices, 122 affirmative action, 87 Africa, 117 African Americans, 173 Age of Enlightenment, 165 aging populations, 177 agricultural jobs, 132 agricultural technology, 132 AI. See artificial intelligence (AI) air conditioning, 166 akrasia, 106–7 Alcor, Arizona (cryonics), 212, 214–216, 221 Alexander the Great, xv alien life, intelligent, 200 alien workers, 135 allele, 20 Allen, Paul, 11 Allen Institute for Brain Science, 11 Alzheimer’s, 17, 108, 169, 181, 221.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

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

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

At a time when the courts have all but ended affirmative action for black children seeking college admission, high-end universities provide preferential admission to the children of wealthy alumni—legacies, as they’re delicately called. Some prestigious colleges have even been known to make quiet deals with wealthy non-alums—admission for their kids with the expectation of a large donation to follow. Jared Kushner’s father reportedly pledged $2.5 million to Harvard just as Jared was applying. The young man gained admission despite rather mediocre grades. The most brazen affirmative-action program for children of the wealthy is the preference baked into elite admissions for graduates from private prep schools.

You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and in principle you wish them well. But you’ve waited long, worked hard, and the line is barely moving. Then you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Who are these interlopers? Some are black, others immigrants, refugees. They get affirmative action, sympathy, and welfare—checks for the listless and idle. The government wants you to feel sorry for them. The liberal media mocks you as racist or homophobic. Everywhere you look, you feel betrayed. While Hochschild finds that “race is an essential part of this story,” the other essential parts are feelings of declining social status and betrayal.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

I look at the “colorblind” organizing logic of Yelp and how business owners are revolting due to loss of control over how they are represented and the impact of how the public finds them. Here, I share an interview with Kandis from New York,10 whose livelihood has been dramatically affected by public-policy changes such as the dismantling of affirmative action on college campuses, which have hurt her local Black-hair-care business in a prestigious college town. Her story brings to light the power that algorithms have on her everyday life and leaves us with more to think about in the ecosystem of algorithmic power. The book closes with a call to recognize the importance of how algorithms are shifting social relations in many ways—more ways than this book can cover—and should be regulated with more impactful public policy in the United States than we currently have.

This is evident in the past thirty years of active antilabor policies put forward by several administrations47 and in increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the antidemocratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems.48 Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes.

I mean, other students can go down the street to anyone, but the Black students have to have a car to travel thirty minutes across town? Why are they required have to have a car or transportation when no one else needs that to get their hair done? Kandis was directly impacted by the shifts away from affirmative action that decimated the admission of African Americans to colleges and universities over the past twenty years: Sometimes people are in a highly competitive arena, and they need to go to a nonjudgmental place where they can be themselves and where they don’t have to apologize for the way they speak or their culture or wonder if they go to a Caucasian hair stylist, if they can handle their hair.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

So, in an indirect way, [the ERC’s recommendations] address those illegal leaks of information and the harm to Lincoln. Much like Affirmative Action addresses discrimination, it’s not directly in response, and yet it seems to be a fair way to deal with what we have on the table. (423–424) This may be the single most muddleheaded analogy in regulatory history. It was not spontaneous: Stewart had been trying it out on others for months. The irony of Stewart calling for “Affirmative Action” for Keating, one of the most privileged human beings on the planet, was rich. She was probably not aware that he was a racist and sexist bigot of truly epic proportions and that he despised affirmative action (Binstein and Bowden 1993, 236, 248, 380).

The larger point, however, is that Stewart refused to bring any enforcement action against ACC and Lincoln Savings; indeed, she declined even to investigate, Stewart knew that any enforcement action would have the same effect as ordering a halt to the junk bond sales to the widows: it would expose the failure of ACC and Lincoln Savings as well as her leadership role in the Bank Board’s acquiescence in Keating’s demands. Stewart had championed affirmative action for Keating on the grounds that newspaper articles had (accurately) exposed his misdeeds. She now decided that the Bank Board should take no meaningful affirmative action on behalf of the widows or the taxpayers. Dochow, shorn of any enforcement support, issued an unenforceable “directive” to Lincoln Savings to stop a significant number of acts, but he had issued no directive to ACC to stop the bond sales in 1988.

They represent the only time in history that a financial regulatory agency consented to what was, in substance, a cease-and-desist order against the agency and permitted an institution that it had found to be in massive violation of its rules to increase those violations. The Bank Board got no meaningful restrictions on Lincoln Savings; instead it surrendered unconditionally and provided reparations (“affirmative action,” in Stewart’s parlance). There were three documents signed on May 20, 1988. The Bank Board eventually gave copies of two of them to the CDSL, which gave us copies. The third document was not disclosed outside a small group at headquarters (and Lincoln Savings). The Bank Board got two things in the agreement: ACC agreed to contribute $10 million to Lincoln Savings to increase its capital, and Lincoln Savings agreed to recognize a relatively small number of accounting adjustments that would have the effect of reducing its capital.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

“Whites were unified in seeing”: Myrdal, American Dilemma, vol. 2, p. 598. it is white women, and thus white families: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Framing Affirmative Action,” 105 Michigan Law Review First Impressions 123 (2007), https://repository.law.umich.edu/​mlr_fi/​vol105/​iss1/​4/; Victoria M. Massie, “White Women Benefit Most from Affirmative Action—and Are Among Its Fiercest Opponents,” Vox, May 25, 2016, https://www.vox.com/​2016/​5/25/​11682950/​fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action. “for structural economic problems”: Ashley Crossman, “Definition of Scapegoat, Scapegoating, and Scapegoat Theory,” ThoughtCo., August 2, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/​scapegoat-definition-3026572.

Both have been “particularly singled out from other groups” based on characteristics ascribed to them. While doors have opened to the subordinated castes in India and in America in the decades since discrimination was officially prohibited, the same spasms of resistance have afflicted both countries. What is called “affirmative action” in the United States is called “reservations” in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries, language tracking in lockstep, with complaints of reverse discrimination in one and reverse casteism in the other. There are many overarching similarities but they are not the same in how they are structured or operate.

In the United States and in India, people in the dominant caste have blamed stagnant careers or rejections in college admissions on marginalized people in the lower caste, even though African-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India are rarely in positions to decide who will get hired at corporations or admitted to universities. In the United States, it is a numerical impossibility for African-Americans to wreak such havoc in employment and higher education: there are simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding. Notably, while affirmative action grew out of the civil rights movement fought by lowest-caste people and their white allies, decades of analysis show that it is white women, and thus white families, rather than African-Americans, who became the prime beneficiaries of a plan intended to redress centuries of injustice against the lowest-caste people.


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

Black men worked in the mills already but were trapped in undesirable and vulnerable departments because workplace seniority operated at the departmental level rather than plant-wide. In this context, the NAACP and groups of organized Black steelworkers intensified their campaign against discrimination by both management and the union. This action, which helped lead to a 1974 federal consent decree mandating affirmative action hiring and integration of seniority lines at the plant-wide level, is generally seen as a workplace spillover of the struggle for civil rights or even a program initiated from above by liberal bureaucrats. Certainly it required the new movement context and state capacity of the 1960s. But the movement for equal employment in steel was also a form of grassroots action, which is better understood in the context of the rapid downturn in the economic fortunes of Black steelworkers over the course of the 1960s.66 It was only in the second half of the decade—amid the steep decline in Black steel employment—that movement activity picked up, in the form of the national organization by Black workers of the Ad Hoc Committee, which enjoyed significant participation and leadership in Pittsburgh-area mills.

Because of weak demand, the blast furnace was shut down, which meant that most African Americans had been furloughed. The confinement of Black workers to seniority lines in the hottest, dirtiest departments led to a set of lawsuits aggregated and settled in a 1974 consent decree. Under this settlement, steel mills and the union began affirmative action hiring of women and African Americans and to shift to a plant-wide rather than departmental seniority system. In theory, this gave Black workers the chance to rise out of the coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open hearths.9 In retrospect, the consent decree appears more as a diagnosis of the industry’s discriminatory practices than a prescription to correct them.

In the longer view, the confrontation eventually played a key role in the conception of the nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign, a rare labor success story of the 1990s.83 As a general rule, the struggles of the postindustrial working class originated in such defensive episodes, as the labor market surplus brought about by the collapse of manufacturing worsened competition for work, drove down wages, and emboldened employers. This was the economic minefield individual workers had to cross. Mary Washington graduated from Steel Valley High in 1976. Soon thereafter she got a job at US Steel hooking structural steel beams to cranes—thanks, no doubt, to the 1974 affirmative action consent decree. But she lost the job in 1982. After a few years without work, she got hired as a nurse’s aide—near minimum-wage work. From her work history, it is clear that she had no formal experience in the field, but the racial and gender structures of the labor market knew where to put her.84 Sharon Browning, a white woman, was the daughter of a steelworker, and she had not anticipated a wage-earning life.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

As Delgado and Stefancic observe, Although CRT [critical race Theory] began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools.26 They list critical race Theory’s strongest footholds, indicating how effectively it can embed itself in other disciplines: Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists, while women’s studies professors teach about intersectionality—the predicament of women of color and others who sit at the intersection of two or more categories.

Delgado and Stefancic regard this as positive: As this book went to press, students on several dozen campuses were demonstrating for “safe spaces” and protection from racially hostile climates with daily insults, epithets, slurs, and displays of Confederate symbols and flags. These “campus climate” issues are prompting serious reconsideration among university administrators, and for good reason. With affirmative action under sharp attack, universities need to assure that their campuses are as welcoming as possible. At the same time, a new generation of millennials seems to be demonstrating a renewed willingness to confront illegitimate authority.29 Critical race Theory has become very much a part of campus culture in many universities and, interestingly, is most evident at the most elite institutions.

Theory insists that only by understanding the various groups and the social constructions around those groups can one truly understand society, people, and their experiences. This conceptual shift facilitates group identity and thus identity politics, which are often radical. Because of intersectionality’s sheer versatility as a tool, it appeals to those involved in many different forms of engagement, ranging from legal activism and academic analysis to affirmative action and educational theory.52 Mainstream activism has also eagerly embraced intersectionality—especially its concept of privilege, an idea that is vigorously insisted upon, often to the point of bullying and browbeating. THE MEME OF SOCIAL JUSTICE The expansion of intersectionality’s sphere of influence has been considerable and perhaps unavoidable.


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

A second item also codes favorable references to ‘under-­privileged minorities’ – specified as ‘handicapped, homosexuals, immigrants, and indigenous populations.’ But there is no explicit reference to coding the range of contemporary policy issues revolving around the politics of sexuality and gender, including sex equality, affirmative action, and equal opportunities policies, women’s rights, equal pay laws, feminism, maternity or paternity Part III From Values to Votes 229 leave, maternity health and childcare, gender and sexual identities, gay and transsexual rights, affirmative action in the workplace and public sphere, rights to same sex marriage and civil unions, gender quotas in elected bodies, sexual harassment, domestic violence, women serving in the military, and so on.

In foreign affairs, this viewpoint favors the protection of national sovereignty, secure borders, a strong military, and trade protectionism (‘America First’), rather than membership of the European Union, diplomatic alliances, human rights, international engagement, and multilateral cooperation within the G7, NATO, and United Nations. Moreover, Authoritarian Populism favors policies where the state actively intervenes to restrict non-­traditional lifestyles, typically by limiting same sex marriage, LGBTQ rights and gender equality, access to contraception and abortion, and affirmative action or quotas – unless, in some cases, these types of liberal policies are framed as a defense of national cultures against attacks by ‘others.’ Finally, in the public sphere, since liberal democracy has been delegitimized, authoritarian populists favor strong governance preserving order and security against perceived threat (‘They are sending rapists’ ‘radical Islamic terrorists’), even at the expense of democratic norms protecting judicial independence, freedom of the media, human rights and civil liberties, the oversight role of representative assemblies, and standards of electoral integrity.

Such self-­censorship seems to underlie resentment against ‘political correctness.’ If this argument is correct, a snowball or band-­wagon effect should be observable in the public square as socially liberal values are seen to gain acceptance in society, such as support for non-­traditional families, gay marriage, affirmative action for women and minorities, legalizing recreational drugs, animal rights movements, environmental protection, and transgender rights. This reaction depends on whether people are aware of changing social norms – which may not happen – for example where distinctive sub-­ cultures persist within isolated communities, or if the cues about what is socially acceptable come from media bubbles or dominant opinion leaders, or during periods of rapid transition and intense polarized debate where it may be unclear what social norms should guide acceptable ideas and behavior.44 Moreover, conservatives who perceive that orthodox moral beliefs are slipping to marginal status within their societies are likely to feel threatened by the loss of respect for their values.


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

In other words, Wallace’s base was among voters who saw themselves as “middle class”—the American equivalent of “the people”—and who saw themselves locked in conflict with those below and above. Like Wallace, they remained New Deal liberals in many of their views, but not on matters that bore on race or law and order. In these cases, they adamantly rejected the welfare and busing and affirmative action policies that 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and many liberal Democrats favored. They had begun the political journey from Democrat to Independent to Republican that would finally conclude in the 1994 congressional elections. Wallace, like Long, was a movement unto himself.

He would end his career much as he began—as a New Deal Democrat. But Wallace and his followers had already had a profound influence on the two-party system. Wallace’s campaigns were the opening wedge in the realignment of the parties in the South. The Republicans would subsequently accommodate Wallace’s positions on big government, welfare, busing, and affirmative action. And Nixon had already begun to do that. As Kevin Phillips understood in his prescient 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, Wallace’s votes would migrate to the Republican Party. In 1972, Nixon’s percentage vote against McGovern closely resembled the total of Nixon and Wallace’s votes in 1968 in 45 of 50 states.

Operatives crafted a majority coalition that was composed of the traditional Republican business class, small businesses and farmers, and white working-class voters who had began fleeing the Democratic Party because of its support for civil rights, feminism, and the secular counterculture. There was an implicit arrangement by which the major business lobbies would acquiesce in Republican opposition to abortion, gun control, or affirmative action in exchange for working-class support for reductions in regulations and taxes. The one area in which Republican business and the new white working-class Republicans could wholeheartedly agree was cutting social spending. Businesses generally favored any spending cuts that would lower pressure to raise taxes on them and their stockholders.


pages: 167 words: 50,652

Alternatives to Capitalism by Robin Hahnel, Erik Olin Wright

affirmative action, basic income, crowdsourcing, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, loose coupling, means of production, Pareto efficiency, profit maximization, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, transaction costs

Real utopias, in contrast, envision the contours of an alternative social world that embodies emancipatory ideals and then look for social innovations we can create in the world as it is that move us towards that destination. Now sometimes this turns out to be the same as an ameliorative reform, but often ameliorative reforms do not constitute building blocks of an emancipatory alternative. Consider, for example, affirmative action policies around race. Affirmative action is one of the critical policies for combating the pernicious effects of ongoing racism, not merely the legacies of racism in the past. But affirmative action is not itself a building block of a world of racial justice and emancipation. It is a necessary means to neutralize severe harms of racism in the world as it exists, but it is not itself a constitutive element of the alternative that we seek.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

A third complication was that Mahathir mixed up industrial policy with affirmative action. He came to power promising to raise up the indigenous bumiputera150 population. In so doing, he painted himself into a racial corner where he decided he could not use Malaysia’s mostly ethnic Chinese and Tamil established entrepreneurs to run his new heavy industrial investments. Instead, he tried to implement effective industrial policy and create a new generation of Malay entrepreneurs at the same time. This was always going to be difficult. In the absence of export discipline and private sector competition, it was impossible. Affirmative action led to the cruellest irony of Mahathir’s industrialisation programme.

His best-known book, The Malay Dilemma, is a rambling discourse on the plight of the Malays that contrasts powerfully with Park Chung Hee’s two books of the early 1960s, which contained much more practical analysis of what Korea needed to do to in order to ascend the industrial learning curve.135 Mahathir had had his political reckoning with the Tunku after the anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur in May 1969 left around 200 people dead.136 He wrote an open letter to the prime minister blaming his witless premiership for the killings and suggesting he was likely playing poker – the Tunku, like many members of the Malaysian upper class, was fond of gambling – while KL burned. As a result Mahathir was expelled from UMNO. The Tunku, however, had become a political liability and was eased out of power by other senior politicians. In 1971, Malaysia introduced an affirmative action plan called the New Economic Policy to ease racial tensions. With the Tunku gone, Mahathir was readmitted to UMNO after only three years, and a year after that he became Minister of Education. When the second prime minister, Razak, and his deputy both died prematurely of natural causes, Hussein Onn took over and in 1976 turned, quite unexpectedly, to Mahathir to be his deputy.

The choice of the east coast was also commercially dubious because most steel in Malaysia is consumed on the much more populous and industrialised west coast. It would have made more business sense to pipe the gas fuel supply from the nearby offshore fields to the west side of the peninsula and to make steel where it is needed. None the less, Mahathir’s determination to marry affirmative action – by building the plant in what is called ‘the Malay heartland’ – with industrial policy was not of itself enough to wreck this project. Instead, he made a series of compounding errors. The most egregious of these were to have no export requirement and to fail to critique the project recommended by Perwaja’s Japanese partner, a consortium led by Nippon Steel (the same partner the Koreans had).


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Surely there are some black Basque lesbian quadriplegic pro-life vehicular cyclists you can have on the committee.”129 perhaps the most disingenuous aspect of vehicular cyclists mocking the issues of diversity and affirmative action is the total lack of reservation shown in formulating advocacy strategies that appropriate such terms to manipulate public opinion. a brief dialogue about advocacy strategies illustrates this point: Might it be possible to rally an adequate number of pedestrian advocates and bicyclist advocates behind the non-prejudicial “universal access” cause, and away from the anti-car affirmative-action campaigns that ensure prolonged friction between user groups, in order to speed the adoption of constructive public policy?

Shouldn’t the audience that could be infected by such a meme be larger than the population that simply hates cars and the people who drive them? —Steven Goodridge your Universal access paradigm is excellent. The only problems are overcoming current inertia and getting its message out to a critical mass. Exponential numbers of people must be infected by the meme. affirmative action for bicyclists has a huge following. affirmative action in civil rights does too. it may be a better strategy to couch it as segregationist vs. integrationist. it’s harsher, which i think is necessary to convert/enlighten bike lane and path devotees. —Wayne pein130 resorting to such convoluted measures to convert people away from simply having their own opinion, or preference, for travel shows how little credence most vC advocates actually give to those who either lack their cycling instructor credentials or deviate from a hard-line stance that effectively shields automobility from any and all forms of criticism.

On the basis of self-interest, the roadway users—cyclists and motorists—should be in one corner and the anti-traffic forces—political bicyclists, residentialists, and environmentalists—in the other. . . . assume, until you know otherwise, that those who have initiated contact with you are political bicyclists, and that real cyclists have seen no useful reason to contact government.124 instead of praising cyclists for taking an active role in the political process or working toward a more egalitarian vision of mobility, Forester and his supporters frame government-funded bicycle facilities as restrictive, choosing to champion equality as a reaganite ethos of every man for himself: “Same roads—Same rights—Same rules.”125 Equality, in this sense of sameness, is conceived not as the rectification of a national problem whereby one form of mobility (auto transportation) dominates public thoroughfares, receives a grossly disproportionate amount of government subsidies, and poses undue physical threats to pedestrians, cyclists, the elderly, children, and people of color. rather, it functions as an ideological and political rationale for voluntary cyclists (those who ride out of choice as opposed to low income) to legitimize their participation in an already unequal matrix of public spaces.126 The idea that the street is somehow a space of equality, or neutrality, that one accesses by simply disciplining and ultimately demonstrating one’s cycling skill is a premise that holds true only if one decontextualizes, if not totally ignores, all the relevant socioeconomic, physical, material, and cultural factors that influence—and in most cases dictate—everyday transportation choices. it virtually mirrors the claims of cyclists in the nineteenth century who, by virtue of their socioeconomic and/or racial status, could easily ignore the cultural restraints on public mobility because they were never subject to them in the first place. not coincidentally, it is a group of mainly white, middle- to upper-class men who now reproduce this same ideology with recourse to similar vulgar psychological explanations. The main difference now is the brazen manner in which vC proponents use racially loaded terms like segregationists (bikeway advocates) and ghettoization (being forced into bike lanes) while they promote a paradigm that explicitly, and openly, condemns what they see as “affirmative action” policies.127 One can peruse the archives of the Chain Guard, an online discussion list for vC advocates, to see just how pointedly the issue of bicycle transportation is framed in such terms. One person writes: i despair of responding at length to all the unending preferences for prioritizing the “special needs” of all the presumed incapable bike riders while we continue to ignore the development of informed, intelligent, safe, enjoyable, efficient transportation by driving a bicycle on normal roads with normal training and education easily achieved by almost all of us, while we promote equal rights.128 The lip service given to equal rights is nicely highlighted in later discussion about the formation of Bicycle advisory Committees, which are groups that recommend localized policies for cycling.


pages: 456 words: 185,658

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

The Texas Gun Owner’s Guide. Phoenix: Bloomfield Press, 1998. Leamer, Edward E. “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics.” American Economic Review 73 (Mar. 1983): 31–43. Lott, John R., Jr. “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime.” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38 (April 2000), forthcoming. ———. “Who Is Really Hurt by Affirmative Action?” Subject to Debate, May 1998, pp. 1, 3. Lott, John R., Jr., and John E. Whitley. “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime.” Yale Law School working paper, October 1, 1999. Ludwig, Jens. “Concealed-Gun-Carrying Law and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data.”

Handgun Control and the Violence Policy Center spread claims such as “Lott has argued that the hiring of more 204 | CHAPTER NINE women and minorities in law enforcement has actually increased crime rates.”48 They have made this claim on their Web sites, in debates, and on radio programs.49 In fact, I had stated that this would be the wrong conclusion to reach. The paper argued: “But it would be a serious mistake not to realize that this simple relationship is masking that the new rules reduce the quality of new hires from other groups.”50 The affirmative action rules which changed the testing standards lowered the quality of new police hires across the board, and that was showing itself in the simple relationship between minority hires and crime.51 On the upside, many have come to my defense. One academic review of my book noted, “The personal (and, to those who know him, completely unfounded) attacks on John Lott’s integrity were made with such ferocity and in so many media outlets nationwide that one can only conclude that Lott was, with apologies to our gracious First Lady [Hillary Clinton], the target of a vast left-wing conspiracy to discredit his politically incorrect findings.”52 Another academic review wrote: “the ease with which guncontrol advocates could get misleading and even false claims published by the press raises important public choice questions.

Other work that I have done indicates that while hiring certain types of police officers can be quite effective in reducing crime rates, the net benefit from hiring an additional police officer is about a quarter of the benefit from spending an equivalent amount on concealed handguns. See John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” University of Chicago working paper (July 1997). 4. The cost of public prisons runs about twice this rate; see Mike Flaherty, “Prisons for Profit; Can Texas System Work for Wisconsin’s Overflowing System,” Wisconsin State Journal, Feb. 16, 1997, p. Al. 5. Fox Butterfield, “Serious Crime Decreased for Fifth Year in a Row,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1997, p. 10. 396 | N OT E S TO PA G E S 1 6 6 – 1 6 9 6.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

The time that I have spent writing these words is, ironically, a triumph of Frequency Scrambling, in that this chapter is dedicated to rebutting false allegations of political correctness, but the myth is so deeply ingrained that first it must be dispelled, before the facts can be argued. Every time an issue is presented as one of PC, the air is sucked out of it and it cannot catch fire. If minorities demand some form of affirmative action, we end up discussing the non-minorities who might be victimised as a result, as opposed to why affirmative action is needed in the first place. If women demand that there be a new way of speaking to and about them in the workplace, we end up discussing the men who will be bewildered and prone to victimisation, rather than why women have made the demand in the first place.

Its stated mission is to ‘formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense’. It is particularly obsessed with political correctness and has been since its inception. In 1991, the foundation published a report entitled ‘Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect’ which criticises affirmative action because ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. ‘We mustn’t let things get by that we know are wrong,’ it concludes, ‘we must start to raise a little hell.’ Searching the foundation’s site for articles containing the phrase ‘political correctness’ throws up 13,839 results. That’s an average of 512 posts a year, or 1.4 a day.

Dinesh D’Souza, one of the most successful far-right conservative commentators in the US, was positively incubated by them. He started his career as editor of the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s. At the time, the paper harassed an African-American faculty member and published a criticism of affirmative action that was so racist in tone that it pierced the niche academic discourse to capture nationwide attention. The Review was receiving thousands of dollars from the rightist Olin Foundation, which also sponsored D’Souza during a stint at the American Enterprise Institute, the end result of which was a book about illiberalism.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Consider a thought exercise proposed by Glenn Loury, a theoretical economist at Boston University: Suppose that ten job applicants are vying for a single position. Nine of the job candidates are white and one is black. The hiring company has an affirmative action policy stipulating that when minority and nonminority candidates are of equal merit, the minority candidate will be hired. Further suppose that there are two top candidates; one is white, the other is black. True to policy, the firm hires the black candidate. Loury (who is black) makes this subtle but simple point: Only one of the white candidates has suffered from affirmative action; the other eight wouldn’t have gotten the job anyway. Yet all nine white candidates go away angry, feeling that they have been discriminated against.

Yet all nine white candidates go away angry, feeling that they have been discriminated against. Loury is not necessarily a foe of affirmative action. He merely adds nuance to a discussion that usually has none. Affirmative action can harm the very race relations that it seeks to heal. Or consider the periodic campaign to mandate that insurance companies cover the cost of two nights in the hospital for women who have delivered babies, rather than just one. President Bill Clinton found this issue sufficiently important that he vowed in his 1998 State of the Union address to end “drive-by deliveries.” But there is a cost to such a plan that should be made explicit.

And, of course, a lot of bright students avoid the course in the first place. This is a shame on two levels. First, many intellectually curious people are missing a subject that is provocative, powerful, and highly relevant to almost every aspect of our lives. Economics offers insight into policy problems ranging from organ donation to affirmative action. The discipline is intuitive at times and delightfully counterintuitive at others. It is peppered with great thinkers. Some, such as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, have captured mainstream attention. But others, such as Gary Becker and George Akerlof, have not gotten the recognition outside of academe that they deserve.


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

In politics, this thinking became entwined with the goals of the civil rights movement: examination of power structures, discovery of voices not valued by history, cultural tolerance, acceptance of diverse viewpoints, affirmative action, mindfulness of the biases of the speaker, a pullback from Western exceptionalism and white supremacy, and the celebration of the self-evident truth that lies at the foundation of the nation—that all people are created equal. If science was the voice of the Western white male culture, then it was not the voice of other, discounted cultures. Academics, writers, politicians, and teachers, in a sort of intellectual affirmative action, took the idea to its logical conclusion: from all people being created equal to the notion that all cultures are created equal and from that to the idea that all ideas are created equal.

In the American humanities, and subsequently in American politics and education, this came to mean that all systems of thought had equal merit and only had to be internally consistent. They were all just different “languages” or “constructs” for assembling our experience of reality. Thus, postmodernists thought of themselves as tolerant and nonjudgmental. In America, this thinking merged with new political ideas about affirmative action and became widespread. Postmodernism provided a secular, progressive, inclusive interpretation of reality for those who felt that there were many worthy groups like African Americans, women, Native Americans, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered persons, and others who had been disenfranchised by the Western white male dominant culture, of which science was a powerful part.

Scientists (“the Man”) resist new (baby boomer) ideas, clinging to old (Western white male), outdated theories even as the evidence they are being willfully blind to accumulates (discrimination) like energy in an electron until it finally becomes overwhelming (the civil rights movement). Then, suddenly, in a crystallizing moment (revelation), the ruling order is displaced (comeuppance) and the intellectual understanding of the old (bigoted) paradigm (attitude) shifts to a new, wider-orbiting (more tolerant and inclusive) paradigm that incorporates (affirmative action) previously discounted outliers (disempowered groups). Kuhn was striving to describe science not as we think it is, but as it really is, and so was likely strongly influenced by his times. He pointed to several past scientific revolutions as examples and argued that they had not been intellectual so much as sociological upheavals.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

From the chart it looked as if a vastly greater percentage of female than male applicants was being turned away from these schools, meaning that it was much harder for the average woman to get in than it was for the average man. The implication was that bright female applicants might be turned away in favor of less qualified men. In other words, if Heriot was reading the chart correctly, American private colleges had quietly begun to practice affirmative action . . . for men. The quotes that follow in the accompanying story seemed to confirm Heriot’s suspicion. Men should be given some extra allowance because they “have perspectives to offer that a woman doesn’t have,” one student suggested. A college counselor advised that they should “emphasize their maleness.”

If they happened to have a gender-ambiguous name like Alex or Madison, they should not hesitate to send in a picture or brag about sports in order to “catch an admission officer’s eye.” Different perspectives to offer. A distinct admissions advantage. Send in a picture. These are the kinds of euphemisms admissions officers have historically offered up to minorities and women. How could it be that affirmative action, an institution set up to break white men’s exclusive hold on power, was now the crutch they needed to get by? And at the University of Richmond, no less? And how had it come to pass that women now found themselves in the same spot as the angry white males of the 1990s, frustrated at getting shut out despite their qualifications?

For private universities, sex discrimination in admissions is perfectly legal; unlike public universities they are not bound by Title IX. But Heriot thought this issue was serious enough that it might be covered by a more general statute against discrimination. And because she seems inclined against affirmative action anyway, she wanted to force the education establishment into a confession so that they could begin to figure out why men weren’t succeeding, rather than to continue just shuffling them among institutions. The commissioners picked nineteen colleges randomly with the aim of covering the basic categories—big, small, religiously affiliated, selective, less selective, and historically African-American.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These include the expectation of certain futures and the right to one’s reputation as a white person: in court rulings from as late as the 1950s, calling a “white” person “black” was considered defamation; the reverse clearly not.30 By protecting these rights and expectations, American law has reinstated whites’ “property interest” in whiteness—an interest predicated on the right to exclude others.31 How American law deals with whiteness has changed in response to popular struggle, but as Harris notes, “property interest in whiteness has proven to be resilient and adaptive to new conditions.” Calls for affirmative action, for example, have challenged the notion that societies built on white supremacy can be made just by simply removing the most overt forms of discrimination. These efforts were contested in court by whites who saw affirmative action as “reverse discrimination.” As Harris has argued, by siding with white plaintiffs and rejecting affirmative action in key instances, the courts have effectively defended white privilege. For instance, in admission to graduate schools, courts have defended the expectation of whites to be privileged over nonwhites by identifying certain criteria of “merit,” such as standardized test scores, as neutral while ignoring alternatives.32 These moves cement the notion that the law must protect the expectation of whites, as a group, to dominate educational institutions.

For instance, in admission to graduate schools, courts have defended the expectation of whites to be privileged over nonwhites by identifying certain criteria of “merit,” such as standardized test scores, as neutral while ignoring alternatives.32 These moves cement the notion that the law must protect the expectation of whites, as a group, to dominate educational institutions. White supremacy can therefore be defended by adopting more abstract, ostensibly nonracialized, criteria of “merit.” Indeed, while the right to exclude persists in all of forms of white supremacy—from colonial America to affirmative action cases in the 1970s—the manifestations of this right and its justifications have changed. As many have recognized, then, whiteness as an ideology cannot be stably grounded in any specific racial account because whiteness is empty. “Whiteness, alone,” Toni Morrison wrote, “is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.”33 Whiteness gets its significance, and its changing shape, only from the need to maintain relations of power.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

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

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

The segment producer wants to ensure lively crosstalk, so the “pre-interview” is designed to make sure you’ll say exactly what the producer expects you to say. They usually don’t need to ask. If Chris Matthews has proudly liberal Joan Walsh on to talk affirmative action with Pat Buchanan, he knows he can sleepwalk through that player-piano setup: Walsh is automatically going to find a way to argue for affirmative action and denounce white privilege, and Buchanan is going to hit back by bleating about reverse racism. But stations still usually make sure there’s no off-the-reservation opinion on the horizon. If you’re brought on to play the Democrat, they make sure in advance you’ll stay in that lane.

Goldberg, whose path to journalism was similar to my father’s—he went to Rutgers in the sixties—regularly comments on the upper-crust schools his colleagues favor. So, for instance, onetime CBS executive vice president Jon Klein is “an Ivy Leaguer, he went to Brown.” It’s regularly part of his quips about political hypocrisy. “They love affirmative action schools, as long as their own kids get into Ivy League schools,” he snaps. The news business is absolutely different in a class sense than it once was, particularly at the national level. These days it’s almost exclusively the preserve of graduates from expensive colleges, when it was once a job for working-class types who started as paper-kids or printers.

Take this sentence, for instance, about the New York Times and its invidious failure to cover his first “liberal bias” editorial: The world’s most important newspaper, which would make room on page one for a story about the economy of Upper Volta or about the election of a lesbian dogcatcher in Azerbaijan or about affirmative action in Fiji, didn’t think a story about media bias, leveled by a network news correspondent, was worth even a few paragraphs. Actually, Bernard, we basically don’t cover Africa at all. Also, Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso about fifteen years before you wrote Bias. I’m not sure exactly where things stand today, but by 2007, the only American news network to have a bureau in Africa was ABC.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward it after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative about it afterward. Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: it made both liberal and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous—and thus squelched diversity.

For an initial glimpse of the problem, let us put the Internet to one side and consider a small experiment in democracy that was held in Colorado in 2005.6 About sixty US citizens were brought together and assembled into ten groups, each consisting of six people. Members of each group were asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers engage in “affirmative action” by giving a preference to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? Should the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of “liberal” and “conservative” members—the former from Boulder, the latter from Colorado Springs.

IDENTITY AND CULTURE A revealing body of research, coming largely from Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, finds that “cultural cognition” shapes our reactions to science—and that our values affect our assessment of purely factual claims, even in highly technical areas.60 As a result, Americans predictably polarize on factual questions involving, for example, gun control, climate change, nuclear waste disposal, and nanotechnology. Kahan’s striking claim is that people’s judgments stem, in large part, from their sense of identity—of what kind of person they consider themselves to be. As a result, seemingly disparate views cluster. Among conservatives, for instance, gun control is a bad idea, and so is affirmative action; climate change is not a big problem; the Supreme Court should not have recognized same-sex marriage; and the minimum wage should not be increased. In principle, it might be possible to identify specific values that link these apparently diverse conclusions. But Kahan’s claim is that the real source of people’s views, at least on certain controversial questions, is their understanding of their identity, and their effort to protect it.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Thiel himself told me: Peter Thiel, “Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel: Studio 1.0 (12/18) Bloomberg, Dec. 18, 2014, video, 27:34, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-12-19/venture-capitalist-peter-thiel-studio-10-1218. Stanford began by instituting: News release, Stanford News Service, April 22, 1991, https://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/91/910422Arc1416.html. lawsuit against Harvard: Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul, “Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/affirmative-action-battle-has-a-new-focus-asian-americans.html?_r=0. The Stanford Review also targeted feminism: Lisa Koven and David Sacks, “Rape at Stanford,” Stanford Review, Jan. 21, 1992. The word “RAPE”: Ibid., 1. “If you’re male and heterosexual at Stanford”: Ibid., 4.

Whites and Asians should not lose academic posts to candidates from more underrepresented groups. Only measurable achievement and academic merit should matter. They also questioned the value of diversity and the idea that universities, companies, and governments function better when a broad range of people participate. “We were pretty critical of affirmative action. We forecast how it was going to play out, saying it’s going to really, really penalize Asians, and that’s exactly what happened,” Rabois told me, referencing a recent lawsuit against Harvard University that alleges Asian Americans are discriminated against in the admissions process. The Stanford Review also targeted feminism.

“We’re working hard to find them and would be ecstatic if more joined Sequoia or other firms.” Sequoia Capital followed up with a tweet from its official account: “We need to do better.” A few months later, Moritz managed to give new life to the controversy while taking questions from journalists at the San Francisco Exploratorium, saying, “We’re not going to run an affirmative action [program]. And I happen to think it’s an insult to a woman we hire, a black we hire, or a Hispanic we hire, to feel like they’re coming to work at Sequoia because of their gender or their race. The people who want to come to work for us want to be the very best.” He again mentioned the “spectacular” female analyst Sequoia had recently hired: “If she had five sisters we’d hire them all!”


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The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas Stanley, William Danko

affirmative action, cotton gin, estate planning, financial independence, high net worth, index fund, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, the market place, very high income, Yogi Berra

They also contend that their sons-in-law “can never be fully trusted … to remain loyal … [to] support [and] protect” their daughters. Actually, the affluent are rather perceptive in this regard. Our data indicate that more than four in ten of their daughters who marry will be divorced at least once. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR WOMEN Affluent parents understand that the income-generating opportunities facing men and women in this country are very different. These parents tend to have their own form of economic affirmative action. Consider the following facts: ♦ Women account for 46 percent of the workers in this country but represent fewer than 20 percent of the individuals who earn $100,000 or more annually. In 1980, fewer than 40,000 women had annualincomes of $100,000 or more.

Stanley For my loving wife, Connie, and my dear children, Christy, Todd, and David –W. D. Danko Contents Tables Preface Introduction 1: Meet the Millionaire Next Door 2: Frugal Frugal Frugal 3: Time, Energy, and Money 4: You Aren’t What You Drive 5: Economic Outpatient Care 6: Affirmative Action, Family Style 7: Find Your Niche 8: Jobs: Millionaires versus Heirs Acknowledgments Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Tables 1-1: The Top Ten Ancestry Groups of American Millionaires 1-2: The Top Fifteen Economically Productive Small Population Ancestry Groups 2-1: Prices Paid by Millionaires for Clothing and Accessories 2-2: Credit Cards of Millionaire Household Members 2-3: Contrasts among American Taxpayers 3-1: Concerns, Fears, and Worries: Dr.


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Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Malaysia’s problems go beyond race and old rivalries. Every nation in Southeast Asia has seen protests against the Chinese business class at some point in the postcolonial period, but only Malaysia keeps the fires burning as a matter of public policy. Even before Mahathir took power in 1981, Malaysia had created a program of affirmative action to give Bumiputeras greater ownership stakes in companies. Mahathir built that program into a sprawling system of racial quotas and subsidies for all walks of life, from schools to government posts. Even today the 60 percent Malay majority feels they do not have a fair share of the economic pie, but the 30 percent Chinese minority feels just as marginalized, trying to compete against favored Malay tycoons.

Officials greet visitors with a blizzard of acronyms, describing their many schemes to recapture growth, and as a whole they get the problems pretty much right. With manufacturing flagging, and corporations moving abroad, they understand the need to regain competitiveness, restart investment, raise the skill level of the workforce, even to make the ubiquitous affirmative action system more transparent and market friendly. These goals are all built into the NEM (new economic model), which was unveiled in March 2010 and aims to double Malaysia’s per capita income by 2020. The NEM includes both an ETP (economic transformation program) and a GTP (government transformation program), which have targeted dozens of NKEAs (national key economic areas) for reform, and launched no fewer than 131 EPPs (entry point projects) to fix those targets.

When it first came to power, the ANC created a modicum of upward mobility for some black South Africans, helping to ease discontent, at least for a time. Normally a rising middle class is the natural by-product of an expanding economic pie, but in South Africa the growth was mainly the product of an affirmative-action program launched in the most fortuitous possible circumstances. The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) set specific targets for all but the smallest companies to increase the role of black owners, managers, and workers, and tried to create a new class of black-owned companies as well. The program came into effect in 2003, the same year that the flood of easy money pouring out of the United States triggered a boom across all the emerging markets.


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The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Included among them were the needs to provide an up-to-date computing system that would put RPI in the lead among schools in the nation; to hire in key open positions, such as a vice president for administration and budget and a vice president of student affairs; to revamp the engineering curriculum; and to successfully complete the new campus facilities, as well as a very real need to support affirmative action. “We have been giving lip service in this area, with no real action,” he noted. “It is an area where I am going to start to get tough.” He underscored the need for more minorities and women on the faculty and staff, as well as a need for more minority and women students. “Not one of you is doing your job as faculty, staff, or administrators, if you are not doing your best in affirmative action,” he warned. “I will consider your performance in this regard as much as I will consider your performance in other areas.”42 Low’s philosophy for the future of RPI was inspired and informed by the work of Frederick Terman at Stanford.43 A trained chemist and engineer who did his undergraduate work at Stanford and his graduate work in engineering at MIT, Terman is widely credited with being the father of Silicon Valley.

Acknowledging that there is no better form of government than the one in the United States, he warned—based on his experience of trying to save NASA in a post-Apollo world—that “the elected leadership can no longer establish a strong sense of direction, nor can it impose the discipline to follow the course promised by its political party. . . . The result is disorder and confusion, wherein the special interest wins at the expense of the general interest.” He did not, however, want to be misunderstood: I strongly support the need to make continued progress toward our societal goals. I will fight for affirmative action, for protection of health and safety on the job, for clean air and water, for human rights and human liberties. But I also know that to achieve these goals, we need the underpinning of a stable economy. Without regaining that, as a first priority, our progress in all other areas will not only come to a halt—we will lose ground.

New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. Index Page numbers refer to the print edition. Abbey, George W. S., 37, 104–5, 107, 120–21, 200, 226–27 Advanced Applications Program (AAP), 84, 85, 86, 147 Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), 29, 30 aeronautical engineering and research, 11, 12, 15–17, 31, 235 affirmative action, 213, 219 Allen, Joe, 206 all-up testing, 84 Always Another Dawn (Crossfield), 16 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 157, 189, 236 Anders, Bill, 139, 158–60, 192, 201, 231, 233 Anderson, Clinton P., 185, 187 Angern Castle, 4, 5, 6 animal-testing approach, 51, 55, 56 Apollo 1 fire: about, xi, 1, 17; and astronauts, 92, 99; causes of, 93; and insulation problem, 114; and spacecraft testing, 91; and space program, 93 Apollo 4, 120, 125 Apollo 6, 125, 135 Apollo 7, 124–28, 130–31, 133–35, 147 Apollo 8: about, 1, 12; as astounding flight of firsts, 133; and Bob Gilruth, 130, 132; decision related to, 127–31; launch of, 138; into lunar missions, 125–27; meeting about, 134–35; planning state of, 131; reading from Genesis on, 144; success of, 138–39; and toggle switch issue, 1, 136, 137, 138, 216 Apollo 9, 112, 120, 126 Apollo 11, 84, 112, 141–43, 145–47, 183, 227 Apollo 13, 123, 179–81, 186 Apollo 14, 154, 170, 173, 181, 183 Apollo 15, 181–83, 185–86, 188 Apollo 17, 121, 154, 170, 186, 225, 226 Apollo missions, 120, 133, 147, 151–52, 154, 181 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), 49, 186, 191, 193, 196–97, 236 Apollo spacecraft: about, 1; anecdote about, 140; CCB meetings for, 117–18; design philosophy of, 117–18; and hatch issue, 99–100; industry studies of, 55; and parachute system, 117; rework of, 123; software for, 115–17; testing of, 118.


pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, railed against the United States’ growing military-industrial complex. On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, newly inaugurated, announced Executive Order 10925, ordering the federal government and its contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity for all of their employees and applicants, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. Through it all, the Space Task Group, the Langley Research Group, the other NASA centers, and thousands of NASA contractors pressed forward on their aerodynamic, structural, materials, and component tests, closing in on a target launch date in May.

Our Monongalia: A History of African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia. Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books, 1999. Roland, Alex. Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915–1958. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1985. Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Rouse, Jr. Parke S. The Good Old Days in Hampton and Newport News. Petersburg, VA: Dietz Press, 2001. Smith, Bob. They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1965.

Dubois, “The Negro Scientist,” The American Scholar 8, no. 3 (Summer 1939): 316. 74 “The [white] libraries”: Ibid. 74 “no opportunity to go to scientific meetings”: Jacqueline Giles-Girron, “Black Pioneers in Mathematics: Brown [sic], Granville, Cox, Claytor and Blackwell,” Focus: the Newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America 11, no. 1 (January–February 1991): 18. 74 just over a hundred women: Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 137. 74 Irish and Jewish women with math degrees: David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 208–9. 74 “But where will I find a job?” Johnson interview, December 27, 2010. 74 they got married, telling no one: Johnson interview, March 13, 2011. 74 waiting outside her classroom: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013. 75 walked away from an offer of $4 million: Albert P.


Au Contraire: Figuring Out the French by Gilles Asselin, Ruth Mastron

affirmative action, business climate, feminist movement, haute cuisine, old-boy network, rolodex, Rosa Parks

Many female politicians and commentators agreed in general terms that more women should be included in politics at the national level but rejected the call for quotas, maintaining that they are simply not necessary, since equality is already guar- With Politics 121 anteed by the Constitution. In concrete terms, the amendment in effect requires that political parties must choose equal numbers of female and male candidates. Quotas indeed violate the French universalist principle. Some Frenchwomen echo the fears expressed in the American affirmative action debate: that a woman who gains a position because of a quota will be perceived as less than competent. People may assume she would not have achieved success on her own merits. Despite such concern, women in the United States have been less reluctant to use quotas to their advantage. Nobody likes quotas, but that’s the only way to make things change, to get women into positions of power so they can show what they know, what they can do.

Universalism is a republican value that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the social protection system (as the French call it), labor laws, and many other vital areas of social life. Based on this fundamental principle, the government enacts laws that give each individual access to the same privileges. It does not in principle differentiate either positively or negatively based on the origin or specific situation of the person. With Society 133 Affirmative action laws such as those that have been on the books in the United States—though they are beginning to disappear—would be hard to implement in France. They exemplify the principle of differentiation, granting different rights and privileges for cultural or historical reasons on the basis of past oppression or discrimination.

Acknowledge their help gratefully and ask follow-up questions. There is a big difference between asking for information or exchanging ideas about a certain topic and bluntly passing judgment on it. Important differences exist, for example, between diversity à la française and à l’américaine, as reflected in French labor laws and American affirmative action practices. Telling French people categorically that they should manage their diversity issues in the American way reflects a lack of knowledge of and respect for your hosts’ culture. An open discussion, comparing and contrasting American and French situations and practices, is a much better way to go about a conversation.


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

Carbon-date my pipe and determine whether I’m a direct descendant of Dred Scott, that colored conundrum who, as a slave living in a free state, was man enough for his wife and kids, man enough to sue his master for his freedom, but not man enough for the Constitution, because in the eyes of the Court he was simply property: a black biped “with no rights the white man was bound to respect.” They’ll pore over the legal briefs and thumb through the antebellum vellum and try to determine whether or not the outcome of this case confirms or overturns Plessy v. Ferguson. They’ll scour the plantations, the projects, and the Tudor suburban subdivision affirmative-action palaces, digging up backyards looking for remnants of the ghosts of discrimination past in the fossilized dice and domino bones, brush the dust off the petrified rights and writs buried in bound legal volumes, and pronounce me as “unforeseen hip-hop generation precedent” in the vein of Luther “Luke Skyywalker” Campbell, the gap-toothed rapper who fought for his right to party and parody the white man the way he’d done us for years.

That incessant Black History Month loop of barking dogs, gushing fire hoses, and carbuncles oozing blood through two-dollar haircuts, colorless blood spilling down faces shiny with sweat and the light of the evening news, these are the pictures that form our collective 16 mm superego. But today I’m all medulla oblongata and I can’t concentrate. The film inside my head begins to skip and sputter. The sound cuts out, and protesters falling like dominoes in Selma, Alabama, begin to look like Keystone Negroes slipping en masse on an affirmative-action banana peel and tumbling to the street, a tangled mess of legs and dreams akimbo. The marchers on Washington become civil rights zombies, one hundred thousand strong, somnambulating lockstep onto the mall, stretching out their stiff, needy fingers for their pound of flesh. The head zombie looks exhausted from being raised from the dead every time someone wants to make a point about what black people should and shouldn’t do, can and cannot have.

And I’d do it again, because this pot is fucking unbelievable.” Fred’s breaking character. “What’s it called?” It being the joint he’s holding in his hand. “It doesn’t have a name yet, but Code Red sounds pretty good.” Fred has sketched all the important cases: same-sex marriage, the end of the Voting Rights Act, and the demise of affirmative action in higher education and, by extension, everywhere else. He says that in his thirty years of courtroom artistry, this is the first time he’s ever seen the court adjourn for dinner. First time he’s ever seen the Justices raise their voices and stare each other down. He shows me an artist’s rendering of today’s session.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

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

“The overwhelming majority of students offered admission through our test process are Asian and white,” she says. I asked Kupferstein Torres to explain why Hunter was admitting fewer and fewer black and Latino students. “There are certain things that emerge immediately,” she says, pointing to the dismantling of affirmative action at Hunter (about which more in a moment) and the persistent and growing inequality of opportunity in New York City. On top of that, she notes, “There was no test prep culture thirty years ago. Stanley Kaplan—the founder of Kaplan Test Prep—was probably tutoring one person.” The test prep industry for national standardized tests like the SAT is now a booming, multimillion-dollar business, and it is at least part of the reason (along with wide variety in school quality and parental educational attainment) that one of the best ways to predict a student’s SAT score is to look at his parents’ income: the more money they make, the higher the score is likely to be.

This doesn’t even count the advantages that wealthy children have in terms of private tutors, test prep, and access to expensive private high schools and college counselors adept at navigating the politics of admissions. All together this layered system of preferences for the children of the privileged amounts to, in Golden’s words, “affirmative action for rich white people.” It is not so much the meritocracy as idealized and celebrated but rather the ancient practice of “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves.” A pure functioning meritocracy, like that conjured by Michael Young, would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility.

., p. 365. 45 “The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy”: Ibid., p. 368. 46 “At least one third of the students at elite universities”: Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), p. 6. 47 “affirmative action for rich white people” … “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves”: Ibid., pp. 6 and 10. 48 “The Great Divergence”: See Paul Krugman, “Introducing This Blog,” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/, accessed January 7, 2012. 49 In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46 percent of national income.… Between 1979 and 2005, nearly 88 percent of the entire economy’s income gains went to the top 1 percent: Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” March 15, 2008, http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2006prel.pdf, accessed January 7, 2012, and Arloc Sherman and Chad Stone, “Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled in Last Three Decades, New Data Show,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?


Au Contraire!: Figuring Out the French by Gilles Asselin, Ruth Mastron

affirmative action, business climate, feminist movement, haute cuisine, old-boy network, rolodex, Rosa Parks

Many female politicians and commentators agreed in general terms that more women should be included in politics at the national level but rejected the call for quotas, maintaining that they are simply not necessary, since equality is already guar- With Politics 121 anteed by the Constitution. In concrete terms, the amendment in effect requires that political parties must choose equal numbers of female and male candidates. Quotas indeed violate the French universalist principle. Some Frenchwomen echo the fears expressed in the American affirmative action debate: that a woman who gains a position because of a quota will be perceived as less than competent. People may assume she would not have achieved success on her own merits. Despite such concern, women in the United States have been less reluctant to use quotas to their advantage. Nobody likes quotas, but that’s the only way to make things change, to get women into positions of power so they can show what they know, what they can do.

Universalism is a republican value that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the social protection system (as the French call it), labor laws, and many other vital areas of social life. Based on this fundamental principle, the government enacts laws that give each individual access to the same privileges. It does not in principle differentiate either positively or negatively based on the origin or specific situation of the person. With Society 133 Affirmative action laws such as those that have been on the books in the United States—though they are beginning to disappear—would be hard to implement in France. They exemplify the principle of differentiation, granting different rights and privileges for cultural or historical reasons on the basis of past oppression or discrimination.

Acknowledge their help gratefully and ask follow-up questions. There is a big difference between asking for information or exchanging ideas about a certain topic and bluntly passing judgment on it. Important differences exist, for example, between diversity à la française and à l’américaine, as reflected in French labor laws and American affirmative action practices. Telling French people categorically that they should manage their diversity issues in the American way reflects a lack of knowledge of and respect for your hosts’ culture. An open discussion, comparing and contrasting American and French situations and practices, is a much better way to go about a conversation.


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

That’s how you get Coca-Cola, a company with over 80,000 employees, training its workforce to be “less white” in fully racist fashion, noting that to be “less white” means to be “less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and more humble”—and claiming that this discriminatory content was designed to enhance “inclusion.”11 SHUTTING THE OVERTON WINDOW Within institutions, the authoritarian Left’s incremental demands have been taken up, one by one: from diversity training to affirmative action hiring, from charitable donations to internal purges. But for the generalized impact of institutional takeover to be felt requires one final step: the renormalization of our societal politics in favor of censorship. Those who work within hijacked institutions remain a small fraction of the general population—but they can renormalize the society more broadly if they can convert liberals into leftists.

Even though the programs did little overall to alleviate the standing of black Americans relative to white Americans, the programs did paradoxically shore up the moral credibility of the American governmental system: it was difficult to claim that systems that had now been turned in favor of black Americans—systems from affirmative action to anti-discrimination law—were designed to make black Americans subservient. The legitimacy of the system, ironically, had been upheld by efforts to overhaul the system in the name of race-neutral progress. The Utopian Impulse had stymied the Revolutionary Impulse. Thus, by the early 1990s, the radical arguments had been put aside.

As Duvernay said, “I would do it all again. If you cannot be respectful of our alignment with that cause, with that protest, with that rallying cry, then there was nothing I wanted from you anyway.” Naturally, the Academy responded the next year with an emergency meeting and sought to radically shift the Academy membership through affirmative action directed at women and minorities. When other members of the Academy complained that political correctness had taken control of the institution—when, for example, Dennis Rice, a member of the Academy’s public relations branch, explained that he was “color- and gender-blind when it comes to recognizing our art,” and added, “You should look purely and objectively at the artistic accomplishment”—Boone Isaacs shot back, “Are you kidding me?


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

This massive change in white attitudes on the principles of racial equality was significant in the sweep of history, and it was an important part of the backdrop to both the Civil Rights movement and America’s upswing. On the other hand, as the Civil Rights revolution moved forward, issues of implementation of those principles by government policy, such as affirmative action, came to the fore, and on those issues white resistance was both more substantial and more resistant to change, a fact to which we will return below. And even progress in white support for the principles of racial equality slackened as the twentieth century ended, partly because the engine of cohort replacement generated less aggregate progress after the pre–World War II generations had passed from the scene.

It would be wrong to dismiss the massive change in white acceptance of the principle of racial equality over the course of the full twentieth century, but it would also be wrong to assume that that conversion was translated directly into practice. Tragically, just as the Civil Rights movement began to see major success, and especially as the government undertook affirmative actions to bring about integration, the fragile national consensus that had enabled that change began to erode. While equality and inclusion sounded good in principle, white Americans quickly began to voice concerns about the pace of change. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed 68 percent of Americans wanting moderation in its enforcement.

Indeed, when examining attitudes toward policies meant to establish racial equality (often called “racial policies” for short), scholars have found not only that white respondents remain widely opposed, but also that their support has been generally trending downward since 1970. White support for policies that ban discrimination and legal segregation in the realms of schools, public accommodations, and employment has slipped since the early 1970s.136 Meanwhile, white support for affirmative action programs that provide compensatory government assistance or preferential treatment to black Americans has remained very low since 1970, whether respondents are asked about direct spending, government aid, school admissions, or employment practices.137 Similarly, in the post–civil rights era, although white respondents indicated increasing levels of support for integration when small numbers of black individuals were involved (that is, when there were only a “few” black children in an integrated school or only a single black family next door), they were far less supportive when large proportions of black individuals were involved, suggesting limits to their commitment to racial tolerance.138 When asked about the causes of racial inequality, very few white respondents at the end of the century were still citing the “low ability” of black Americans.


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

After analyzing the employment records of the thirty-three lead- ing Silicon Valey firms and interviewing hundreds of executives, academics and activists, the Chronicle concluded that massive un- derrepresentation of the region's Black and Latino populations in managerial and professional jobs was the result of the dearth of science and math education five factors: 1) in minority-majority schools; 2) failure to enforce federal affirmative action laws ("violators rarely tin pay fines and are almost never disqualified from government contracts"; 3) get- job recruiters' neglect of campuses with substantial minority enrollments; 4) absence of supportive "networks" ("there are virtually no top-ranking blacks and Lati- nos in Silicon Valley to inspire and mentor younger employees"); 5) pervasive image.

Intellectually, Palo Alto-based Unz is the love-child of Mickey Kaus and Thomas Sowell, the New Republic and Commentary, not the traditional California right. to see them quickly He assimilated without undue in the marketplace of talent. Accordingly, 187 (to punish immigrants" but wants "likes state interference he opposed Proposition undocumented immigrants) in 1994 almost as vig- orously as he campaigned in favor of Proposition 209 (to end affirmative action) in 1996. Moreover, in the best Silicon Valley tradition, he has come up with an invention that he hopes will reframe the national debate about immigration and multiculturalism (and help pave his own way to poHtical office). Unz-designed Proposition 227 ("English for Children"), which be- came California law in June 1998 despite the 63 percent of Latino voters, Only as a rescue stream.


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

We have to understand the deep-seated institutional bases of racism and other forms of discrimination and root them out.48 This means that racial, ethnic, and gender equality won’t be achieved unless we more strongly enforce our antidiscrimination laws, in every aspect of our economy. But we have to go beyond that. We also need a new generation of civil rights legislation. WE NEED affirmative action and economic programs to promote equality of opportunity. There are multiple poverty traps in our country—groups of individuals, whether in particular places, like Appalachia, or of particular backgrounds, like Native Americans and African Americans, who need help in finding a way up.49 We’ve come to understand the mechanisms by which advantages, and disadvantages, can be passed on from generation to generation.

Ironically, our attachment to our mythological self-image leads us to embrace policies that actually undermine the expression of our values—making it ever less likely that the American dream becomes a reality. If everyone simply by dint of hard work can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, we don’t need financial aid programs for the poor—somehow, they’ll get a job and work their way through college—and we don’t really need affirmative action programs to level the playing field for those facing a legacy of discrimination—those with grit and determination will overcome this, making them better people for it. We’ve seen the statistics though: even with the admittedly limited assistance we provide, those from poor families and from discriminated-against groups simply aren’t making it.3 The odds are overwhelmingly against it, so much so that one has to label the American dream as fiction.

PAGE NUMBERS IN ITALIC REFER TO ILLUSTRATIONS. abuses of power checks and balances to prevent, 163–67 money and, 167–70 academic publishing, 76 active labor market policies, 187 Acton, Lord, 164 Adelson, Sheldon, 331n26 Adobe, 65 advantage, intergenerational transmission of, 199–201 advertising, 124, 132 affirmative action, 203 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), 40, 211–13 African Americans; See also racial discrimination disenfranchisement of, 161 and GI Bill, 210 and inequality, 40–41 intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, 279–80n43 and Jim Crow laws, 241, 271n3 mass incarceration, 202 agricultural subsidies, 96 agriculture, Great Depression and, 120 AI, See artificial intelligence AIG, 107 airline subsidies, 96–97 Akerlof, George, 63–64 alcoholism, 42 AlphaGo, 315n1 “alternative facts,” 136 alternative minimum tax, 85 Amazon, 62, 74, 123, 127, 128; See also Bezos, Jeff American Airlines, 69 American dream failings masked by myths, 224–26 and inequality of opportunity, 44–45 American exceptionalism, 35, 211–12 American Express, 60 American individualism, See individualism American-style capitalism dangers of, 28–29 and mortgage market, 218 and national identity, xxvi other countries’ view of, 97 and patent infringement suits, 59 and values, 30 anticompetitive behavior, 68–76 antipoaching agreements, 65–66 antitrust, 51, 62, 68–76 Apple market power, 56 patent infringement suits, 59 share buybacks, 109 tax avoidance, 85, 108 applied research, 24–25; See also research arbitration clauses, 73 arbitration panels, 56 Arizona campaign finance case, 170 artificial intelligence (AI) advances in, 117 in China, 94, 96 globalization in era of, 135 and IA innovations, 119 and job loss, 118 market power and, 123–35 Association for Molecular Pathology, 127 atomistic labor markets, 64–66 AT&T, 75, 147, 325n17 Australia, 17 authoritarian governments, Big Data and, 127, 128 automation, See technology balanced budget principle, 194–95 bank bailout (2008), 102–3, 113–14, 143–44, 151 bankers, 4, 7, 104 banks danger posed to democracy by, 101–2 and 2008 financial crisis, 101–4 and fiscal paradises, 86 mergers and acquisitions, 107–8 need for regulation of, 143–44 traditional vs. modern, 109–10 Bannon, Steve, 18 Baqaee, David, 62 barriers to entry/competition, 48, 57–60, 62–64, 183, 289n47 behavioral economics, 30 Berlin Wall, fall of, 3 Bezos, Jeff, 5, 33 bias, See discrimination Big Data; See also artificial intelligence (AI) in China, 94 and customer targeting, 125–26 and market power, 123–24 and privacy, 127–28 regulation of, 128–31 and research, 126–27 as threat to democracy, 131–35 Big Pharma, 60, 88–89, 99, 168 bilateral trade deficit, 90–91 Bill of Rights, 164 Blackberry, 286n34 Blankfein, Lloyd, 104 bonds, government, 215 Brexit, 3 browser wars, 58 Buckley v.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

But it is sensible to take steps to prevent it. One popular answer is affirmative action, an idea that is making headway even in that last redoubt of old-fashioned meritocracy, the French establishment. However, experience in the United States—which introduced the practice in the 1970s—suggests that it raises a host of problems. In practical terms, many “affirmative-action babies” fail in highly competitive environments. On a more philosophical note, why should the children of rich blacks be given a head start over the children of poor whites? The biggest problem with affirmative action, however, is that it comes too late. The best way to boost the life chances of poor people is to intervene much earlier in life—to set them on the right path in kindergarten and primary school and reinforce those lessons in secondary school.

Only fourteen of the bosses of the S&P 500 companies and five of the bosses of the FTSE 100 companies are women. The British Equal Opportunities Commission calculates that, at the current rate of progress, it will take sixty years for women to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100. The slow pace of women’s progress has inevitably led to demands for affirmative action. But this should be used only as a weapon of last resort. It brings all sorts of problems in its wake, from promoting unqualified people (Sweden, which has introduced quotas, has been forced to recruit many female board members from academia and NGOs) to casting doubt on the merits of women who reach the top.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

His essential formula for improving inner cities and reducing racial tension is to implement vouchers in education, legalize drugs, cut welfare, and eliminate affirmative action. Friedman endorses the argument of Thomas Sowell that among the negative consequences of affirmative action is that it mismatches participants’ fields of endeavor with their abilities, to their detriment (an individual who would be a success at a state university is instead, for example, admitted to an Ivy League university, where he or she is more likely to fail). Friedman also opposes affirmative action because it brings the wrong sentiment or ethos to a society—that people should be evaluated by group membership rather than by individual merit.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/10/07/sat-scores-and-income-inequality-how-wealthier-kids-rank-higher/ (accessed March 31, 2015). 18 Strauss, Valerie. “A basic flaw in the argument against affirmative action,” Washington Post, July 17, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/17/a-basic-flaw-in-the-argument-against-affirmative-action/ (accessed December 8, 2014). 19 Pinker, Steven. “The trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it,” New Republic, September 4, 2014. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests (accessed September 6, 2014). 20 “Fundamentals of Statistics 2: The Normal Distribution.”

“GI bill covered tuition for nearly a million post-9/11 veterans without tracking their progress,” The Center for Public Integrity, September 3, 2013. http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/09/03/13297/gi-bill-covered-tuition-nearly-million-post-911-veterans-without-tracking-their (accessed November 20, 2014). 56 “Remembering America’s Veterans in 2013,” Center for American Progress, November 11, 2013. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/military/news/2013/11/11/79087/remembering-americas-veterans-in-2013/ (accessed November 20, 2014). 57 Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep, 2687–2688. 58 Ibid. 59 Siskind, Sarah R. “Affirmative dissatisfaction,” Harvard Crimson, November 2, 2012. http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-snollygoster/article/2012/11/2/Siskind-affirmative-action/ (accessed October 2, 2014). 60 “Voter Turnout by Age.” CivicYouth.org (accessed December 8, 2014), http://www.civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2012YouthVote.jpg. 61 “Digest of Education Statistics,” National Center for Education Statistics, October 2013. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_104.20.asp. 62 “Statistics,” Campus Vote Project, http://www.campusvoteproject.org/statistics. 63 Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, 1924–1926. 64 Quoted from the summary of the book on amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Tightrope-Portrait-College-Student-ebook/dp/B008NPSNHQ (accessed December 8, 2014). 65 Leonhardt, David.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Outside our unions, for instance, there is no large bloc of voters that has formed to demand social security, or are arguing in favor of comprehensive health care, education, energy solutions or infrastructure. India’s fragmented caste system has instead redefined partisanship mainly around caste lines. The pet issues of the Indian left and right focus on affirmative action and caste reservation; these have forced the debates on broader reforms in, say, labor education deep into the sidelines. These appeals to caste and the politics of identity have also hardened people’s opinions, with their you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us approach. Both within the government and in our advisory committees and task forces, there is now little more than sharp partisanship.

And a corrupt system is no help; one journalist recently managed to procure backward-caste certificates from the government for former prime minister Vajpayee, the general secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, and the UPA’s human resource development minister, Arjun Singh—all of whom are “upper” castes. Dr. Vijay Kelkar points out that there are better ways to correct years of backwardness, through solutions that ensure affirmative action while looking out for relative skill. “Adding an additional number to the exam scores of OBC and SC/ST students in entrance tests would give them benefits that balance fairness and merit,” Dr. Kelkar says. He compares this movement from outright reservations to such “score additions,” to our postreform shift from import quotas to tariffs.

He compares this movement from outright reservations to such “score additions,” to our postreform shift from import quotas to tariffs. “Quotas are, in the end, a very crude mechanism for inclusion,” he says. Yogendra Yadav has similarly recommended a point-based system where college and job applicants receive additional points for caste backwardness and low incomes, a system that closely parallels affirmative-action schemes in the United States.cl But it is much more difficult to establish such rules than to allow what is now happening—retaining feudal loyalties, only this time in favor of the Dalits and lower castes. And the recent rise in power of OBC parties that are tightly focused on caste pride and loyalty brings to mind George Orwell’s warning that a corrupt system will, if unchanged, stay corrupt even if power shifts hands from its tyrants to its past victims—and soon enough, as he wrote, “it’s impossible to tell which is which.”


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

“There was a strike against one of their hotels in California, two hundred black kids arm in arm in the lobby protesting because no blacks were employed there. They paralyzed the hotel,” he said. “The police couldn’t move them—they didn’t have enough prisons for all these young blacks. So I was sent out as a lawyer for the hotel chain to negotiate some sort of a settlement. I worked out an affirmative action deal with the mayor and the hotel, in which the hotel would hire two blacks every year. “Then, on my way back home—it was the time of the second march on Selma—I had to stop in Chicago, and I was watching this horrible business at the bridge on TV, and instead of going home I went to Selma, and I was in Selma for a week.

“We measure progress, evaluate individual colleges and universities—which ones are committed to advancing blacks, and which ones aren’t. Which ones have black faculty in large numbers, which ones don’t.” Ted’s focus in Adulthood II has been the creation and maintenance of the journal, tracking academic affirmative action and hiring policies across the country. Ted explained that he still had no succession plan to maintain the journal, which he works on full-time. “It’s really a problem,” he said. “Probably, as I look back on it, it’s more important than anything else I’ve done. We have established a history, an archive that is irreplaceable, on what’s happened over the past fifteen years—in the elite schools, the Ivy League schools, the smaller colleges, the public universities, we’ve got it all there.

But if it’s land that you have to farm, you can’t start off with a small piece and have it propagate!” “Inheriting a white skin has been a legacy advantage and a black skin was a big disadvantage,” Ted commented. “Today, having a black skin may be an advantage in applying for certain positions. Being a woman has an important advantage in becoming a college president! Affirmative action has shifted the biological disadvantage to advantage in some contexts. I think that’s good. Who would dream that this could have happened? “It’s difficult to sort out good and bad in these legacy advantages and disadvantages. Does the legacy system always interfere with merit? Are legacy and merit always at war with each other?


pages: 25 words: 7,179

Why Government Is the Problem by Milton Friedman

affirmative action, Bretton Woods, floating exchange rates, invisible hand, rent control, Savings and loan crisis, urban renewal

Miscellaneous I have not even mentioned the botched economic policies: the reverse Reaganomics that the Bush administration practiced contributed to the recession of 1990—1991, condemned us to a very slow and erratic recovery from a mild recession, and, very probably, promises a relatively slow 1990s, almost regardless of what the Clinton administration does. Nor have I mentioned such things as over-regulation of industry or agricultural policies under which taxpayers pay people to grow crops that are going to be destroyed or stored or given away. I have not mentioned tariffs and quotas or affirmative action and wage and hour laws. In light of this list, is there any doubt that government is the problem? None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly.


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death. BILL STRICKLANDFounder of the ManchesterCraftsmen's Guild, and MacArthurgenius award winner Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action one that wants to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn't discriminating. Now the organization isn't focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won't get sued).


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

She’s a veteran of the Reagan White House and a former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She’s a FOX News political analyst, a nationally syndicated columnist, and head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes assimilation over multiculturalism and actively opposes affirmative action quotas and bilingualism. She’s written extensively on organized labor, including the book, Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and President George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Labor in 2001 before withdrawing her name from consideration.

Bauer, P. T. Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion. Harvard University Press, 1981. Bean, Frank D., and Gillian Stevens. America’s Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity. Russell Sage Foundation, 2003. Becker, Gary S., and Guity Nashat Becker. The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life. McGraw-Hill, 1997. Bickel, Alexander M. The Morality of Consent. Yale University Press, 1975. Borjas, George J. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton University Press, 1999. Buchholz, Todd G. Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis—and How We Can Fix It.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

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

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

Libertarians believe that the market alone determines value, and that any attempt to tip the scales will upset its laws while endangering freedom. To the meritocrats of Smart America, some interventions are necessary for everyone to have an equal chance to move up. The long history of racial injustice demands remedies in affirmative action, diversity hiring, and maybe even reparations. The poor need a social safety net and a living wage; poor children deserve higher spending on education and health care. Workers dislocated by trade agreements, automation, and other blows of the global economy should be retrained for new kinds of jobs.

“Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run so we could all fly”: that was the story in a sentence, and it was so convincing to a lot of people in my generation—including me—that we were slow to notice how little it meant to a lot of people under thirty-five. Or we heard but didn’t understand and dismissed them with irritable mental gestures. We told them they had no idea what the crime rate was like in 1994. Smart Americans pointed to affirmative action and children’s health insurance. Free Americans touted enterprise zones and school vouchers. Of course the kids didn’t buy it. In their eyes “progress” looked like a thin upper layer of Black celebrities and professionals, who carried the weight of society’s expectations along with its prejudices, and below them, lousy schools, overflowing prisons, dying neighborhoods.


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

There was thus a direct link between the critique of American public policy and the earlier anticommunism of the CCNY group: both American liberals and Soviet communists sought worthy ends but undermined themselves by failing to recognize the limits of political voluntarism. Examples of this focus abound. Nathan Glazer wrote about the negative consequences of affirmative action in terms of the way it stigmatized its purported beneficiaries and set up perverse incentives for social advancement. James Q. Wilson, in his extensive writings on crime, argued that it was foolish to believe that social policy could get at alleged root causes of crime like poverty and racism, and that sensible crime-fighting policies had to deal with mitigating short-term symptoms.

John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign," American Interest 1, no. 1 (2005): 37-46. 8. Pierre Hassner, "Definitions, Doctrines, and Divergences," National Interest no. 69 (2002): 30-34. Abu Ghraib, 187 Adelman, Carol, 2111133 Administrative Procedure Act, 170 affirmative action, 19 Afghanistan, 111, 173; invasion of, 1, 174; precision targeting used in, 35; regime change in, 28, 29 Africa: and Chad-Cameroon pipeline, 179-80; social breakdown in, 130; and Western development strategies, 121-22 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 20 Albright, Madeleine, 193-94 Alhurra, 150 Allison, Graham, 68 Almond, Gabriel, 126 American Center for Labor Solidarity, 136 American exceptionalism, 2, 3, 96-97, 101, in, 190.


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Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The economy in many countries was in a wretched state. Unions had seldom been more powerful: in 1974, the miners toppled Britain’s Conservative government. And even in America, governments kept introducing bothersome rules. In 1971, Richard Nixon introduced controls on wages and prices. His administration also launched affirmative action and established some of the country’s most powerful regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.1 The deregulatory revolution began in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher was swept to power in 1979 by a wave of resentment over strikes and stagflation.

According to the British government’s own regulatory impact assessments, the European working-time directive alone, which set a maximum forty-eight-hour week, was costing the country’s businesses more than £2 billion a year by 2001.30 According to the same figures, Tony Blair’s Labour government had added £15 billion worth of regulatory costs in its first five years. The American government also increased its grip on the company through laws governing health, safety, the environment, employee and consumer rights, and affirmative action. Often the effect was not just more red tape but also more lawsuits. The 1991 Civil Rights Act, signed by George Bush senior, imposed huge regulatory burdens on businesses. It also created a litigation bonanza by increasing attorneys’ fees and allowing claims for “emotional injury.” American managers were more restricted than ever before in performing one of their most basic functions—hiring and firing.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

My heart burning with the pain of societal injustice, I chose the one on “Freedom, Equality, Difference.” Most of the other students had no particular interest in the topic—they were just meeting the requirement. But a significant minority did: like me, they cared passionately about it. They were the conservatives, armed with endless citations on how affirmative action was undermining American meritocracy. The only other political attitude I noticed was a moderate centrism, the view espoused by the teacher, whose day job was studying just-war theory. It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me.

We have to teach students this uplifting version of American history because if you’re not taught to be proud of your country, you cannot defend yourself. The talk ends and we move to Q&A. I notice Horowitz has failed to mention what we can do to fight this insidious leftist control. I get in line. The first person asks Horowitz how to distinguish this from affirmative action. Horowitz sort of dodges the question, talking more about how conservatives are discriminated against in his view, before assuring me that he doesn’t support a requirement of hiring conservatives, he just thinks the management should seek out good conservatives (he mentions Thomas Sowell as an example) and hire them.

Horowitz explains that Bush-hatred is the problem, not disagreement. “Friends disagree with me, but they don’t compare me to Hitler!” It’s my turn. I say that I understand programs to ensure blacks and women aren’t discriminated against, but why do conservatives deserve special treatment? Horowitz emphasizes that he’s against affirmative action and says that his point is that exposure to new ideas is far more important than skin color. (The audience applauds at Horowitz’s ability to evade my poorly constructed question.) Finally, someone asks what we can do about it. Horowitz says he’s started a group, StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org (200K visitors!)


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

Rising status insecurity and the continuing move away from traditional forms of authority—from traditional family and church to governments and employers—all helped create the conditions for a powerful conservative backlash against abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and environmentalism. Insecure Americans seeking ways to meet their deeply felt needs for status direct their ire at immigrants, racial minorities, the poor, and others perceived as low status. And since the 1970s, conservatives have successfully harnessed resentments around everything from affirmative action to school busing to environmental laws. And while support for universal programs like Social Security and Medicare has remained relatively high, support for programs aimed at helping the poorest Americans has declined sharply.27 5. By 1993, the economic fortunes for the average American started to improve.

Given the powerful correlation between rising prosperity and the emergence of higher postmaterialist values, it would seem to follow that the increasing prosperity of the 1993 to 2003 period would be accompanied by a turn back toward fulfillment values. And indeed, this is what Benjamin Friedman believes happened. Friedman points to the quieting down of controversies over affirmative action, the liberalization of trade, military action in Yugoslavia and Somalia for humanitarian reasons, increased spending on education, and more liberal attitudes toward immigration. But Friedman offers no evidence that any of the above is indicative of a shift in social values. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed in Congress in 1993, when the economic recovery was just beginning, because President Clinton pushed it through, not because an increasingly prosperous and secure public had suddenly embraced trade liberalization.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed in Congress in 1993, when the economic recovery was just beginning, because President Clinton pushed it through, not because an increasingly prosperous and secure public had suddenly embraced trade liberalization. Notably, in 2005, after twelve years of solid economic growth (only briefly interrupted by a small recession), Congress rejected an expansion of NAFTA to the rest of Latin America. Affirmative action was dramatically rolled back in a voter initiative in California in 1996—a banner year for economic growth. Clinton’s mend-it-don’t-end-it position was politically deft, but it did not indicate (nor does Friedman suggest it did) more liberal attitudes toward racial equity. The only opinion research Friedman cites to substantiate his claim about more liberal attitudes toward the less fortunate is in regard to immigration.


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

Stan Puryear (later Muata Weusi-Puryear), a computer programmer who moved to the area in the early 1960s to pursue a doctorate in symbolic logic at UC Berkeley, became president of the Palo Alto–Stanford branch of the NAACP, which swelled with professors and students and was able to funnel substantial funds to the southern movement, in addition to organizing protests against new attacks from the real estate industry.23 Palo Alto SNCC and Mid-Peninsula CORE worked to desegregate employment, education, and housing individual by individual. That meant negotiating for affirmative action in hiring at shops, getting signatures for open-housing promises from homeowners, and “sneaking out” black kids into white liberal houses so they could access the residentially segregated Palo Alto schools. If the suitcase cohort could not for the most part access the integrated middle-class lifestyle held out as a lure during the war, they worked hard to prepare their children for such opportunities and to prepare the world for their children.

Having expanded greatly in the previous decades, in the late 1970s the state stopped. Conservatives, led by Governor Ronald Reagan, turned an attack on the New Left campus movement to an attack on students in general.98 Tuition and fees at the University of California system doubled in the ’80s, then tripled in the ’90s.99 Right-wing lawyers attacked affirmative action, posing individual white claims against black group claims. In the landmark Bakke ruling of 1978, the Supreme Court struck down the UC system’s racial admissions quotas—themselves a compromise with the open-admission demand from the Third World student movement—which steered liberation struggles toward an individual anti-discrimination orientation.

Together—and they usually were—the two concepts crystallized into a racist phantasmagoria: decent white property owners losing control of their communities to inferior blacks and Mexicans who are taking over the government, using up all the tax dollars, allotting themselves unfair advantages via affirmative action and social programs, despoiling the environment with their fertility, undermining the quality of America’s human stock, and destroying property values. And because of these shifting demographics, soon there would be nothing anyone could do about any of it. Bienvenidos a Soviet América. Underpinning the persecution fantasy in the 1970s and ’80s was Stanford’s supposedly hard new science in genetics and ecology, making it difficult for liberals to refute or reject.


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 the northeast, a similar recruitment program brought Puerto Ricans—who, like African Americans, were citizens, but second-class citizens—to work in the farms and fields. In the 1960s, the formal system of racial segregation in the United States was dismantled, and a new wave of government programs ranging from affirmative action to food stamps tried to redress the results of centuries of legally enforced racial inequality and exclusion. The Voting Rights Act, moreover, acknowledged that blacks had been excluded by administrative means from full citizenship. The bracero program was also tacitly acknowledged to be a violation of people’s rights.

Furthermore, as Crawford explains, “because bilingual education is controversial, it is reported less as a pedagogical field than a political issue, with opposing ‘sides’ given equal time.”16 Rather like the issue of evolution, or global warming: there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the basic issues, but because they are politically controversial, they are often presented in the media as if there were equal scientific validity to the opposing political views. In some ways, the debate about bilingual education mirrors other debates about social policy. Conservatives argue that social spending on programs like welfare, affirmative action, or others designed to address social, racial, and economic inequalities actually harms those whom it is designed to help. Education should not be understood as a zero-sum issue. Just as children should be taught math and reading—and educators understand that literacy enhances math skills, and vice versa—children who are fluent in a language other than English have an academic skill that should be nurtured.


pages: 172 words: 61,599

My Journey as a Combat Medic: From Desert Storm to Operation Enduring Freedom by Patrick Thibeault

affirmative action, operational security, placebo effect, satellite internet

The gun goes off and all four people take off. A few of the runners are being held back due to racism and inequality. Affirmative Action is supposed to help those who are being held back by racism and inequality. The majority of us part-time National Guard soldiers did not live in a bubble like the active duty soldiers did. We pointed out that these programs have some merit, but in most cases in the real world, the playing field is pretty equal. We tried to explain to the instructors that Affirmative Action, in itself, has become a form of discrimination. A big argument ensued, but it was good that discussions like this can occur in the military.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

While quantitative and standardized, the results simply measure the wrong things. Gladwell argues that the mismatch problem extends well beyond sports. He cites examples from education (credentials are poor predictors of performance), the legal profession (individuals accepted to law school under lower affirmative-action standards do as well as their classmates after graduation), and law enforcement (burly police officers may not be best for a largely relational job). You can easily see how the problem extends to interviews for all kinds of jobs, because the questions and answers rarely shed any light on prospective performance.

The loss of diversity usually stems from a dominant leader, an absence of facts, or cognitive homogeneity in the group. To illustrate the latter, Cass Sunstein, a professor at the Harvard Law School, and some colleagues separated liberals and conservatives into like-minded groups and had them deliberate on socially controversial issues like same-sex marriages and affirmative action. In most cases, the group settled on a more extreme view than that expressed by most individuals in interviews conducted before the deliberations. The views of the individuals became more homogeneous after they spent time with their groups. Without diversity, collectives large or small can be wildly off the mark.28 So what can you do to make the expert squeeze work for you instead of against you?


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Her less-gifted cousin might graduate from a private school with better grades and a range of extra-curricular baubles. If both apply for the same college place, the rich student is plainly better qualified, but does she really deserve the place more? In this instance, true equality of opportunity requires more than merely abstaining from racism or bigotry. It calls for affirmative action, taking into account the socio-economic conditions in which the cousins’ qualifications were earned (or not earned, as the case may be). Another perspective on desert is to say that instead of looking at merit to decide what people deserve, we should try to reward morally deserving or socially useful conduct, as opposed to work whose value is only valuable in commercial terms.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 268 FUTURE POLITICS Using algorithms and data to make these decisions is not inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s possible that carefully crafted algorithms could eliminate the biases and prejudices of human decision-makers.With regard to work, for instance, affirmative action algorithms could be used to broaden the pool of successful applicants from beyond the usual colleges and institutions. When it comes to loans, housing, and insurance, algorithms could be used to widen access for those who need or deserve it most. My point, at this stage, is simpler: code (embodying algorithms) is an increasingly important mechanism of distributive justice.

To add insult to injury, the neutrality fallacy gives these instances of injustice the veneer of objectivity, making them seem natural and inevitable when they are not. The lesson for technologists is that justice sometimes demands that different groups be treated differently. This idea underpins affirmative action and the subsidizing of minority arts. And it should underpin all our efforts to avoid algorithmic injustice. An application of code should be judged by whether the results it generates are consistent with a relevant principle of justice, not by whether the algorithm in question is neutral as between persons.


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

Officially, the line had nothing to do with race, but to critics it was a wink as ugly as it was blatant. Republicans bristled at the charge of race baiting. Civil rights, their party platform proclaimed, was a settled matter, and America was better for it. But race was so intertwined with the most contentious issues of the 1970s and ’80s, from school busing and affirmative action to welfare and crime, that it was possible to stoke prejudices in ways that were politically advantageous. Moreover, Democrats moved in the opposite direction, embracing newly enfranchised blacks in the South and forging tighter bonds with nonwhite voters everywhere. The New Left movement of activists and academics gained influence within the party, pushing it toward a vision of social equality and powering the nomination of George McGovern for president in 1972.

Over the last generation, Georgia’s fraught racial politics had pushed its white voters toward the Republican Party, and Buchanan now aimed hard for them. A few months earlier, Bush had signed a civil rights bill. He’d told conservatives it was a victory because it didn’t include quotas. but it did allow for affirmative action, which Buchanan now argued was just as likely to make blue-collar whites the victims of “reverse discrimination.” He framed it as an issue of class—Bush and the “Exeter-Yale GOP Club” trying to “salve their social consciences at other people’s expense.” The White House was on edge as the vote neared.

And then I read in the Manchester paper that the United States Export-Import Bank had just guaranteed a great big loan for a new paper mill in Mexico.” He paused to let that sink in, then returned to his refrain. “What are we doing to our own people, my friends?” He knew every button to press: multiculturalism and affirmative action (“This was supposed to be a country where men were judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin”), foreign aid (“If I get there, foreign aid comes to an end and we start thinking about the Americans right here in the United States!”), political correctness (“They took Washington’s name off Washington’s birthday!”)


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

Another important development in higher education has been a major expansion in the federal government's involvement in financing, and even more in regulating both government and nongovernment institutions. The intervention has in large measure been part of the greatly expanded federal activity to foster so-called "affirmative action," in the name of greater civil rights. This intervention has aroused great concern among faculty and administrators at colleges and universities, and much opposition by them to the activities of federal bureaucrats. The whole episode would be a matter of poetic justice if it were not so serious for the future of higher education.

GOVERNMENT In addition to protecting union members, government has adopted a host of laws intended to protect workers in general: laws that provide for workmen's compensation, prohibit child labor, set minimum wages and maximum hours of labor, establish commissions to assure fair employment practices, promote affirmative action, establish the federal Office of Safety and Health Administration to regulate employment practices, and others too numerous to list. Some measures have had a favorable effect on conditions of work. Most, like workmen's compensation and child labor laws, simply embodied in law practices that had already become common in the private market, perhaps extending them somewhat to fringe areas.

On issue after issue the government of the people acts in ways that the bulk of the people oppose. Every public opinion poll shows that a large majority of the public opposes compulsory busing for integrating schools—yet busing not only continues but is continuously expanded. Very much the same thing is true of affirmative action programs in employment and higher education and of many other measures directed at implementing views favorable to equality of outcome. So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, "Are you getting your money's worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government?"


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

In the US, this traditionally involved a live-and-let-live approach: cultural diversity was accepted but not promoted, and it was expected that newcomers would organically become American as they and their children settled in. But since the 1960s, affirmative-action policies designed to give a leg up to the descendants of slaves and ‘native’ Americans have encouraged newcomers to continue identifying as ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Asian’ for economic reasons to benefit from preferential hiring and promotion. That, in turn, has sparked a backlash among non-beneficiaries. While affirmative-action policies may be necessary for short periods to right entrenched injustices, they become pernicious if sustained over time, since they encourage people to club together in rival groups to compete for privileges.

Many politicians lambaste multiculturalism for enabling or even encouraging immigrants to lead ‘parallel lives’ – which typically isn’t true – yet French-style assimilation policies have scarcely eradicated the problems of the segregated banlieue underclass. If immigrants and their children get trapped in deprived ghettoes, they suffer and feel excluded, while locals accuse them of not fitting in. That is not an argument for affirmative action, though newly arrived refugees need specific help.11 It is an argument for vigorously pursuing policies that advance equal opportunities, non-discrimination policies and social mobility for everyone in society – not just immigrants – as well as providing a pathway to citizenship for newcomers who choose to settle.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Laws need to be adapted to support what is happening in the market. Under current discrimination law, it may be unlawful to tell an algorithm to adjust the scores of women or to institute hiring quotas. The current law on affirmative action is unsettled. For years, the quest for equality has presented a puzzle and bred tensions between different laws. Many policies to increase diversity have themselves been deemed discriminatory, labeled as unconstitutional affirmative action. Technology may help us move beyond the conundrum of wanting to be both identity conscious and identity blind. Legal scholar Pauline Kim argues that federal discrimination law should be broadened to prohibit what she terms classification bias—the use of automated classification that exacerbates inequality along the lines of sex, race, or other protected categories.39 But we’ve also seen that classification can be a way to support rather than impede inclusion.

What types of inputs should be allowed and what should be forbidden is a normative decision that will vary. For example, we might want to use gender and race as identifiable inputs to detect ongoing bias or to correct past wrongs. These are policy choices that we need to reexamine given evolving capabilities. Moreover, while constitutional law has limited affirmative action, digital capabilities are providing us with the advantages of precision and calibration. Unlike requirements about quotas in hiring or representation on boards, for example, algorithms can be designed to be fine-tuned. A focus on fair and equitable outcomes—as opposed to restricting inputs or constraining algorithmic learning—is likely to be the most impactful strategy most of the time.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But in recent years, the government has tried to address chronic development problems by spending much more on education, water, sanitation, and welfare grants. To narrow the wealth gap between white and black South Africans and to create a black middle class, it instituted a Black Economic Empowerment program, which supporters call a growth strategy and detractors label affirmative action. According to the program, all companies are required to comply with specific targets on black ownership, procurement, and employment equity.i Many government tenders give preferential treatment to BEE-compliant firms. In 2004, it scrapped plans to privatize state-owned companies like Eskom and decided instead to use them to help generate stronger growth.

But as in Russia, he has also embraced state control over the oil, gas, and mining resources and hasn’t hesitated to use state institutions to favor state-owned companies and privately owned favorites over foreign competitors. For forty years, Malaysia’s government has used state capitalism to serve its political interests by establishing and enforcing a kind of majority affirmative action—empowering Bumiputeras (Malays and other native ethnic groups) at the expense of commercially successful Chinese and Indian minorities. In 1969, the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) capitalized on nationalist rage stirred by “race riots” between Malays and minority Chinese to create the New Economic Policy, which guarantees Bumiputeras a fixed share of Malaysia’s national wealth.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

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

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

Among his administration’s major initiatives were: ending military conscription in favor of a so-called all-volunteer force; creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; signing into law the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts; launching the “war on cancer”; embracing “affirmative action” to promote equal employment opportunity; imposing wage and price controls in an effort to curb inflation; abandoning the gold standard; expanding social security; and increasing federal expenditures on Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.8 Although Nixon may have been a Republican, he routinely defied conservative orthodoxy, going so far at one point as to assert that “we are all Keynesians now.”9 Not every program Nixon initiated achieved its intended (or at least advertised) purpose.

INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. ABC abolition abortion Abu Ghraib Adams, John Adams, John Quincy affirmative action Afghanistan Bill Clinton and insurgency vs. Soviet Union and Afghanistan War (2001–present) Bush Jr. and Obama and Trump and Africa African Americans AIG alliances Allied Force, Operation all-volunteer force (AVF) al-Qaeda America condition of, in 2016 declining primacy of divisions in America First American Airlines American Century American Exceptionalism American Historical Association American mission.


pages: 287 words: 69,655

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Sacerdote’s study: Bruce Sacerdote, “How large are the effects from changes in family environment? A study of Korean American adoptees,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(1) (2007): 119–57. gave Jared a stake in his lucrative real estate business: Andrew Prokop, “As Trump takes aim at affirmative action, let’s remember how Jared Kushner got into Harvard,” Vox, July 6, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/2/16084226/jared-kushner-harvard-affirmative-action. randomized controlled trial on breastfeeding: Michael S. Kramer et al., “Effects of prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding on child height, weight, adiposity, and blood pressure at age 6.5 y: Evidence from a large randomized trial,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 86(6) (2007): 1717–21.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

If you have no orientation—whatever happens, happens—that’s a bias. I was at Stanford from 1990 to 1994. It was a really hard time to decide that racial and social justice was going to be the thing that you cared about. We had affirmative action backlash. Prop 187 passed right after I graduated—an anti-immigration bill that targeted Mexicans in particular.* And then Prop 209 shortly after that, which gutted affirmative action in public schools.† Condoleezza Rice was our provost. And so, this was the climate. I was miserable. Tons of the people who espoused this libertarian model were there at the same time. They did not have neutral opinions about politics then, and I don’t believe that they had some sort of transformational experience later on that reshaped their sense of justice.


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

(Other strands take a much more elitist, and even oligarchic line.) intelligence or academic ability: See, e.g., Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy (Boston: Beacon, 2015), 21, and Richard D. Kahlenberg, “Affirmative Action for the Rich,” New York Times, May 10, 2013, accessed June 14, 2018, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/13/why-do-top-schools-still-take-legacy-applicants/affirmative-action-for-the-rich . skill or talent: See, e.g., Lauren Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 15–25. Hereafter cited as Rivera, Pedigree. See also Bourree Lam, “Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites,” Atlantic, May 27, 2015, accessed June 14, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitment-resumes-interviews-how-the-hiring-process-favors-elites/394166/ [inactive].

These divisions cumulate to compose a distinctive elite worldview, which separates the natural instincts and imaginative understandings of rich Americans from those of the rest. This worldview combines traditionally progressive ideals concerning privacy, diversity, and pluralism with traditionally conservative ideals concerning work, productivity, and individual responsibility. The rich are more likely than the rest to favor same-sex marriage, women’s rights, and affirmative action and to oppose school prayer and law-and-order policing, and they are more likely than the rest to favor low taxes and free trade, and to oppose social spending and labor unions. The worldview reflects what one commentator calls a “greater attraction of the free market to the affluent”—including both the free market’s indifference to religion and moralism and its hostility to government regulation and redistribution.

Espenshade, Chang Y. Chung, and Joan L. Walling, “Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities,” Social Science Quarterly 85, no. 5 (December 2004): 1422–46, 1443, Figure 1. See also Douglas S. Massey and Margarita Mooney, “The Effects of America’s Three Affirmative Action Programs on Academic Performance,” Social Problems 54, no. 1 (2007): 99–117, 100 (“The only comprehensive study of all [preferential admissions] that has sought to control for variation in qualifications is that of Espenshade and associates (2004).”) the entire bottom half: See Chapter 5.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

The new ideology can be fairly described as totalizing and unapologetic for its absolutism. Its targets were not confined to Democratic politicians but included a wide range of matters: education, morality, religion, and popular culture. The great evil was “relativism,” the favorite remedy “discipline.” They charged that liberal relativism, permissiveness (= moral laxity), affirmative action, and secularism were softening the national will, mocking ideals of loyalty and patriotism, and in the process undermining national unity in the global struggle with Soviet communism. To describe Republicanism as a dynamic party is to say that the party succeeded in organizing and focusing powers that challenge limits, be they limits regarding church and state, presidential powers, environmental protections, the distinctions between public and private, the protections for civil liberties, the observance of treaties, or respect for local markets.

When presidents sign a congressional bill into law, it has sometimes been the practice of a president to attach a statement in which he may indicate his understanding of the intention of the bill. President Bush, however, has taken that practice and converted it into a sweeping claim that he can ignore provisions of a bill with which he disagrees. On this basis he has claimed the authority to ignore congressional attempts to regulate the military, affirmative action provisions, requirements that he report to Congress about immigration service problems, whistle-blower protections, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. He has asserted that he does not have to obey congressional laws forbidding U.S. troops to engage in combat in Colombia; or laws requiring him to inform Congress when he diverts money to start secret operations; or laws prohibiting the military from using intelligence unlawfully collected.

Despite the Higher Costs,” New York Times, August 20, 2006, A-12. Index abolitionism, 257–58, 277 abortion debate, 62, 115 Abramoff, Jack, 119, 323n2 academia. See educational institutions Acheson, Dean, 301n70 Adams, John, 154, 255–56 advertising, 12–13, 118. See also media affirmative action, 224, 236 Afghanistan, 193 African Americans, 57–58, 101, 181, 197, 228, 277 Albright, Madeleine, 236 Alcibiades, 172–73, 282–83 Aldridge, Edward C., Jr., 313n16 Alien and Sedition laws of 1798, 78 Alito, Samuel, 146, 236, 323n2 American colonies, 150–51, 254, 255 American Political Science Association (APSA), Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, 188–89 American Revolution, 154, 155, 219, 227 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 89 antidemocracy, xx-xxi, 150, 212–13, 239, 241 The Apprentice (television series), 144 archaism, 117–21, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 169, 201 Archer Daniels Midland, 138, 185 aristocracy, 97, 151, 162, 174, 183, 219, 248, 251, 253, 256, 269.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

To mention only a few: Religion—at present, contention most vehemently between militant Islamists and their opponents (Christians; Hindus; secularists of the post-Christian West; the post-Communist successor states, etc.); not ruling out the possibility of other axes of religious conflict in the future. Race/ethnicity/national identity—conflicts ranging among struggles over distribution of the spoils of office, quotas and government regulation of ethnic access to resources (affirmative action, etc.), policing borders against immigration, exclusion of immigrants, territorial disputes, and ethnic wars. But also movements to promote interethnic harmony or integration, which may be opposed in turn by movements seeking the particularistic ends listed in the previous sentence. There are also a host of transient issues that take up most of the political attention space most of the time.

After the futuristic decade of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks would also recycle as new mass culture the classical music, ballet, and literature inherited from the imperial intelligentsia. The Stalinist state had indeed ended up looking imperial in many respects. Yet the ability of the U.S.S.R. to integrate its numerous nationalities for almost three generations was arguably progressive and modernistic. The Soviets pioneered affirmative action and then proved by development and broad inclusion that they really meant it. At the time many observers, friend and foe alike, tended to agree that these achievements based on economic planning and the abolition of private property in sum amounted to socialism. The key Soviet features were emulated or reinvented by a broad variety of developmentalist and nationalist regimes because such a concentration of state powers appeared extraordinarily successful for the duration of twentieth century.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

An ongoing class action lawsuit against Bookspan (the company behind Book of the Month club) claims that: Nowhere on the face of the 25 pages of the Clubs' multi-step registration process does it disclose any the following: (1) that there is a purchase requirement; (2) the timeframe in which those purchases must take place (3) the cost per item to fulfill the purchase requirement; (4) the penalties for failing to fulfill any purchase requirement; (5) that "featured selections" will be automatically sent on a periodic basis; (6) that affirmative action will be required to stop the shipments and prevent a consumer from being charged; and (7) the actual cost of any "featured selections.” … a consumers' purported assent to the Membership Agreement occurs on a page prior to and separate from the credit card submission page, an intentional design meant to decrease the number of prospective consumers who will actually attempt to read the Membership Agreement.

As you know, elected officials are held to high standards in public life. Here are some reasons people are giving to vote against Dan Morales for Attorney General. Please tell me if each statement makes you much more likely to vote against Dan Morales, somewhat more likely to vote against Dan Morales, or if it makes no difference at all? Morales supports affirmative action. Morales supports gun control. Morales' political campaign purchased two tickets to a fundraiser for Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam organization. Juvenile crime has increased by one-third in Texas since Morales became Attorney General. Conservative political groups rate Morales as a liberal Democrat.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Fact Sheet,” Sept. 8, 2017, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-chinese-in-the-u-s/; United States Census Bureau, “Los Angeles County a Microcosm of Nation’s Diverse Collection of Business Owners, Census Bureau Reports,” Dec. 15, 2015, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-209.html. 10 López, Ruiz, and Patten, “Key Facts About Asian Americans.” 11 Shalene Gupta, “Big Fat Indian Weddings Get Bigger and Fatter,” Fortune, Aug. 8, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/08/08/indian-weddings/. 12 Sari Horwitz and Emma Brown, “Justice Department Plans New Project to Sue Universities over Affirmative Action Policies,” Washington Post, Aug. 1, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-plans-new-project-to-sue-universities-over-affirmative-action-policies/2017/08/01/6295eba4-772b-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.808b27e06276. 13 Vivek Wadhwa, “The Face of Success, Part I: How the Indians Conquered Silicon Valley,” Inc., Jan. 13, 2012, https://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/how-the-indians-succeeded-in-silicon-valley.html. 14 Ibid. 15 Jane Ciabattari, “Why Is Rumi the Best-Selling Poet in the US?

The emerging emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in the United States is due in part to a recognition of the competitive achievements of Asian societies in science as well as the demands of Asian parents in the United States. So, too, is the rising academic stress manifest in the elevated teen suicide rate. Asians’ superior academic standing in college admissions has generated major lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard, with aggrieved whites claiming that Asians benefit from affirmative action policies that whites now seem to need to guarantee sufficient representation in universities and Asians demanding that admissions criteria be more meritocratic rather than artificially limiting their enrollment through racial quotas.12 It is safe to say that Silicon Valley would not be what it is today without Asians.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

The data hinted at reverse discrimination against males, and in fact there was explicit evidence of this: “In most of the cases involving favored status for women it appears that the admissions committees were seeking to overcome long-established shortages of women in their fields,” Bickel wrote. Just three years later, a lawsuit over affirmative action on another campus of the University of California went all the way to the Supreme Court. Had the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, such “favored status for women” might have become illegal. However, the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action, and the Berkeley case became a historical footnote. A wise man leaves the final word not with the Supreme Court but with his wife. Why did mine have such a strong intuitive conviction that it is utterly impossible for a school to discriminate while each of its departments acts fairly?


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

THE DEMOCRATS Nearly all states now held primaries, completing the reforms begun by the McGovern Commission. The smooth Robert Strauss, chair of the Democratic National Committee, salved the divisions of 1968 and 1972. Strauss deftly empowered party and elected officials but retained the inclusion rules, now governed by affirmative action, not quotas. For the first time, campaigns were governed by a new finance law that had been passed in 1974. The U.S. Treasury gave $21.8 million to each of the two major party candidates, provided that they spent no more. It also matched the offerings of small contributors to candidates running in the presidential primaries.

The same was true in the civil service, the one urban sector where employment was increasing. Blacks armed with new antidiscrimination laws mobilized to challenge older political and recruitment practices. Black issues had been addressed separately during the 1960S. Whether it was the War on Poverty, affirmative action, or jobs for ghetto residents, the government acted as if, in the words of the Kerner Commission 1968 report on the causes of U.S. race riots, the U.S. was two societies, black and white, poor and affluent. Although only 30 percent of the poor in 1964 were African American, 47.9 percent of nonwhite Americans were poor, compared with 14.2 percent of whites.11 People disputed the origin of this difference.

Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 86. 12. Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 13. John David Skretny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 90. 14. Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 125. 15. Joyce A. Hughes to Vernon Jordan, Aug. 6, 1975, III, file 6, box 173, National Urban League papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 16.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

It found that 37 per cent of students think it can be acceptable to shout down controversial speakers and as many as 10 per cent of students think it can be acceptable to use violence to prevent someone from speaking.60 On some campuses necessary work against discrimination of minority groups has turned into a contest about who can turn the most innocent difference of opinion into evidence of hate and oppression. Having another understanding of the economy or of affirmative action can be enough to be attacked. This is not strange. Such purging of dissent always happens when a homogenous group establishes an orthodoxy. But if universities want to continue to be a place for open inquiry, they must make sure not to play along. ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field,’ John Stuart Mill observed.61 Fortunately, some universities are beginning to take a stand, some by embracing the ‘Chicago principles’ of free speech, declaring that ‘concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community’.

This is the idea that equal status contact between individuals from different groups, especially if it is in pursuit of a common goal, reduces antagonism. Cult leaders try to isolate their followers from outside influences precisely because they don’t want their own control and group loyalty ruined by contact with the outside world. This was a very influential theory that contributed to decisions like affirmative action and bussing students to other schools to reduce segregation. A 2018 review found twenty-seven high-quality studies on the contact hypothesis, and twenty-four of them revealed positive effects on prejudice reduction.49 However, those studies only looked at very specific situations, to fit the conditions Allport thought were needed.

INDEX Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 6, 136–7, 138, 169, 353 abortion, 113 absolutist monarchies, 154, 155, 170, 182, 185 Academy Awards, 82 Accenture, 375 accountants, 41 Acemoglu, Daron, 185, 187, 200 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88, 249 Acton, Lord, see Dalberg-Acton, John Adams, Douglas, 295 Adobe, 310 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 306 Aeschylus, 132 affirmative action, 244 Afghanistan, 70, 345 Age of Discovery, 177 agriculture, 39–40, 42, 74, 171, 263 Akbar I, Mughal Emperor, 98 Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC), 42 Alaska, 76 Albania, 54 Albertus Magnus, Saint, 145 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond, 154 Alexander III ‘the Great’, Basileus of Macedon, 87–9 Alexandria, Egypt, 134 algae, 332 algebra, 137 Alibaba, 311 Allport, Gordon, 244–5 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 alpha males, 227–8, 229 Alphaville, 245 altruism, 216 Amalric, Arnaud, 94 Amazon, 275, 311 America First, 19, 272 American Civil War (1861–5), 109 American Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 American Society of Human Genetics, 76–7 Americanization, 19 Amherst, William, 1st Earl Amherst, 176–7 amphorae, 48 Amsterdam, Holland, 150, 152, 153 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 anaesthesia, 279, 296 anagrams, 83 Anatolia, 42, 74 Anaximander, 127 Anaximenes, 127 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Andromeda, 88 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Anhui, China, 315 anti-Semitism, 11, 94–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 254, 255 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor, 91 Apama, 88 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5 Apple, 82, 195, 304, 311, 319 Apuleius, 89 Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 Arabic numerals, 70, 137, 156 Arabic, 136, 137, 140 archaeology, 21–2, 31, 32, 38, 43, 50, 51 Archer Daniels Midland, 329 Aristides, Aelius, 48 Aristophanes, 129, 131, 132 Aristotle, 130–31, 132, 137, 141–6, 161 Armenians, 136, 220 ARPAnet, 306 Art Nouveau, 198 art, 198 Artaxerxes III, Persian Emperor, 87 Ashkenazi Jews, 99 Ashoka, Mauryan Emperor, 53 Assyria (2500–609 BC), 248–9 Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BC), 41, 43, 86 astronomy, 80, 145–6, 150 Atari, 304 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131, 134 Atlas Copco, 65 Augustine of Hippo, 133, 139 Australia, 50–53, 76, 262 Australopithecus afarensis, 24–5 Austria, 1, 150, 151, 190 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 179, 254 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Habsburg monarchy (1282–1918), 151, 179, 190, 237 migration crisis (2015–), 342 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Nazi period (1938–45), 105 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 Authoritarian Dynamic, The (Stenner), 343 authoritarianism, 4, 14, 220, 343–61, 363, 379 democracy and, 357 economics and, 346–51 exposure to difference and, 242 innovation and, 318 insecurity and, 338, 342, 378 media and, 346–9 nostalgia and 351–4 predisposition, 220, 343–6 populism and, 325, 350–51 scapegoats and, 355–6 science and, 161–3 automatic looms, 179 automation, 63, 312–13 Averroes, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 Aztec Empire (1428–1521), 55 Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 75 baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 Babylon, 39, 86–7 Babylonia (1895–539 BC), 39, 42, 43, 86–7, 128, 131, 249, 267 Bacon, Francis, 147, 156, 165–6, 201 bad news, 322 Baghdad, 70, 136, 353 Bahrain, 42 Bailey, Ron, 11 Bailyn, Bernard, 201 balance of trade, 59–60 Banda Islands, 100 Bangladesh, 270 Bannon, Steve, 14, 108 Barcelona, Catalonia, 320 Basel, Switzerland, 152 Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Bayezid II, Ottoman Sultan, 98 Bayle, Pierre, 158 Beginning of Infinity, The (Deutsch), 332 Behavioural Immune System, 222 Beirut, Lebanon, 236 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Berges, Aida, 80 Bering land bridge, 76 Berkeley, see University of California, Berkeley Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 307–8 Bernstein, William, 42 Berossus, 267 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 243 Beveridge, William, 59 Béziers, France, 94 Bezos, Jeffrey, 274, 275–6, 277 Bi Sheng, 171 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 bicycles, 297 de Biencourt, Charles, 189 Big Five personality traits, 7 Black Death (1346–53), 77, 139, 208, 356, 352, 356 Blade Runner, 334 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 124–6 Blue Ghosts, 236 Bohr, Niels, 105 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), 307 bonobos, 226–7 Book of Jonah, 248–50 Borjas, George, 116 Boston, Massachusetts, 122, 223 Boudreaux, Donald, 62, 270 Boulton, Matthew, 194 Bowles, Samuel, 216 Boym, Svetlana, 288 Brandt, Willy, 364 Brewer, Marilynn, 247 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Brezhnev, Leonid, 315 Britain, 169, 181–99 Acts of Union (1707), 101, 194 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 anti-Semitism in, 254 arts, 198 Bletchley Park, 124–6 Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 Cheddar Man, 74 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 coffee houses, 166 colonies, 84, 191, 194, 200 Corn Laws repeal (1846), 53, 191 creative destruction in, 179 crime in, 119, 120 Dutch War (1672–4), 101 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 hair powder tax (1795), 72 immigration in, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 193–4 Industrial Revolution, 188–99, 202 innovation in, 53, 189–90 Internet, development of, 307–8 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Levellers, 183–4, 186 literacy in, 188, 198 literature, 188–9 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 London 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Magna Carta (1215), 5 monopolies, 182 MPs’ expenses scandal (2009), 345 Muslim community, 113 Navigation Acts, 192 nostalgia in, 294 open society, 169, 181–2, 195–9 patent system, 189–90, 203, 314 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 political tribalism in, 238, 240–41 poverty in, 256 railways in, 297 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196, 296 ruin follies, 286–7 slavery, abolition of (1807), 182, 205 smuggling in, 192 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 United States, migration to, 104 West Africa Squadron, 205 Whig Party, 185, 201 World War II (1939–45), 124–6 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 135 Bronze Age (c. 3300–600 BC) Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 migration to Europe, 74–5 Phoenician civilization, 43–6, 49, 70 Sumerian civilization, 42–3 Brotherton, Rob, 322 Brown, Donald, 219, 283 Bruges, Flanders, 208 Bruno, Giordano, 150 Bryn Mawr College, 201 Buddhism, 96, 149, 352 Bulgaria, 73, 342 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US, 65 Burke, Edmund, 152, 292 Bush, George Walker, 328 ByteDance, 318 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 94, 134, 135, 155, 224 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 Calvin, John, 149 Calvinism, 6, 99, 153, 356 Canada, 235, 258 Caplan, Bryan, 258 Caracalla, Roman Emperor, 91 Carbon Engineering, 332 Cardwell, Donald, 10 Cardwell’s Law, 10 Carlson, Tucker, 82, 302 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 Carthage (814–146 BC), 45 Caspian Sea, 75 Cathars, 94, 142 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 154 Catholicism, 208 in Britain, 101, 185–6, 191 Crusades, 94, 138 in Dutch Republic, 99 exiles and, 153 in France, 154 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 100, 106, 140, 233 Inquisition, 94, 97, 98, 100, 143, 150 in Italy, 6, 169 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106, 233 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 237 in Rwanda, 230–31 in United States, 102, 104, 108, 254 values and, 114 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 201 Celts, 89, 289 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 313 Ceres, 89 Cerf, Vinton, 307 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 306, 307 chariot racing, 224 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 148, 179, 183 Chávez, Hugo, 354 Chechen War, Second (1999–2009), 354 Cheddar Man, 74 cheongsam dresses, 73 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 286, 300 Chicago principles, 164–5 Chicago, Illinois, 202 child mortality, 168–9 Child, Josiah, 184 children, 26 chimpanzees, 24, 25, 32, 36, 226–7, 228 China, 4, 5, 6, 13, 84, 270, 314–18 Amherst Mission (1816), 176–7 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), 352 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 authoritarianism, 4, 162–3, 175, 318, 325, 343 budget deficits, 60 cheongsam dresses, 73 Confucianism, 129, 149, 169, 176 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 4, 11–12, 162–3 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 355 dictatorships, support for, 367 dynamism in, 315–18 ethnic groups in, 84 Great Wall, 178 industrialization 169, 172–3, 207 intellectual property in, 58 kimonos, 73 literacy in, 148 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 national stereotypes, 235, 236 overcapacity in, 317 paper, invention of, 136 private farming initiative (1978), 315–16 productivity in, 317 poverty in, 273, 316 Qing dynasty (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179, 353 Reform and Opening-up (1979–), 4, 53, 56, 315–16 SARS outbreak (2002), 162 science in, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73, 269 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 Song dynasty (960–1279), 53, 169–75 state capitalism in, 316–17 Tang dynasty (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Taoism, 129, 149 trade barriers, 59 United States, migration to, 104, 109, 254 United States, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 WTO accession (2001), 63 Yuan Empire (1271–1368), 174–5 Zheng He’s voyages (1405–33), 177–8 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 Christensen, Clayton, 305 Christianity, 46, 70, 96, 129 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50, 296 in Britain, 101 Calvinism, 6, 99, 149, 153, 356 Cathars, 94, 142 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 Crusades, 94, 138 Catholicism, see Catholicism Dominican order, 356 in Dutch Republic, 99 economic hardship and, 359 fundamentalism, 133–5, 149 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Inquisition, 97, 98, 100 Jews, persecution of, 95, 96, 97 Lutheranism, 99, 356 in Mongol Empire, 96 Old Testament, 46, 72 orthodox backlash, 149–50 Orthodox Church, 155 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178, 233 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178 Puritanism, 99, 102 Rastafari and, 72 Reformation, 148, 155 in Roman Empire, 90, 93–4 science and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 97 tribalism and, 230–31, 246 zero-sum relationships and, 248–50 Chua, Amy, 84 Cicero, 141 Cilician, Gates, 42 cities, 40, 79, 140 division of labour in, 40 immigration and, 114, 250 innovation and, 40, 53, 79, 140, 145, 172, 287 liberalism and, 339 Mesopotamia, 37–43 open-mindedness and, 35 productivity and, 40, 98 tradition and, 287, 291 turtle theory and, 121–2 civic nationalism, 377–8 civil society, 6, 199, 253, 358, 363 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 362–3, 365–6 ‘Clash of Civilizations?’


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

In its 2015 report summarizing its review of admissions at UT Austin, Kroll didn’t find any quid pro quo exchanges or things that veered into illegal territory, but what was happening still didn’t seem entirely kosher, the report’s authors determined. Existing policies, the company warned, could lead to “affirmative action for the advantaged” as the president, deans, and others flagged prospects of special interest and encouraged or pressured the admissions office to take their recommendations. Bill Powers, who had been president at the flagship campus since 2006—and is not the same Bill Powers who introduced Doug Hodge to Rick Singer—acknowledged intervening in admissions decisions at the request of regents and others.

Playing soccer sophomore year isn’t enough; admissions officers expect to see an application chock-full of references to the sport—tournament trophies, race times, essays about hours they spent sacrificing social lives and physical health to compete. But with most sports losing money for schools, why bend over backward to favor athletes at all? Critics say the practice only serves as a sort of affirmative action for wealthy applicants. Elite club programs, camps, and showcases that get teens in front of collegiate coaches easily run into the thousands of dollars. Lift tickets and country club memberships aren’t cheap. Then, there’s the racial disparity. About 65 percent of all students who participate in NCAA sports are white, higher than the overall student population.

He also liked the idea: Toby Macfarlane’s sentencing memo. Document 335, filed November 8, 2019, in USA v. Macfarlane, case no. 19-cr-10131-NMG. “Our sports teams engender pride”: March 15, 2019, email to Yale community from President Peter Salovey. Critics say the practice only serves: Saahil Desai, “College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students,” The Atlantic, October 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/. About 65 percent of all students: NCAA Demographics Search, 2018, Search by Gender and Diversity, http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/ncaa-demographics-search.


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

The charmed circle became so homogeneous by the late 1990s that Valley firms attracted the attention of federal officials for their failures to properly ensure diversity. Anyone with a federal contract had to adhere to affirmative action guidelines, and tech was missing the mark. “Being the fastest-growing software company ever, we shot past the mark that the government sets down for putting an affirmative action plan in place,” countered Bob Sundstrom, whom Netscape belatedly hired as its manager of diversity programs after it was rapped on the knuckles for its failures. Apple had to pay over $400,000 in back pay to fifteen black workers who were rejected for jobs.

Nearby suburbs filled with Lockheed men and their wives and children, further skewing the Valley’s demographics toward the white, the middle class, and the college educated. Plenty of blue-collar workers found jobs in Sunnyvale as well; like the other electronics firms of the era, Lockheed had assembly lines alongside its research labs. But the lack of diversity carried through even in jobs that didn’t require an engineering degree. In an era before affirmative action, Lockheed and the other major electronics firms of the Valley had no pressure to recruit minority or female employees. Even after the enactment of federal minority hiring laws that required contractors like Lockheed to meet certain hiring targets, the percentage of Latino, Asian, and black workers at its Sunnyvale facility only reached 10 percent.

For the remainder of his undergraduate years and as a Stanford law student immediately after, Thiel focused his considerable intellectual energies on the Review, making its libertarian-conservative views an inescapable feature of campus life as a fresh, even more polarizing battle erupted: the war over the undergraduate curriculum. The “canon wars” blazed hotly on many elite American campuses in the mid-1980s, as students and faculty demanded—and won—a more inclusive, multicultural approach to humanistic education. Civil rights and affirmative action victories of the 1960s had resulted in far more diversity on campus; people of color now made up one-third of the Stanford student body. But as access to college enlarged, so did what one national periodical primly called “public concern about student ignorance.” Bestsellers like E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind bemoaned the state of American higher education, turning academic debates about what went on the syllabus into a flashpoint of the 1980s culture wars.18 This swirl was escalating on Stanford’s campus by the time Thiel founded what he called “a forum for rational debate” in the Review, and its eventual heat and velocity—coming right on the heels of the headline-making fight over the Reagan library—made Stanford’s canon wars national news.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The Republican Party now had its Christian base. It also appealed to the cultural nationalism of the white working classes and their besieged sense of moral righteousness (besieged because this class lived under conditions of chronic economic insecurity and felt excluded from many of the benefits that were being distributed through affirmative action and other state programmes). This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti-feminism. The problem was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of culture, but the ‘liberals’ who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environmentalists, etc.).

But the moral values that have now become central to the neo-conservatives can best be understood as products of the particular coalition that was built in the 1970s, between elite class and business interests intent on restoring their class power, on the one hand, and an electoral base among the ‘moral majority’ of the disaffected white working class on the other. The moral values centred on cultural nationalism, moral righteousness, Christianity (of a certain evangelical sort), family values, and right-to-life issues, and on antagonism to the new social movements such as feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, and environmentalism. While this alliance was mainly tactical under Reagan, the domestic disorder of the Clinton years forced the moral values argument to the top of the agenda in the Republicanism of Bush the younger. It now forms the core of the moral agenda of the neoconservative movement.25 But it would be wrong to see this neoconservative turn as exceptional or peculiar to the US, even though there are special elements at work there that may not be present elsewhere.


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

Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing politics.”15 A recent econometric analysis of American counties is worth quoting in detail: “Whites who currently live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in 1860 are on average more conservative and express colder feelings toward African-Americans than whites who live elsewhere in the South. That is, the larger the number of slaves per capita in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southerner today will identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express positions that indicate some level of ‘racial resentment.’”16 A vivid sense of what it means to be black in America today is expressed well in a prose poem by Claudia Rankine that describes a professional man who is taken out of his car by the police, brought to the police station in handcuffs, stripped, and then released to walk home, with the refrain: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”17 The treatment of women is similar in some bodily aspects to current divisions about race.

Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1) (Winter): 29–46. Kang, Cecilia. 2016. “No Driver? Bring It On: How Pittsburgh Became Uber’s Testing Ground.” New York Times, September 10. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 2015. Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead. New York: Norton. Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Norton. Katznelson, Ira. 2013. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Norton. Kaufman, Dan. 2016. “The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin.” New York Times, January 16. Keller, Josh, and Adam Pearce. 2016.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

But there are by now countless studies looking at political orientation and asking people whether they are liberal or conservative, and it turns out that this sort of crude assessment works just fine at predicting all sorts of specific views. For instance, one study asked people about the following five issues: • Stricter gun control laws in the United States • Universal health care • Raising income taxes for persons in the highest income-tax bracket • Affirmative action for minorities • Stricter carbon emission standards to reduce global warming If you are American or European, you’ll have strong intuitions about which positions on these issues correspond to the liberal side and which to the conservative side, and you’ll be right. Moreover, these views hang together; people who approve one of them tend to approve the others; people who oppose one of them tend to oppose the others.

To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools. 1984 (Orwell), 37–38 A&W’s Third Pounder, 213, 229 abductions, 90–91 abortion, 6, 115, 117, 119 accountability, 155 Adams, Henry, 184 Adios, America (Coulter), 192–93 admiration, 16, 159 “affective neuroscience,” 60, 217 affirmative action, 116 Against Fairness (Asma), 159, 161 age restrictions, 230–31 aggression, 42, 45, 83–84, 193–95, 201 AIDS, 68–69 alcohol, and violent crime, 179 Alexander, Scott, 103–4 Alfred (character), 180 Alito, Samuel, 125–26 alternatives to empathy, limitations and biases of, 50–51 altruism, 46–47, 102–6, 167–68.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Many people now know that we are all, in fact, one species, and think that racial differences are, from a biological point of view, illusory; but that seldom undermines the significance for them of racial identities and affiliations. Around the world, people have sought and won affirmative action for their ethnoracial groups. In the United States, in part because of affirmative action, public opinion polls consistently show wide divergences on many questions along racial lines.33 On American campuses where the claim that “race is a social construct” echoes like a mantra, Asian, black, and white identities continue to shape social experience.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

—Blaise Pascal LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1–1 Everyday violence in a bodybuilding ad, 1940s 25 1–2 Domestic violence in a coffee ad, 1952 26 2–1 The violence triangle 35 2–2 Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies 49 2–3 Rate of death in warfare in nonstate and state societies 53 2–4 Homicide rates in the least violent nonstate societies compared to state societies 55 3–1 Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000: Gurr’s 1981 estimates 60 3–2 Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000 61 3–3 Homicide rates in five Western European regions, 1300–2000 63 3–4 Homicide rates in Western Europe, 1300–2000, and in nonstate societies 64 3–5 Detail from “Saturn,” Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch (The Medieval Housebook, 1475–80) 65 3–6 Detail from “Mars,” Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch (The Medieval Housebook, 1475–80) 66 3–7 Percentage of deaths of English male aristocrats from violence, 1330–1829 81 3–8 Geography of homicide in Europe, late 19th and early 21st centuries 86 3–9 Geography of homicide in the world, 2004 88 3–10 Homicide rates in the United States and England, 1900–2000 92 3–11 Geography of homicide in the United States, 2007 93 3–12 Homicide rates in England, 1300–1925, and New England, 1630–1914 95 3–13 Homicide rates in the northeastern United States, 1636–1900 96 3–14 Homicide rates among blacks and whites in New York and Philadelphia, 1797–1952 97 3–15 Homicide rates in the southeastern United States, 1620–1900 98 3–16 Homicide rates in the southwestern United States and California, 1830–1914 104 3–17 Flouting conventions of cleanliness and propriety in the 1960s 112 3–18 Homicide rates in the United States, 1950–2010, and Canada, 1961–2009 117 3–19 Homicide rates in five Western European countries, 1900–2009 118 4–1 Torture in medieval and early modern Europe 131 4–2 Time line for the abolition of judicial torture 149 4–3 Time line for the abolition of capital punishment in Europe 150 4–4 Execution rate in the United States, 1640–2010 151 4–5 Executions for crimes other than homicide in the United States, 1650–2002 152 4–6 Time line for the abolition of slavery 156 4–7 Real income per person in England, 1200–2000 171 4–8 Efficiency in book production in England, 1470–1860s 172 4–9 Number of books in English published per decade, 1475–1800 173 4–10 Literacy rate in England, 1625–1925 174 5–1 Two pessimistic possibilities for historical trends in war 191 5–2 Two less pessimistic possibilities for historical trends in war 192 5–3 100 worst wars and atrocities in human history 197 5–4 Historical myopia: Centimeters of text per century in a historical almanac 199 5–5 Random and nonrandom patterns 205 5–6 Richardson’s data 205 5–7 Number of deadly quarrels of different magnitudes, 1820–1952 211 5–8 Probabilities of wars of different magnitudes, 1820–1997 212 5–9 Heights of males (a normal or bell-curve distribution) 213 5–10 Populations of cities (a power-law distribution), plotted on linear and log scales 214 5–11 Total deaths from quarrels of different magnitudes 221 5–12 Percentage of years in which the great powers fought one another, 1500–2000 224 5–13 Frequency of wars involving the great powers, 1500–2000 225 5–14 Duration of wars involving the great powers, 1500–2000 226 5–15 Deaths in wars involving the great powers, 1500–2000 227 5–16 Concentration of deaths in wars involving the great powers, 1500–2000 227 5–17 Conflicts per year in greater Europe, 1400–2000 229 5–18 Rate of death in conflicts in greater Europe, 1400–2000 230 5–19 Length of military conscription, 48 major long-established nations, 1970–2010 256 5–20 Military personnel, United States and Europe, 1950–2000 257 5–21 Percentage of territorial wars resulting in redistribution of territory, 1651–2000 259 5–22 Nonnuclear states that started and stopped exploring nuclear weapons, 1945–2010 273 5–23 Democracies, autocracies, and anocracies, 1946–2008 279 5–24 International trade relative to GDP, 1885–2000 286 5–25 Average number of IGO memberships shared by a pair of countries, 1885–2000 290 5–26 Probability of militarized disputes between pairs of democracies and other pairs of countries, 1825–1992 294 6–1 Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1900–2005 301 6–2 Rate of battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, 1946–2008 301 6–3 Number of state-based armed conflicts, 1946–2009 303 6–4 Deadliness of interstate and civil wars, 1950–2005 304 6–5 Geography of armed conflict, 2008 306 6–6 Growth of peacekeeping, 1948–2008 314 6–7 Rate of deaths in genocides, 1900–2008 338 6–8 Rate of deaths in genocides, 1956–2008 340 6–9 Rate of deaths from terrorism, United States, 1970–2007 350 6–10 Rate of deaths from terrorism, Western Europe, 1970–2007 351 6–11 Rate of deaths from terrorism, worldwide except Afghanistan 2001–and Iraq 2003– 352 6–12 Islamic and world conflicts, 1990–2006 366 7–1 Use of the terms civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights in English-language books, 1948–2000 380 7–2 Lynchings in the United States, 1882–1969 384 7–3 Hate-crime murders of African Americans, 1996–2008 386 7–4 Nonlethal hate crimes against African Americans, 1996–2008 387 7–5 Discriminatory and affirmative action policies, 1950–2003 390 7–6 Segregationist attitudes in the United States, 1942–1997 391 7–7 White attitudes to interracial marriage in the United States, 1958–2008 391 7–8 Unfavorable opinions of African Americans, 1977–2006 392 7–9 Rape prevention and response sticker 400 7–10 Rape and homicide rates in the United States, 1973–2008 402 7–11 Attitudes toward women in the United States, 1970–1995 404 7–12 Approval of husband slapping wife in the United States, 1968–1994 409 7–13 Assaults by intimate partners, United States, 1993–2005 411 7–14 Homicides of intimate partners in the United States, 1976–2005 411 7–15 Domestic violence in England and Wales, 1995–2008 412 7–16 Abortions in the world, 1980–2003 428 7–17 Approval of spanking in the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand, 1954–2008 436 7–18 Approval of corporal punishment in schools in the United States, 1954–2002 438 7–19 American states allowing corporal punishment in schools, 1954–2010 438 7–20 Child abuse in the United States, 1990–2007 440 7–21 Another form of violence against children 441 7–22 Violence against youths in the United States, 1992–2003 443 7–23 Time line for the decriminalization of homosexuality, United States and world 450 7–24 Intolerance of homosexuality in the United States, 1973–2010 452 7–25 Antigay hate crimes in the United States, 1996–2008 454 7–26 Percentage of American households with hunters, 1977–2006 467 7–27 Number of motion pictures per year in which animals were harmed, 1972–2010 469 7–28 Vegetarianism in the United States and United Kingdom, 1984–2009 471 8–1 Rat brain, showing the major structures involved in aggression 498 8–2 Human brain, showing the major subcortical structures involved in aggression 502 8–3 Human brain, showing the major cortical regions that regulate aggression 503 8–4 Human brain, medial view 504 8–5 The Prisoner’s Dilemma 533 8–6 Apologies by political and religious leaders, 1900–2004 544 9–1 Implicit interest rates in England, 1170–2000 610 9–2 The Flynn Effect: Rising IQ scores, 1947–2002 652 10–1 The Pacifist’s Dilemma 679 10–2 How a Leviathan resolves the Pacifist’s Dilemma 681 10–3 How commerce resolves the Pacifist’s Dilemma 682 10–4 How feminization can resolve the Pacifist’s Dilemma 686 10–5 How empathy and reason resolve the Pacifist’s Dilemma 689 PREFACE This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.

They would not only erase any law in the books that singled out an ethnic minority for unfavorable treatment, but would swing to the opposite pole and mandate anti-exclusionary, un-eliminationist policies, such as the integration of schools, educational head starts, and racial or ethnic quotas and preferences in government, business, and education. These policies are generally called remedial discrimination, though in the United States they go by the name affirmative action. Whether or not the policies deserve credit for preventing a backsliding of developed countries into genocide and pogroms, they obviously are designed as the photographic negative of the exclusionary policies that caused or tolerated such violence in the past. And they have been riding a wave of popularity throughout the world.

And of course there will be occasional rampages.”23 Undeterred by the dearth of dynamitings and the rarity of rampages, he followed up in 1992 with Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, whose message was “A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the coming century will see it closed.”24 Though the 1990s were a decade in which Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Colin Powell were repeatedly named in polls as among the most admired Americans, gloomy assessments on race relations dominated literary life. The legal scholar Derrick Bell, for example, wrote in a 1992 book subtitled The Permanence of Racism that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.”25 FIGURE 7–5. Discriminatory and affirmative action policies, 1950–2003 Source: Graph from Asal & Pate, 2005. The sociologist Lawrence Bobo and his colleagues decided to see for themselves by examining the history of white Americans’ attitudes toward African Americans.26 They found that far from being indestructible, overt racism has been steadily disintegrating.


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Game Over Press Start to Continue by David Sheff, Andy Eddy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, air freight, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, game design, HyperCard, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, pattern recognition, profit motive, revision control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

He gave a compassionate speech—he had been the victim of racism himself, he said—and pledged that Nintendo had begun training its employees in ways to avoid workplace discrimination, and promised to initiate an affirmative-action plan. Meanwhile, the state of Washington suspended its practice of referring job seekers to Nintendo even though Phil Rogers contested the Core Group’s statistics. He insisted that Nintendo employed 110 ethnic minorities, a number representing 14.3 percent of the permanent work force. (The percentage included all minorities, including Japanese.) He also said that three, not one, of Nintendo’s 147 managers were African-American. In 1991 Nintendo unveiled its plan for an affirmative-action program, but it was criticized as inadequate by the Core Group.

Yamauchi, who had always tried to keep a low profile, now appeared on the front page of The New York Times on February 7, and people across the United States were suddenly asking questions about him. Allegations of racism made by some African-Americans and other minorities were quickly dismissed by Howard Lincoln, who sent the baseball commissioner a copy of Nintendo’s affirmative-action policies and their results. But the charge that Nintendo was involved in gambling was more difficult to defuse. The Minnesota lottery deal that had fallen through was cited as proof of Nintendo’s intention to become involved in gambling. Critics also noted that the company had its origins in gambling cards and that the Nintendo Network in Japan offered a horse-race betting service.


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

They also were more driven by the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles than by issues like union rights and controlling big business abuses, which had cemented the New Deal Democratic coalition. This meant that their assumption of power and the priorities they pursued—which by the 1970s included affirmative action and drives to integrate public schools by busing students to distant schools—were likely to alienate crucial working-class elements of the coalition. As highlighted in an article in The Atlantic in 2016, an important casualty of their agenda was Wright Patman of Texas, a populist when it came to banking and anti-trust laws who had been against civil rights legislation and for the Vietnam War.

Ronald Reagan caused a stir that year attacking “welfare queens” in his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination—an issue that seemed to resonate with a middle class that had become increasingly restive over wage stagnation and frustrated by much of the Democratic Party’s continuing focus on civil rights, including affirmative action and forced integration through school busing. During the Carter years, 1977–81, programs continued, but did not expand significantly when a flagging economy saw poverty rates rise. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that the basic welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was providing a safety net of cash but was not moving people out of poverty.

“The biggest disaster of the seventies and eighties,” Edelman recalled, “was that we allowed working people to be split from the poor, when they were being victimized by the same forces….We should have had the foresight to see that we needed to save the middle class. Instead we let the middle class become disillusioned by losing good jobs, by inflation, by unemployment, by thinking they were losing out to blacks from affirmative action or busing. So, they opted out, became totally cynical. That just gave the special interests more power, which left workers with lower wages and less protection, and left the poor even worse off, even while the middle class resented them still more.” FORCING A NEW ECONOMY The most disheartening signs of America’s breakdown are, obviously, these realities of life for the poor who live in the world’s richest country.


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

.,” Folder 3, Box 16, NCFB Records, NCSU. The position of the Farm Bureau resonates with Ira Katznelson’s reinterpretation of New Deal social welfare policies as beneficial to whites at the expense of African Americans—an in-built system of white racial privilege that Katznelson calls “affirmative action for whites.” See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). See also Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013). 142. “North Carolina Policies and Recommendations to the American Farm Bureau Federation, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 21, 1956,” Folder 3, Box 16, NCFB Records, NCSU. 143. “1959 Policies, Resolutions, and Recommendations: North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation, Greensboro, N.C.,” Folder 3, Box 16, NCFB Records, NCSU. 144.

For accounts of the ways in which the U.S. state frequently operates “out of sight” of most citizens, see Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011); Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 20. Mark Tushnet, “An Essay on Rights,” Texas Law Review 62 (1984): 1371. 21. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 14–16. See also Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: Norton, 2005). Historians of southern agriculture have been particularly attentive to the discriminatory elements of USDA policy. See Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013). A class-action discrimination suit was brought by African-American farmers against the USDA for the agency’s discrimination against them between 1983 and 1997.


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

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

In movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals of ideological one-upmanship. So the New Left’s legacy to liberalism was a double one. It spawned issue-based movements that helped to bring about progressive change in a number of areas, most notably the environment and human rights abroad. And it spawned identity-based social movements—for affirmative action and diversity, feminism, gay liberation—that have made this country a more tolerant, more just, and more inclusive place than it was fifty years ago. What the New Left did not do was contribute to the unification of the Democratic Party and the development of a liberal vision of Americans’ shared future.


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

There’s not much evidence that public opinion can be predicted by narrow self-interest. In 1998, Donald Kinder, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an influential survey of thirty years of research on this topic. He summarizes the effects of self-interest on political views as “trifling.” Trifling! Kinder writes: When faced with affirmative action, white and black Americans come to their views without calculating personal harms or benefits. The unemployed do not line up behind policies designed to alleviate economic distress. The medically needy are no more likely to favor government health insurance than the fully insured. Parents of children in public schools are not more likely to support government aid to education than other citizens.

Imagine that a company offers: The bonus and new job-framing studies are from Chip Heath, “On the Social Psychology of Agency Relationships: Lay Theories of Motivation Overemphasize Extrinsic Rewards,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 78 (1999): 25–62. Dining in Iraq: The Floyd Lee story is from a marvelous article by Julian E. Barnes, “A Culinary Oasis,” U.S. News & World Report, December 6, 2004, 28. The Popcorn Popper and Political Science: The popcorn popper story is from Caples/Hahn, Tested Advertising, 71. When faced with affirmative action: Donald Kinder, “Opinion and Action in the Realm of Politics,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 778–867. The extended quote is from. 190 A related idea comes from James March: James March describes the two patterns of making decisions—consequence versus identity—in Chapters 1 and 2 of James G.


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Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In the case of these Westchester County revolutionaries, the rallying cry was a lawsuit filed jointly by a liberal nonprofit group in New York City and the Department of Housing and Urban Development against the county. The suit alleged that Westchester falsified HUD grant applications, asking for federal grant money without conforming to federal affirmative action guidelines designed to push desegregation. The county lost the suit and as a result was now going to be forced by the federal government to build seven hundred new subsidized low-income housing units in the area. Whereas subsidized housing in the county had historically been built closer to New York City, the new ruling would now place “affordable housing” in places like Elmsford whether Elmsford wanted it or not.

The entire controversy was dreamed up and resolved behind closed doors by lawyers, mostly out-of-town lawyers. What they accused the government of Westchester of was having an inadequate amount of zeal for submitting the mountains of paperwork that goes hand in hand with antiquated, Johnson-era affirmative action housing programs. The Westchester housing settlement that resulted from that suit is the kind of politics that would turn anyone into a Tea Partier—a classic example of dizzy left-wing meddling mixed with socially meaningless legal grifting that enriches opportunistic lawyers with an eye for low-hanging fruit.


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The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Such a focus would be impossible in democratic India, for example, where vast resources are spent on short-term subsidies to satisfy voters. (India’s elite educational institutions, by contrast, are under pressure to limit merit-based admissions and accept half their students on the basis of quotas and affirmative action.) It is unusual for a nondemocratic government to have managed growth effectively for so long. Most autocratic governments quickly become insular, corrupt, and stupid—and preside over economic plunder and stagnation. The record of Marcos, Mobutu, and Mugabe is far more typical. (And lest one veers into cultural explanations, keep in mind that the record of the Chinese government under Mao was atrocious.)

If you’re wrong, people won’t buy the book anymore.” At least at this point, three years later, I don’t think I’ve embarrassed him. Index Abrahamic religions, 122, 171, 172 Abu Sayyaf, 11 Abyssinia, 195 Academy of Science, 211 Acheson, Dean, 255, 256 Acquaviva, Claudio, 124 Adams, James Truslow, 237 affirmative action, 109 Afghanistan, 13, 15, 54, 101, 172, 185, 199, 235–36, 241, 247, 260, 277, 284 Afghan War, 13, 241, 247, 260 Africa: agriculture in, 70 Chinese influence in, 129–32, 270 Christian population of, 98 colonization of, 65, 79, 80, 129, 156 corruption in, 130–32 economies of, 21n, 40, 68, 129, 130, 242–43 geography of, 77 instability of, 12–13, 20, 29, 40, 65, 68 national debts of, 130 natural resources of, 129 North, 12–13, 20, 80 slaves from, 79 sub-Saharan, 80 U.S. influence in, 270–71, 273 see also specific countries AFRICOM, 270–71 Aggarwal, Anil, 155 aging populations, 214–15 agriculture, 21, 30, 31, 32–33, 65–67, 70, 71–72, 100, 106, 112, 136, 151, 160 Agtmael, Antoine van, 2 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 16, 55 AIDS, 149, 161 AIG, 43–44 air conditioners, 102 air pollution, 111 airport security, 280 Akbar, 75 Al-Azhar University, 15 Albright, Madeleine, 246 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 123 alerts, terrorist, 277 algebra, 67 Algeria, 13 algorithm, 67 Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, 67 Al Jazeera, 96 al-Khwarizmi, 67 Al Qaeda, 5, 10–18, 172, 248n, 270, 277 Ambrose, Stephen, 37 American dream, 237 American Enterprise Institute, 213 Amery, Leo, 193 Amsterdam, 67 Anglo-Chinese Wars, 81 Angola, 284 Annan, Kofi, 272 anti-Americanism, 13, 35, 39, 42, 60, 166, 241, 245, 251–55, 274, 283 Apple, Inc., 203 Arab culture, 67, 75, 76, 77, 80, 98 Arab-Israeli conflict, 6, 96, 246 arbitrage, 27 architecture, 95, 98, 103, 105, 152 Argentina, 3, 26, 55, 115 Armenia, 209 Arnold, Thomas, 187 Arroyo, Gloria, 133 art, modern, 95 ash-Sheikh, Abdulaziz al, 15 Asia: agriculture in, 70 Chinese influence in, 132–36, 143, 173, 176–77, 259, 267, 281 colonization of, 79, 80–82, 156 demographics of, 214–15 East, 20, 23, 29, 32, 36, 52, 64n, 65, 122, 133, 214, 241–42, 245 economies of, 52, 75, 138, 151–52, 221 education in, 208–12 financial markets of, 221–22 geography of, 76 global influence of, 245, 257, 259 India’s influence in, 151–52, 173, 181 manufacturing sector of, 202–3 South, 21n, 52, 60 technology sector of, 200–208 U.S. influence in, 90, 241–42, 245, 259–60, 266, 267, 273–74, 280–81 Western influence in, 90, 93, 99 see also specific countries “Asian Tigers,” 26 assets, 219 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 132, 133 Atatürk, Kemal, 84 Australia, 78, 132, 143, 196, 252, 266 Austria, 223 automobile industry, 33, 110, 149, 192, 205, 225, 229–30, 244 Autor, David, 231 Bacon, Francis, 86 bailouts, 43, 44 Baker, James A., III, 39, 244 Bakiyev, Kurmanbek, 54 balance of power, 79 Bali bombings (2002), 11, 17 Balkans, 20, 29, 117–18, 245, 246, 247 Bangalore, 50 Bangladesh, 60, 159, 281 Ban Ki-moon, 30 banking industry, 36, 43–45, 81, 106, 107, 109, 110, 127, 139, 153, 157 Barma, Naazneen, 38 Barnett, Correlli, 262 “Base Structure Report” (2006), 262 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 20 BBC, 96, 120 Bear Stearns, xi Beijing, 71, 103, 105, 111, 137, 150, 211 “Beijing Consensus, The” (Ramo), 142–43 Beijing Olympic Games (2008), 5, 103, 105, 137 Belgium, 41 Berlin, 103 Berlin Wall, 24 Beveridge Plan, 197 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 158–59, 160, 178, 179–80 Bhutan, 166 Bialik, Carl, 205 Bible, 172 bicycles, 192 bin Laden, Osama, 12, 13, 14–15, 85, 269–70 biological weapons, 18 biotechnology, 201–2, 215 bipolar order, 4 Bismarck, Otto von, 198, 257, 266–67 Blackwill, Robert, 177 Blair, Tony, 274 Blinder, Alan, 230–31 Bloomberg, Michael, 220–21 “blue card,” 224 blue jeans, 88, 89, 91 Boer War, 188–90, 261 Bollywood, 90, 94, 147, 153–55 Bono, 272 Boorstin, Daniel, 69 Bosnia, 272 Brahmans, 74 “brain drain,” 167 brand names, 203 Brazil, xii, 2, 3–4, 19, 23, 26, 28–29, 39, 48, 49, 53, 55, 60, 79, 95, 98, 257, 258, 259, 263 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 253 British East India Company, 60, 80, 82–83 British Empire, 36, 37, 57, 60, 65, 79, 80–83, 84, 89, 94, 97–98, 151, 154, 156, 158–59, 161, 162–63, 164, 170, 173, 179, 184–99, 237, 261–63, 266, 268 British Guiana, 194n broadband service, 28, 224–25 Brookings, Robert, 235 Brookings Institution, 235 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 36 Buck, Pearl, 100 Buddhism, 124, 171, 172 budget deficits, 219, 241–42, 244 Buffett, Warren, 45–46 Bulgaria, 182 Burma, 79, 121, 264, 273 Burns, Ken, 37 Buruma, Ian, 187 Bush, George H.


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

An unsigned introduction to the 1995 book The Bell Curve Debate, edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, defines the original book’s troublesome nature with deft acidity: “The Bell Curve gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself.” The Bell Curve tended to convince only those who already believed in its political implications (among them, that affirmative action was misguided, and that increased funding for minority education was probably a waste of time). And ten years later, plenty of antitest advocates remain. Monty Neill, the co-executive director of the Boston-based advocacy group FairTest, tells me that no matter its form, the intelligence test has never been able to overcome its racist—or, as Neill puts it, “eugenicist”—background: “Our take is that instead of measuring innate capacity, IQs measure things that one has learned.”

Slaves have changed through the ages slave chains to slave wages the change, black is not the only race it encases Dominicans and Haitians… It’s amazing how slavery never discriminates against us to tell you the truth I think it loves us with a passion cos when I applied for slavery they had no problem givin’ me affirmative action. What I realized after having attended a few competitive teen slams and then hanging out with the slam team at workshops and on their own was that spoken word was different from the other kids’ competitions in a significant way. For starters, spoken word began as a form of expression invented by an urban minority underclass, which was then taken up and developed by bohemian outsiders and aspiring bohemian outsiders.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Global and regional trade accords also give multinational corporations the right to buy land anywhere in almost any country, and new corporate landlords have forcibly evicted or cheaply bought off millions of people from self-sustaining plots of land, directly contributing to a huge rise in immigration into the United States and Europe.8 During the same decades, the corporate class pocketed the courts, one judicial appointment at a time. The resulting deeply conservative judiciary has relentlessly chipped away at the major laws sustaining the victories of labor and civil rights, overturning hard-fought, key provisions of affirmative action and voting-rights protections. Moreover, along with austerity and privatization, conservative courts have facilitated a vertically integrated for-profit prison system, resulting in the mass incarceration of African Americans, detention centers overflowing with Latinos, and massive profits for the putrid penal system’s corporate shareholders.9 The corporate class also created their version of a popular front, seizing the cultural apparatus through such rulings as the Federal Communications Commission’s Clinton-era decision to allow multinationals to outright own the means of communication.

Court of Appeals ruling, after the first order of cease-and-desist came the order that the employer offer ten workers illegally fired in the campaigns in the 1990s their jobs back. It also stipulated making the workers “whole,” that is, financially compensating them for loss of wages: 2. Take the following affirmative action necessary to effectuate the policies of the Act. (a) Within 14 days from the date of this Order, offer Lawanna Johnson, Keith Ludlum, George Simpson, Chris Council, Fred McDonald, Larry Jones, Ray Shawn Ward, Margo McMillan, Tara Davis, and Ada Perry full reinstatement to their former jobs or, if those jobs no longer exist, offer them substantially equivalent positions, without prejudice to their seniority and other rights or privileges previously enjoyed.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Think of the recent extreme increase in inequality in India, despite serious attempts since independence in 1947 to promote social opportunities for disadvantaged caste members via the constitution (1950, drawn up by Ambedkar, himself born a Dalit), which, in turn, facilitated affirmative action by way of ‘reservations’18 – and also despite efforts to build a welfare state à la Beveridge, which, unfortunately, ended in a deep gulf between a protected ‘formal’ and an unprotected ‘informal’ sector.19 In the US, too, affirmative action, as pleaded for by James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, is a long way from delivering the desired result, as the Black Lives Matter movement does not fail to emphasize.

Although the British had abolished the slave trade and slavery in their colony in the mid-nineteenth century, various estimates indicate that, still today, many millions and perhaps even more than 10 million Indians have to work for their employers-cum-creditors without any rights.68 Like in the Americas (as explained by Tobias Barrington Wolff, p. 310), this is not just a question of people unable to repay their debts; rather – and more fundamentally – it is an issue of employers-cum-creditors belonging to a higher caste than their workers-cum-debtors. Moreover, the forebears on both sides of this economic divide also maintained such unequal relationships. Although at that time sanctioned by generally accepted custom, this is no longer the case before the law. Indeed, independent India has a long history of affirmative action for groups down the caste ladder, albeit with limited success.69 The practice may have diminished over time but it nevertheless remains vigorous. The fact that unfree labour remains embedded in traditional norms and customs may also explain why numerous initiatives by politicians and social activists like B.R.

The Second World War has shown us many examples of this, and, unfortunately, we cannot say the possibility can be ruled out in the future.22 The logical follow-up question is why collective action in the face of the increasing welfare gap has become so rare, in comparison with the previous century. Arguably, there is not, in fact, a total absence (remember, for example, the fierce protests in South Korea). And we can also see the partial success of affirmative action, or at least the promise it holds, for instance in India in relation to the lower castes and, in general, for women.23 The lack of a strong, collective counter-movement can perhaps be explained by the fact that, precisely as a result of a century of collective action, on average, the underclass in the North Atlantic now enjoys a historically reasonable level of prosperity (again because of the aforementioned transfer payments).


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

Presumably, Emil’s reasonably comfortable family experience under Stalin means that his parents (at least Party middle-rankers, judging by his own sharply upward career trajectory) successfully negotiated the sudden reversal of Soviet ‘nationalities’ policy during the later thirties. For this, see Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a fabulously dismal description of post-Soviet Kazan, see Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut: Travels to the Republics That Tourism Forgot (London: Faber, 2006). 11 The title song from the old musical, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys’: see James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia.

Presumably, Emil’s reasonably comfortable family experience under Stalin means that his parents (at least Party middle-rankers, judging by his own sharply upward career trajectory) successfully negotiated the sudden reversal of Soviet ‘nationalities’ policy during the later thirties. For this, see Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a fabulously dismal description of post-Soviet Kazan, see Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut: Travels to the Republics That Tourism Forgot (London: Faber, 2006). 11 The title song from the old musical, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky Guys’: see James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia.

McKean, St Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionarie/i> (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1990) Ken Macleod, The Cassini Division (London: Legend, 1998) Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001) Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, ed. Anne Fitzpatrick, trans. Emmanuel Aronie. Available at www.sovietcomputing.com Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1990) Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922; trans. from the German by J.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The problem for black Americans was understood not as one concerning the values themselves, but the willingness of white society to recognize the dignity of blacks who accepted those values. Despite the abolition of legally sanctioned barriers to equality in the 1960s, however, and the rise of a variety of affirmative action programs giving preference to blacks, a certain sector of the American black population not only failed to advance economically, but actually lost ground. One political result of persistent economic failure, however, is the now more frequently heard assertion that the traditional measures of economic success, such as work, education, and employment, represent not universal but “white” values.

Every effort to give the disadvantaged “equal dignity” will mean the abridgment of the freedom or rights of other people, all the more so when the sources of disadvantage lie deep within the social structure. Every place granted to a minority candidate for a job or a university education under an affirmative action program means one less place for others; every government dollar spent on national health insurance or welfare means that much less for the private economy; every attempt to protect workers from unemployment or firms from bankruptcy will mean less economic freedom. There is no fixed or natural point at which liberty and equality come into balance, nor any way of optimizing both simultaneously.

“Origins of the Modern World System: A Missing Link.” World Politics 33 (January): 253-281. Zuckert, Catherine H. 1988. Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. INDEX Abortion, 176 Acid rain, 86 Affirmative action, 237, 293 Afghanistan, 26, 127, 275 African National Congress, 15, 111 Afrikaners, 14, 21, 111, 172 Afro-American culture, 237 Aganbegyan, Abel, 29 Alawi-dominated regime (Syria), 16 Albalkin, Leonid, 29 Albania, 27, 112 Alcibiades, 317 Alexander II, Czar of Russia, 75 Alfonsin government (Argentina), 14 Algeria, 275 Alienation, 65, 197, 335 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 5 Alwyn, Patricio, 42 Ambition, 162 American Bill of Rights, 43, 159 American Civil War, 171, 175-176, 261, 330 American Revolution, 42, 64, 134 Amish, 85 Amour-propre, 83-84, 155, 162, 255 Andropov, Yuri, 47 Angell, Norman, 5 Anger, 163-165, 171, 172, 178-180 Angola, 35 Animal behavior, 297 Anomie, 337 Anthropology, 151 Anti-liberal doctrines, 235-244 Anti-Stalinism, 30, 40 Apartheid, 20-21, 77, 111, 171-172 Aquino, Corazon, 14, 119-120 Arab-Israeli conflict, 283 Aral Sea, 115 Argentina, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 42, 104-106, 112, 113, 256 Aristocracies, 45, 185-86, 200, 259, 260, 265 Aristophanes, 296 Aristotle, 55-56, 127, 335 Aron, Raymond, 66, 95 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 102 Assembly of Women (Aristophanes), 294 Associational life, 322-324 Astayev, Viktor, 37 Ataturk, Kemal, 236, 256, 272 Athens, 48, 127, 184, 247, 316, 317 Athletic competition, 318-320 Atlantic Charter, 258 Augustine, Saint, 56, 183 Australia, 111 Austria-Hungary, 333 Authoritarianism, 8-9, 11, 12, 37, 39-42, 124 current crisis of, 13-22, 44, 47 market-oriented, 123, 124 new Asian, 238-243 Ba‘ath parties, 16, 236 Bacon, Francis, 56, 57, 72, 135 Baigan, Ishida, 227 Balance of power, 247-250 Baltic states, 27-28, 215, 273 Bangladesh, 275 Basques, 269 Battle of Jena, significance of, 64, 67 Beast with red cheeks, 162, 170-180, 188 “Bee and the Communist Ideal, The” (Nuikin), 23 Belief, 309-310 Bell, Daniel, 91 Bellah, Robert, 227, 229 Belorussia, 35 Beria, Lavrenty, 32, 40 Berlin Wall, 27, 178, 263, 280 Biology, 151 Bipolarity, 248, 255, 262 Black market (Soviet), 32 Black underclass, 293-294 Bogomolov, Oleg, 29 Bolshevik party, 43 Bolshevik Revolution, 24, 25, 66, 304-305 Bombing, 6 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 329 Botswana, 35 Bourgeois, 145, 160, 180, 185, 188, 189, 314, 323, 329 Brazil, 14, 20, 42, 104-105, 112, 123 Brezhnev, Leonid, 8, 10, 32, 76 Brezhneva, Galina, 16 Bryce, Lord, 42 Buddhism, 216-217, 227 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 169 Bulgaria, 27, 36, 112 Bureaucracy, 65, 89 as characteristic of modern societies, 77-78 Burma, 14, 85 Bush, George, 318, 328 Bushido ethic, 227 Caetano, Marcello, 13, 18 Calvinism, 226, 227, 229 Cambodia, 79, 127, 275, 293 Canada, 264 Capitalism, 44, 90-91, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 114, 120, 204, 226-230, 290, 292, 316 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 123 Capital punishment, 261 Carthage, 248 Caste system, 228 Catholicism, 19, 221 Ceaucescu, Nicolae, 115 Centrally planned economic systems, 90, 91, 93-96, 98, 107 Ceylon, 123 Chad, 275 Chamorro, Violetta, 14 Charismatic authority, 115 Charter 77, 166 Charter of the United Nations, 282 Checks and balances, 188 Chemical and biological weapons, 278 Chemistry, 151 Chernenko, Konstantin, 47 Chernobyl, 115 Chiang Ching-kuo, 14 Chile, 14, 21, 42, 104, 112, 123 Chinese Revolution, 11, 66, 127 Christian Democracy, 284 Christianity, 56 grounds for human equality, 196-197, 301 Hegel and, 216, 301 as slave ideology, 62, 196-198, 205, 261, 301 Churbanov, Yury, 32 Churchill, Winston, 318 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 18, 28 Citizenship, 202, 322 Civil rights, 42-43, 203-204, 237 Civil society, 33, 219, 221, 222 Civil war American, 171, 175-176, 261, 330 English, 271 Spanish, 79 Class conflict, 65, 118-119 Classical liberal trade theory, 100 CNN (Cable News Network), 7 Cold War, 7, 10, 46, 127, 233, 246, 248, 252, 262, 264, 272, 282, 283 Collectivization, 30 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 42 Colombia, 14 Colonialism, 99, 258, 267, 338 Communications technology, 7 Communism, 7, 45; see also Authoritarianism; Communist parties; Totalitarianism belief in permanence of, 8, 10 Havel on, 166-169 legitimacy of, 10-11 as slave ideology, 205 Soviet-style, 9-10 worldwide collapse of, 8, 12, 25-38, 177-179, 264, 280, 293, 296 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 65 Communist parties Chinese, 34 Filipino, 119 Portuguese, 18, 47 South African, 15 Soviet, 26, 27 Spanish, 19 Community, 242, 304, 322-327 Compassion, rise of, 261 Comte, Auguste, 68 Condorcet, Marquis de, 57, 62 Conflict resolution, 117-119 Confucianism, 217, 325 Congress of Vienna, 267, 331 Conservatives, in Soviet Union, 40-41 Constitution of the United States, 25, 153, 184, 187, 200, 204, 296 Consumer electronics industry, 84 Consumerism, 4, 63, 83-85, 126, 169, 230, 242 Contradictions, 61, 64, 65, 136, 137, 139 Cortés, Hernando, 259 Cosmopolitanism, 126 Costa Rica, 123, 217-218 “Cotton mafia,” 32 Craft guilds, 232 Crimean War, 75 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 151 Croatia, 272, 273 Cuba, 10, 14, 25, 127 Cultural relativism, 340 Cultural Revolution, 79, 95, 96 Culture preconditions for democracy, 215, 219-222 relationship to thymos, 213 work attitudes and, 224-225, 230-234 Cunhal, Álvaro, 18 Custine, Marquis de, 25 Cyprus, 20 Czechoslovakia democratic transition in, 36, 112 fall of communist government, 27, 177-178 nationalism in, 273 Darwin, Charles, 299 Debray, Régis, 320 Declaration of Independence, 134, 153, 158, 186, 196, 200, 204, 296 Decline of the West (Spengler), 68 Defensive modernization, 74-76 de Gaulle, Charles, 332 de Klerk, F.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They are vilified, and in many states there are explicit attempts to undermine them, but there is no recognition of the important role that they can play in countervailing other special interests and in defending the basic social protections that are necessary if workers are to accept change and to adjust to the changing economic environment.19 Affirmative action, to eliminate the legacy of discrimination. One of the most invidious—and hardest to eradicate—sources of inequality is discrimination, both ongoing discrimination today and the legacy of past discrimination. In different countries it takes on different forms, but almost everywhere there is racial and gender discrimination.

But such discrimination corrodes our basic values, our basic sense of identity, the notion of nationhood. Strong laws prohibiting discrimination are essential; but the effects of past discrimination continue, and so even if we were successful in eliminating discrimination today, its consequences would still be with us. Fortunately, we’ve learned how to improve matters through affirmative action programs—softer than hard quotas, but when implemented with good intentions, they can help our society evolve in ways that are consistent with our basic principles. Because education is the key to opportunity, such programs are perhaps even more important there than elsewhere. Restoring sustainable and equitable growth A growth agenda, based on public investment.

See also Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Campbridge University Press, 2006), pp. 319–65, especially the discussion of the commonwealth beginning on p. 347. INDEX Abed, Fazle Hasan, 196 Acacia Research Corporation, 203 Accenture, 360 advertising, 147, 335, 348, 354 see also marketing affirmative action, 282 Afghanistan, 143, 176, 209, 211, 218 Africa, 23, 40 African Americans: discrimination against, 68, 69, 70, 71, 129, 303, 305, 308, 328, 367, 369 disenfranchisement of, 345, 349 wealth of, 13, 70, 71, 329, 384 agriculture: government subsidies in, 51, 64, 179, 180, 320, 326, 379 in Great Depression, 56–57, 231, 233 AIG, 35, 49, 67, 180, 253, 369 airlines, deregulation of, 317 air traffic controllers, 65 Alien Torts Statute, 59 Ally, 374 Alperovitz, Gar, 78 alternative minimum tax, 394 American Airlines, 318 American Tobacco Company, 317 Andreessen, Marc, 318 Angelides, Phil, 372 antiglobalization movement, xiii, 277 Apple, 203, 360 Arab Spring, ix–xi, xiv, 287 Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), 51, 320 Arnall, Roland, 333 Asia, 64, 157 financial crisis in, 61, 231, 352, 353 AT&T, 44, 203, 317 Atkinson, Anthony B., xxiii auction theory, 50 austerity, 207, 220, 221, 230–36 Australia, 5, 14, 18, 22, 135, 286 autoworkers, 67 balanced-budget multiplier, 217–18, 379 Bangladesh, microcredit schemes in, 196, 197 bankers: bonuses for, x, xiv, xv, 21, 79, 141, 169, 245, 247, 270, 319, 333, 363 criminal prosecution of, xvi, 70, 119, 199, 205–6, 372, 373 economic influence of, xxii–xxiii, 79–80, 240 private incentives of, 33, 34, 87, 90, 96, 109–10 risky behavior by, xi, xxiii, 37, 90, 101, 109, 171, 198, 239–40, 246, 247, 269, 270, 336, 387 see also corporations; financial markets; financial sector Bank of America, 70, 374 bankruptcy: corporate, 313 derivatives claims in, 49, 271 government regulation of, 30 personal, 10, 275, 301 reform of, 58 student debt in, 58, 94, 195, 196, 265, 271, 323, 371 see also Chapter 11; foreclosures bankruptcy law, 193–97, 201, 202, 270, 271, 284 Bardeen, John, 41 Bartel, Larry, xxiv Basov, Nikolay, 315 Bear Stearns, 388 Belgium, 19, 22, 286 Berlusconi, Silvio, 349 Bernanke, Ben, 247, 248, 252, 257, 389 Berners-Lee, Tim, 41, 315 Bhutan, 122, 312 Bilmes, Linda, 176 Bipartisan Policy Center, 207 Bischoff, Kendra, 75 BlackBerry, 203 Blankfein, Lloyd, 124 Bloomberg, Michael, xiv bondholders, 168, 240, 261 bonds, municipal, 212, 378 Bowles, Erskine, 207 Bowles-Simpson Deficit Reduction Commission, 207, 221, 379, 380 Brattain, Walter, 41 Brazil, 5, 51, 249 economic growth in, 139, 298, 353 Bridgestone/Firestone, 104 British Petroleum (BP), xviii, 99, 189, 190, 367, 374 “Buffett rule,” 395 Buffett, Warren, 77, 180, 269, 333, 395, 396 Burnham, Walter Dean, 130 Bush, George W., 71, 73, 86, 87, 97, 101, 114, 169, 177, 208, 212, 221, 228, 330, 360, 383 Bush administration, xiv, 167, 168, 171, 178 business: anticompetitive behavior in, 44–46, 317, 318 corruption in, 176 government partnerships with, 174 government regulation of, 47 innovations in, 35, 46, 41, 78, 96, 178–79, 314, 315 political power of, 47, 50, 51, 62, 95, 99, 101, 111, 131–32, 135, 136, 285, 286, 319, 325, 350 teamwork in, 113, 343 trust in, 121–22 see also corporations; financial sector business, small, 61, 167, 225, 226, 241, 245, 395 California, electricity market liberalization in, 177–78 campaign finance, 37, 47, 131–32, 135, 136, 162, 196, 200, 206, 285–86, 319, 325, 350, 373, 397 Canada, 5, 18, 19 capital, 59, 323 social, 122–23, 125, 135 capital controls, 60, 181, 182, 277, 353 capital gains, 71–72, 87, 88, 115, 211, 274, 297, 298, 315, 330, 361, 378, 395 Cardoso, Enrique, 5 Carter, Jimmy, 71 Cayman Islands, 270 cell phones, 98, 203, 274 Census Bureau, U.S., 27, 305 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 209 Chait, Jonathan, 19, 116–17 Chapter 11, 284, 313, 363 see also bankruptcy Chavez, Hugo, 40 Cheney, Richard, 101 Chicago school, 44–45, 47, 256, 317, 391 child care, 10, 301 Chile, 141, 258 China, 19, 54, 64, 249, 280 economic strength of, 144, 175 inflation in, 259–60 Citibank, 204–5, 369, 387 cities, community segregation in, 75–76 Citizens United v.


pages: 340 words: 96,242

Mars Crossing by Geoffrey A. Landis

affirmative action, experimental subject, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Mars Society, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

"Are we really going down this?" Radkowski's voice, when it came, was a hoarse whisper. "Yes," he said. "Down and across." I to paused, and then in a whisper so soft that it was almost inaudible through the radio noise, added, "We have no choice." 3 TANA IN SCHOOL Tana's grandmother had told her about affirmative action—that whatever she managed to achieve, white people were going to assume that she got it simply by being black. "Ain't no way you're gonna avoid it," she told Tana. "You just go and pay no attention to them, ignore it and do a good job." It seemed unfair, Tana told her, but her grandmother disagreed.

No, they won't admit it. Maybe they don't even know it themselves. But they got help, every single one of 'em." Tana listened to what she said—her grandmother had always been a sharp cookie and a good judge of character—but she didn't actually believe it. She had every intention of getting where she was going, affirmative action or no. Her way to medical school was paid by a Hawthorne Foundation scholarship that covered her tuition and expenses and a little bit for her to live on as well. The very first day of med school, before she knew anybody, before she even could find her way around the strange new campus without the map in the med school handbook, one of the boys in her class cornered her in a hall.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

Americans at the bottom of the income ladder are not struggling because the top 1 percent are getting fabulously rich; they are struggling despite the fact that the top 1 percent are getting fabulously rich. The Republicans are rightfully skeptical of what government can accomplish. Not every social problem has an elegant government fix. One can care deeply about providing better opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities without necessarily embracing affirmative action. One can care deeply about public education, drug addiction, and homelessness without being convinced that throwing more money at current programs will make things better. Similarly, conservatives appreciate that government policies are prone to unintended consequences. Understanding one’s limitations is an attractive personal trait for individuals; it is also an important form of modesty for governments.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

You get married, you can’t get divorced.”7 It is exactly the transition from the disconnected world of the 1990s to the barricaded world emerging today that changes the performative role of democratic regimes. Democracy as a regime-type that favors the emancipation of minorities (gay parades, women’s marches, affirmative action policies) is supplanted by a political regime that empowers the prejudices of majorities. And it is the political shock caused by the flow of refugees and migrants that is the driving force of the transformation. A study by London’s Demos think tank, long prior to Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential victory, showed that opposition to liberal migration policies is the defining characteristic of those supporters of right-wing populist parties8.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Fryer, “Financial Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from Randomized Trials.” 30. Fryer et al., “Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives Through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment.” 31. Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelley, “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies.” 32. Ayres, “Fair Driving: Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations.” 33. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? 12. DON’T ASK, CAN’T TELL 1. Strack, Martin, and Stepper, “Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis.” 2.

In Tastes for Endowment, Identity, and the Emotions, vol. 3 of The New Behavioral Economics, edited by E. L. Khalil, 119–42. International Library of Critical Writings in Economics. Cheltenham, U.K.: Elgar, 2009. Kalev, Alexandra, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelley. “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies.” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 589–617. Kamin, Leon J. “‘Attention-Like’ Processes in Classical Conditioning.” In Miami Symposium on the Prediction of Behavior: Aversive Stimulation, edited by M. R. Jones. Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1968. Karremans, Johan C., Wolfgang Stroebe, and Jasper Claus.


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

A more complicated set of motives has been imputed to Jayson Blair. These include not just psychological problems but drug addiction and alcoholism as well. Blair has said that all of these may have played a role. It's also been alleged that Blair got away with cheating because he was black and was coddled by a newspaper mindlessly committed to affirmative action. (An explanation that Blair has said is absurd.) Only a few postmortems of these journalistic scandals have focused on the most obvious possible motive for why young, ambitious professionals might take such big risks—to reap big rewards. Fabrications by journalists are nothing new nor are conflicts of interest in the media.

Serious wealth-building efforts are needed to address a racial wealth gap that has left an estimated 60 percent of African American households with no assets or a negative net worth. Communities of color—historically marginalized in the political process—should also be the locus of new initiatives to foster civic education and participation. Jurisdictional boundaries that isolate nonwhite urban communities from surrounding suburban areas must be redrawn. And affirmative action must continue until the day comes when leaders across all the nation's institutions have legitimacy in an America of tomorrow destined to look very different than that of today. A Different Bottom Line Far-reaching efforts to create a new social contract in America are only part of the solution to today's cheating epidemic.


The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Many flight attendants told me that their counterparts on Lufthansa (the German national airlines) and even more on EI Al and Aeroflot (the Israeli and Russian national airlines) were notably lacking in assertive friendliness. t A black female flight attendant, who had been hired in the early 1970s when Delta faced an affirmative action suit, wondered aloud why blacks were not pictured in local Georgia advertising. She concluded: "They want that market, and that market doesn't include blacks. They go along with that." Although Delta's central offices are in Atlanta, which is predominantly black, few blacks worked for Delta in any capacity. 94 Public Life So the sexualized ad burdens the flight attendant with another task, beyond being unfailingly helpful and open to requests: she must respond to the sexual fantasies of passengers.

Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 9: 369-380. Index Abrahamsson, Bengt, 225n.l (Ch. 5) Acting. See Deep acting; Method acting; Surface acting Action language, 203 Advertising, by airlines, 5, 91, 92 -95, 182 Aeroflot,93n Affective deviant, 214-215, 219. See also Inappropriate feelings Affirmative action, 93n. See also Delta Airlines, minority employment by Age: devaluation of, 127, 130, 180n; regulations, 124 Aggressiveness:,by bill collectors, 139, 145,146; and emotionallabor, 163, 164; gender differences in, 260n.12 Air California, 124 A irline Guide to Stewardess and Steward Careers(l979-1980),95-96,119 Airlines: advertising by, 5, 91,92-95, 182; appearance codes for flight attendants, 101-103, 126-127, 178n; competition among, 91-92, 117,124,125,129,185-186, 255n.I (Ch. 6); concentration among, 91, 256n.4 (Ch. 6); cooperation among, 92n; deregulation of, 91, 123, 255n.2 (Ch. 6); discount fares, 123-124, 124-125; government-owned, 93n; price wars by, 91; ran kings of, 6,13,94,117, 243n.2; service as focus of competition among, 91-93,117,125,129,130; speed-up by, 8n, 90, 94-95, 121-126,127,131.SeealsoFlight attendants; Union, flight attendants' Alcohol use, 99,101,131 Alexander,James,206n Alienation, 7, 243n.3.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Taber and Lodge were following in the footsteps of Kari Edwards and Edward Smith, whose work on politics and doubt we encountered in the introduction. As with Edwards and Smith, they wanted to examine the way Americans reasoned about controversial political issues. The two they chose were gun control and affirmative action. Taber and Lodge asked their experimental participants to read a number of arguments on either side and to evaluate the strength and weakness of each argument. One might hope that being asked to review these pros and cons would give people more of a shared appreciation of opposing viewpoints; instead, the new information pulled people further apart.

accessibility of data, 81, 132–34, 179–80, 183, 205–11 accountability, 180, 181 Active Lives Survey, 143 actively open-minded thinkers, 254–55 ad hominem attacks, 39 Adams, Douglas, 65 Adapt (Harford), 123 addiction, 5, 222 administrative data, 148–50. See also official statistics affirmative action, 33–34 age data and childhood mortality trends, 66–67, 91 and criminal justice data, 178 and defining “children,” 70n and divorce rates, 253n and evaluation of statistical claims, 133 and incidence of strokes, 98 and misuse of statistical methods, 117–19 and “priming” research, 121 and scale of numerical comparisons, 93–94 and self-harm statistics, 75 and smoking research, 4–5 and teen pregnancy, 55 and vaccination research, 53–54 aggressive behavior, defining, 70–71 AIDS, 28 alchemy, 171, 173–75, 173n, 179, 207 algorithms alchemy analogy, 175 and consumer data, 159–64 criminal justice applications, 176–79 and excessive credulity of data, 164–67 and found data, 149, 151, 154 and Google Flu Trends, 153–57 vs. human judgment, 167–71 pattern-recognizing, 183 and proliferation of big data, 157–59 and systematic bias, 166 and teacher evaluations, 163–64 trustworthiness of, 179–82 See also big data Allegory of Faith, The (Vermeer), 29–30 Allied Art Commission, 21 alternative sanctions, 176–79 altimeters, 172–73 Amazon, 148, 175, 181 American Economic Association, 186n American Statistical Association, 194 Anderson, Chris, 156 Angwin, Julia, 176 anorexia, 75 antidepressants, 126 anti-vaccination sentiment, 53–54 Apple, 175 Argentina, 194–95, 211 Army Medical Board (UK), 215 art forgeries, 19–23, 29–32, 42–45 Asch, Solomon, 135–38, 141–42, 260 assessable decisions, 180 astrology, 124 Atkinson, Tony, 83 atomic weapons, 90, 249–50 Attenborough, David, 277–78 authority, deference to, 138–39 autism, 53–54 automation, 128 Avogadro’s number, 246 Babbage, Charles, 219 Babcock, Linda, 27 Babson, Roger, 263 backfire effect, 129 Bad Science (Goldacre), 2 bail recommendations, 158, 169, 180 Bakelite, 32 Bank for International Settlements, 100–101 Bank of England, 256, 258 Bannon, Steve, 13 bar charts, 228, 234, 235 Bargh, John, 121, 122 barometric pressure, 172–73 Barrack Hospital, Scutari (Istanbul), 213–14, 220, 225, 233, 235 base rates, 253–54, 253n Battistella, Annabelle (Fanne Foxe), 185–86, 212 battlefield awareness, 58–59 Baumeister, Roy, 121, 122 BBC, 10, 276 behavioral data, 69–70 behavioral economics, 25, 27, 41, 96, 271.


pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

affirmative action, British Empire, computer age, Deng Xiaoping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, information retrieval, invention of movable type, machine readable, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, QWERTY keyboard, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, transcontinental railway

A recent dissertation on the topic of Chinese Latinization and Soviet Turkish illiteracy campaigns provides new insight from a Eurasian-oriented perspective. See Ulug Kuzuoglu, “Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2018). Context for the Latinization of Chinese in Soviet language policy can be gleaned from Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923−1939 (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the U.S.S.R., 1917−1953 (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998); A. G. Shprintsin, “From the History of the New Chinese Alphabet,” in D.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Already in the 1929 draft: Qu Qiubai, “Zhongguo ladinghua de zimu,” in Qu Qiubai wenji, vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1989), p. 354. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Within a year of being reintroduced: Ni Haishu, Zhongguo pinyin wenzi yundongshi jianbian (Shanghai: Xiandai shubao, 1948), pp. 150−72. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It was necessary, they argued: Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923−1939 (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 199−200. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT One member, Ma Xulun: Fei Jinchang and Wang Fan, Zhongguo yuwen xiandaihua bainian jishi (1892−1995) (Beijing: Yuwen, 1997), p. 171.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

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

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

When asked if he considered himself connected to the alt-right, he said: ‘They’re much younger, they’re basically guys in their twenties and thirties. Some people I know walked out of it—they’re not into Sieg Heil, they’re not into this stuff… the media loves this stuff, they can’t get enough of it.’ The conservative culture war of the 90s had tried to push back against the enormous gains of the cultural left over abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, pornography and the Western canon. Buchanan’s style was more pugilistic than most of the Republican mainstream was willing to risk and his culture war speech remains an undeniably brilliant piece of writing and oratory, as well as one of the most important speeches in US history.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Who would ever choose work over life?12 Women’s decisions to give up on their ambitions as adults are often the result of learned dispositions and habits acquired during childhood. But despite this socialization and its long-term effects, Sandberg doesn’t really believe in glass ceilings or see the need for affirmative action. She thinks the main force holding women back—at least educated women—is their own hang-ups and fears. Women don’t need favors, they just need to believe in themselves. “Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face … Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment.”13 Deborah Gruenfeld calls Sandberg a post-feminist—a woman who believes that “when you blame someone else for keeping you back, you are accepting your powerlessness.”14 So how should women take power and the corner office?


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But a large portion of charitable deductions claimed by the wealthy go not to the poor. They go to culture palaces—operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters—where the wealthy spend much of their leisure time, and to the universities they once attended and expect their children to attend (perhaps with the added inducement of knowing that these schools often practice affirmative action for “legacies”). I’m all in favor of supporting the arts and our universities, but let’s face it: These aren’t really charities, as most people understand the term. They’re often investments in the lifestyles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have too. They’re also investments in prestige—especially if they result in the family name being engraved on the new wing of an art museum or symphony hall.


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

Many factors influenced the development of the late twentieth century, from the worldwide movement for gender equity to an intense East-West confrontation that spawned proxy wars across the globe, from the revival of religious fundamentalism to the reunification of Europe following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. And, of course, every country had its unique political and social concerns. It is these—affirmative action in the United States, the battles over language and separatism in Canada and Spain, the re-establishment of democratic governments in Korea and across South America—that tend to fill the airwaves and the history books. Yet in a way that has generally gone unappreciated, these factors played out in the wake of sweeping changes that buffeted the global economy and left citizens anxious and ill at ease.

Believers in free markets had devoted years of patient investment to building an intellectual superstructure of think tanks and university research institutes to stand against the welfare state. Alongside it, starting in the 1960s, they had fostered a network of grassroots groups united by their resentment of various social and legal changes—busing of children to schools outside their neighborhoods to achieve racial integration; easier access to abortion; “affirmative action” policies to promote integration in the workplace; more widespread sex education in the schools—and committed to using the Republican Party as the vehicle to reverse those changes.26 But these concerns had not yet carried enough weight to swing US politics decisively to the right. In 1976, when Reagan became the conservatives’ spear carrier, a more traditionally moderate Republican president, Gerald Ford, managed to deny him the party’s presidential nomination.


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

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. The 1970s also saw growing demands for corporate affirmative action for women and minorities. Thus it was that Friedman hit a nerve when he reprised key points of Capitalism and Freedom in a 1970 article in the New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The article, which was widely read and discussed, took aim at the executives who claimed that “business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable c10.indd 216 5/11/10 6:25:46 AM the corporate liberal 217 ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.”

Almost nine in ten agree that they are motivated by public relations or profitability, or by both concern and business benefits in equal measure.”10 Findings like this might confirm the cynical view that CSR is a sham. On the other hand, evidence is everywhere of real change. Fifty years ago, top U.S. companies were pillars of an all-male, all-white power structure; today, many Fortune 500 companies embrace women’s and civil rights, at least in their official policies. Even as Republicans bashed affirmative action during the 1980s and the 1990s, corporate America moved in the opposite direction, and diversity emerged as a key goal in boardrooms. Something similar has been happening with gay rights during the last decade. Even as conservatives sounded the alarm about a growing acceptance of the “gay lifestyle,” most Fortune 500 companies moved to bar workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

President Obama can veto any GOP attempt to abolish the agency. Except for auto loans, the agency may regulate “abuses” in most financial products. However, as Congress should have learned from the credit card penalty fiasco, firms demand a reasonable rate of return. If forced to cut some fees, they will raise others. Finally, Dodd-Frank creates affirmative action offices in every regulatory agency. Discrimination was already illegal, but financial firms can expect a lot more paperwork, as well as implicit pressure to meet hiring quotas. Impact of the Midterm Elections By many standards, the November 2010 elections were historic; among other things, the Republican Party not only recaptured the US House of Representatives, they won their biggest majority in more than half a century.

He was Global Head of Advertising for UBS Bank, Head of Corporate Brands for Zurich Financial Services, and Head of Corporate Communications for Westpac Financial Services. He also founded his own marketing company. His upcoming book, The Big Mo (to be published in 2011), focuses on the increasing influence of large-scale momentum on our world. INDEX Abe, Shinzo, 105 Abedian, Iraj, xxii addiction, 298 affirmative action, 267 Afghanistan, 204 Africa, xv African National Congress (ANC) Alliance, xxii–xxiii, 128, 135–136 African Union, 121 aging populations, 27–26, 258 agriculture, in Japan, 110–112; in South Africa, 130–131 Ahmadinejad, Mahmud, 207–208, 210–211, 214 AIG, 139–140 Al-Naimi, Ali I., 195 alternative energy, 40, 181, 190–191, 193–194 American Clean Energy and Security Act, 27 AMLO.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

The situation in Kashmir, unfinished business from the 1947 partition, became one of virtual civil war, and, like the stunning decision to test nuclear devices in 1998, meant that tensions with Pakistan continued. Class or caste tension was also evident from the start of the decade with protests against implementation of the Mandal Commission’s report in favour of additional affirmative action; and it continued with periodic episodes of violence against the lowest classes. Serious disabilities still faced women, with ‘dowry deaths’ the most flagrant sign of their lack of power. The unfavourable sex ratio in India, and in the subcontinent as a whole, was a more important clue to the differential health care and nutrition for girls and women characteristic of a society with continuing extreme poverty.

By September 1990, Delhi was at a standstill as high- and low-caste groups across north India fought and demonstrated. There were even cases of upper- and middle-class students, shown in photographs flashed across the country, setting themselves ablaze in protest. The BJP withdrew its support from the government. They and other opponents argued, as do opponents of affirmative action in the United States, that such programmes fostered social divisions, failed to reward merit, and benefited only the better-off in the disadvantaged groups. In 1992 the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the commission report and the government moved to its implementation. The Mandal crisis coincided with a dramatic escalation on the part of the BJP, with its allied Vishva Hindu Parishad, the World Hindu Council, of their simmering demand to build a Ram temple at the precise site of a 1528 Mughal mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

The Right Stuff was written while the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the most decisive affirmative-action case of the decade, while the Equal Rights Amendment was awaiting state ratification, and as the first classes of women were attending the U.S. Air Force, Coast Guard, Military, and Naval academies. At the book’s conclusion, Wolfe specifically signifies the twilight of the age of right stuff with Ed Dwight’s experience at Edwards, presenting his story as a misguided early attempt at government-enforced affirmative action. Released a year before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, The Right Stuff appealed to readers eager to remember an America when a president could inspire the nation to take on daunting challenges—even beating the Soviet Union in a race to the Moon.


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

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

If your rich grandfather leaves his fortune to all his kids equally, that would probably be perceived as fair from a distributive justice perspective. However, if one of the kids was taking care of your grandfather for the last twenty years, then this distribution no longer seems fair from a procedural justice perspective. Many current political debates around topics such as income inequality and affirmative action revolve around these different formulations of justice. Sometimes this distinction is framed as fair share versus fair play. For example, in the U.S., K–12 public education is freely available to all. Because of this educational access, some conclude that everyone has an equal opportunity to become successful.

Others believe that the quality of public educational opportunities differs widely depending on where you live, and that education itself doesn’t grant access to the best advancement opportunities, which often come through family and social connections. From this latter perspective, fair play doesn’t really exist, and so there needs to be some corrections to achieve a more fair share, such as affirmative action or similar policies. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it in a May 8, 1967, interview with NBC News: “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” In any case, perceived unfairness triggers strong emotional reactions.


pages: 387 words: 120,092

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Hispanic, gender, African American, and gay histories were now offered, along with similar perspectives on culture, literature and other fields of inquiry. At times the debate was regarded as a war, because in some circles it was held that for these points of view to be fairly represented in academia, members of those very groups were the best candidates to put them across. Affirmative action and positive discrimination were sometimes the solution. Lawsuits, the disintegration of departments, and the sacking of staff members were the more extreme manifestations of this discussion. But, as in any academic war, nobody died or was even wounded. Israeli academics tried to follow suit.

Palestinians, Mizrachi Jews, and in particular Palestinian and Mizrachi women, constitute a mere fraction of the ten thousand or so members of staff in Israeli academia (less than one per cent for Palestinians, 9 per cent for Mizrachi Jews, and one per cent for Mizrachi women).39 For the Israel academic to be able even to experiment with what is called affirmative action – and I say ‘experiment’ because I am aware of the drawbacks of this technique – these scholars had to become activists against Zionism. For most of them, however, political activism did not go beyond writing articles or books. The price would have been too high. Demanding representation of other groups was thus a complex and risky endeavour.


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

(The US Census answers this question in the affirmative.) Is somebody a Native American because they have some pertinent ancestry, or do they need to be officially recognized by a relevant tribe? (Many Native Americans protested when Elizabeth Warren argued the former.) And should the children of recent African immigrants be eligible for affirmative action programs whose goal it is, in part, to redress the lingering injustices caused by slavery? (A new activist group, the American Descendants of Slavery, believes that they shouldn’t.) There is nothing natural about the specific racial categories that animate so much of our contemporary politics.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Abi-Nassif, Marie-Joe, 77–78 abolition of slavery, 61, 286 Academy of Dijon, 257 Acemoglu, Daron, 114 Acton, John Emerich Edward, Baron, 115 affirmative action, 41 Afghanistan, 59–60, 222 Africa, 42–45, 134, 222 African Americans and American identity, 325n209 and “challenger ideology,” 180 and conflict driven by diversity, 8–9 and demographic trends in US, 232, 241, 244, 249 and “intergroup contact” hypothesis, 88, 89–90 and jobs and education gaps, 3, 328n219 and legacy of social domination, 11, 216–20, 255 and policies supporting universal solidarity, 264, 266 and power-sharing arrangements, 80 and primordial view of social groups, 37 and prospects for diverse democracies, 286 socioeconomic and education trends, 212–13, 219–20 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 106 Alba, Richard, 247 Albanians, 206 alcohol consumption, 37 Ali, Mohammad, 136 Aligarh, India, 85, 91–92 Ali Khan, Saif, 113–14 Allport, Gordon W., 87–90 American Descendants of Slavery, 41 American Political Science Association, 76, 338n270 anarchy, 52–56, 80.


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 opening of elite schools to the academically talented of all backgrounds was not accompanied by socioeconomic democratization of those schools. On the surface, it looked as if things had changed. The proportion of students coming from socially prominent families dropped. The proportion that came from exclusive prep schools dropped. The de facto quotas on the number of Jews who would be admitted were dropped. Affirmative action increased the representation of African Americans and Latinos on elite campuses. The numbers of Asian American students increased manyfold through the force of their superb credentials.15 But despite these changes, the student bodies of the elite schools were still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-middle class.

The result is that each level of educational attainment—high school diploma, AA, BA, MA, and professional degree or PhD—implies a mean IQ for people attaining that level that has been remarkably stable among whites at least since the beginning of the 1980s. I must limit the numbers to whites as I present these data, because aggressive affirmative action has produced means for African Americans and Latinos at each level of educational attainment that are substantially lower and more variable than the white means.30 But since we are talking about the new upper class, there are good reasons to think in terms of the white means—partly because African Americans and Latinos who enter the new upper class have passed a number of career tests signifying that they approximate the white means on cognitive ability for each level of educational attainment, and partly because the new upper class is still overwhelmingly white.31 Table 2.1 shows the evidence for these stable means.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

The average poor white kid gets better schooling than the average poor black kid. Brazil’s best universities are state-run and cost nothing but are so competitive that, given the crappiness of basic public education, it’s very hard to get in unless you can afford private school or private tutoring. When public universities adopted affirmative action starting in the early 2000s, many white Brazilians were outraged. TV Globo’s news chief, Ali Kamel, wrote a book titled Não Somos Racistas (We Are Not Racists) in which he complained that the quotas undermined the principle of meritocracy. It’s a curious position for the employee of a company whose current owners were born into their places at the top of the pyramid.

I started to feel this, immersed in Lemannland. As a concept it’s hard to argue with, but as it travels, it gets diluted. Among well-to-do Brazilians, meritocracia became an incantation against the mediocrity of government and those who survive on its teat. That book by the Globo exec—We Are Not Racists, which called affirmative action unfair—was one example. Once I met a twenty something named Beth who complained about Bolsa Família, the welfare program; she had attended private school, still lived with her parents, and worked at her father’s textile company. My dentist shared Beth’s disdain. “Some of us, like you and me, have to work,” she told me once while poking an instrument in my mouth.


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

In that conservative region, Democrats would continue to cede ground to ascendant Republicans. In other respects, however, developments in the party more closely tracked the DLC blueprint—and by 1992 would emerge in full form in the “New Democrat” campaign of Bill Clinton. The party’s appeals began to mute aspects of cultural liberalism on guns, affirmative action, and crime, and took a tougher line on national defense. Proposals for welfare reform were structured to send a reassuring message to moderate voters about work and family. Yet the DLC’s reformation project was clearly as much or more about economics. Most of the group’s leaders had built careers on a business-friendly posture, and they pushed to make that stance more prominent in the Democratic Party.

Bush (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003), 106; Michael Sandel, “Obama and Civic Idealism,” Democracy 16 (Spring 2010): 10. Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables. abortion, 145–46, 147, 179, 202, 235 Abramoff, Jack, 199 Adams, John, 77 advertising, 104, 105–6, 171, 176, 206, 251, 277, 283, 295 affirmative action, 181 AFL-CIO, 57, 97, 129, 140, 218, 276 agenda-setting, 123–26, 168–70, 179–80, 259–62, 268, 286–88 agribusiness, 280 agriculture, 84, 85, 108, 189, 246, 280 AIG, 261 airlines industry, 119, 184 air-traffic controllers strike (1981), 58–59, 186–87, 191 Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, 144 Almond, Gabriel, 144 Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), 49–50, 215–18 Amar, Akhil, 76 amendments, constitutional, 86, 201, 266, 294 American Bankers Association, 124–25, 292 American Council for Capital Formation, 124–25 “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” 150 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 123 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 140 American Legion, 138, 143, 144 “American Option,” 266, 267, 302; see also DeMint, Jim American Petroleum Institute (API), 144, 274 American Political Science Association, 150 Americans for Financial Reform, 275, 285, 292 Americans for Limited Government, 284 Americans for Prosperity, 284 Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), 208, 209–10, 284 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), 192 America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), 275 antitrust regulation, 71, 80 approval ratings, 165, 258, 268, 282 Archey, William, 206 Armey, Dick, 190, 200, 201, 209, 210, 241, 283 Articles of Confederation, 297, 298–99 Association of State Democratic Chairs, 176 “Astroturf” organizations, 144, 274 Babbitt, Bruce, 181 Bai, Matt, 260 Balz, Daniel, 192 banking industry: bailouts of, 1–2, 71, 198, 226, 249–50, 254, 261 commercial, 69, 71, 197, 249–50, 275 deregulation of, 69, 185, 196, 197–98 government regulation of, 69, 71, 80, 185, 196, 197–98, 282 investment, 69, 71, 197, 229, 249–50 mortgages issued by, 2, 32–33, 197–98, 216, 301 risk management by, 1–2, 44, 45–46, 115 tax reforms opposed by, 89 Bartels, Larry, 110–12, 151–52, 160, 167, 234 Bartlett, Bruce, 267 Baucus, Max, 238–39, 245, 260, 267, 268, 273–74 Bayh, Evan, 239 Beane, Billy, 234 Bear Stearns, 67, 70 Bebchuk, Lucian, 63, 64 Beck, Glenn, 284, 294, 339n Beilenson, Tony, 128 Bernanke, Ben, 34, 267 Berry, Jeffrey, 145, 146 Biden, Joseph, 260 Billings, Robert, Sr., 203 bipartisanship, 100, 183, 185, 186–88, 190, 191–93, 212, 219, 230–31, 233, 259–62, 267–68, 293–300 Blankfein Lloyd C., 1, 2 Bloomberg, Michael, 225, 256 boards of directors, 63–64, 65 Boehner, John, 275, 292, 294 Bogle, John, 63, 229 Bok, Derek, 141 bonuses, 2, 67, 70 Born, Brooksley, 198, 249 Boxer, Barbara, 240, 247 “bracket creep,” 187, 216 Bradley, Bill, 243 Brandeis, Louis, 80–81 Breaux, John, 6, 181, 183, 184, 239, 245 “Broadland,” 15, 17, 24–25, 25, 26, 194, 290 Brock, William, 172–73, 174, 175, 176, 265–66 Brokaw, Tom, 156 Broockman, David, 269 Brookings Institution, 123, 124 Brooks, David, 147 Browder, Earl, 67 Browder, William, 67 Brown, Scott, 282, 284, 287 Brownstein, Ronald, 192 Bryan, William Jennings, 170–71 Buckley, William F., Jr., 221–22 Buffett, Warren, 229, 249 Bush, George H.


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

Conservatives thought they could spot bullshit a mile away; they saw lies and theft and even extortion in every bit of liberal legislation; and they were champion accusers, charging their enemies with corruption almost as a matter of course. Bribery? Well, the wingers would demand, what do you call all the subsidies and welfare and food stamps and affirmative action and Social Security benefits that flow from Uncle Sam to the “special interests” who keep returning these damned liberals to Congress? Self-aggrandizement? How about the vast army of bureaucrats and Washington “experts” whose only concern is to grab more power for themselves, to exert control over every little aspect of the economy?

But in 1997, when Gingrich gave up his confrontational stance against President Clinton and decided to give a balanced budget priority over tax cuts, a large chunk of the conservative movement joined the rebellion against him. “Who is the most powerful liberal in American politics?” wrote Pete King, a Republican congressman from New York, referring to Gingrich. He has prevented the Republican majority in Congress from addressing affirmative action and race-based quotas. He has forced congressional Republicans to shelve their drive to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. He has stood firm against tax cuts. He is a confidant of Jesse Jackson’s. He is a pal to Alec Baldwin. He is a cheerleader for bipartisan cooperation at any cost and a pious opponent of the unspeakable horrors of harsh partisan rhetoric.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

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

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

In the United States, slavery and then Jim Crow laws, as well as atrocities against Native Americans, along with violation of treaties they signed and the Senate ratified; British, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch participation in the slave trade; British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, and Dutch colonial oppression. Many other democratic nations and cultures have committed grave offenses. Contemporary Americans tend to think of slavery as a moral outrage that was corrected by the Thirteenth Amendment and of segregation as a political outrage that was corrected by civil rights legislation and affirmative action. As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, slavery and segregation also were economic institutions, and these legacies are far from corrected. “The ghettoes of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions: the redlining of real-estate zoning maps, the expanded authority given to prosecutors, the increased funding given to prisons,” Coates wrote in 2017.

But if being perceived as a victim leads to benefits, there may be a logic to desiring this station. After all, schools were teaching that society abuses all who lack wealth, so why shouldn’t whites, the majority of whom are not wealthy, be seen as victims? Schools and employers were granting special treatment to favored groups through affirmative action and other programs—why shouldn’t whites seek special treatment? Perhaps the swearing-in of the first African American president allowed American whites to begin to think of themselves as, for the first time, on the short end of the stick. In the hands of the white majority, the notion of victimhood has proven powerful, simply because, in the United States and United Kingdom, there are more whites than other types of people combined.


pages: 443 words: 125,510

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

All of these questions deal with first principles: the essential guidance for how we think and act. To put the questions in more concrete terms: What does reason tell us about which religion, if any, provides the true guide to how we should lead our daily lives? Can we reason our way to the ideal political system? Can our critical faculties resolve debates about abortion, affirmative action, or capital punishment? Can they settle conflicts between individual rights, such as when one person’s freedom of speech clashes with another’s right to privacy? What does reason say about whether we should treat outsiders differently from members of our own society, or when it is permissible to make war on other countries?

Thus it is hard to believe, given the limits of our critical faculties, that there can be anything close to universal agreement on whether rights are inalienable, what they should be, and which ones should take precedence. There is a fundamental disagreement between modus vivendi and progressive liberals over whether individuals have a right to equal opportunity, and over positive rights more generally. Well-informed, well-meaning citizens disagree profoundly over whether there is a right to abortion or to affirmative action. These are matters that deal with the good life, and they show that we should not expect reason to provide collective truths. To take this a step further, placing rights at the core of any political system is tantamount to saying that the best political order is a liberal one. It is difficult to imagine how it is possible to privilege rights in the absence of a liberal or at least quasi-liberal state.


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

In the same election, 67 percent of the people in El Paso County (Colorado Springs) had voted for George W. Bush. Schkade and Sunstein screened participants—in order to pick liberals from Boulder and conservatives from Colorado Springs—and then measured the individual opinions of these citizens about three issues: global warming, gay marriage, and affirmative action. True to form, the Boulder citizens were initially more liberal on these issues than the participants from Colorado Springs. Schkade and Sunstein then divided the citizens from the two cities into batches of six—making ten groups, five from each city. The groups were then asked to discuss the three issues, to deliberate, and then to come to a consensus on the same questions each participant had been asked individually.

Descriptions and videos of Elliott's experiment can be found at http://www.janeelliott.com/index.htm. [back] *** * Schkade and Sunstein assigned a simple ten-point scale (ranging from very strongly agree to very strongly disagree) that participants marked in answering three questions, one each about affirmative action, global warming, and gay marriage. The difference between the answers given by the individuals from Colorado Springs and those given by the individuals from Boulder averaged 4.59 points before deliberation After deliberation, the difference between the groups had grown to 6.24. [back] *** * GIuckman quoted T S.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Californians gave a big victory to a governor who staked his reelection campaign on strident anti-immigration rhetoric. Taking advantage of the state’s highly democratic constitution, which allows for popular referenda on a large range of issues, they then excluded undocumented immigrants from public benefits; forbade public universities from practicing affirmative action; and banned bilingual education in schools.57 At the time, observers were understandably worried about the future of race relations in California. But in the 2000s and 2010s, the fever somehow broke. Most Californians grew comfortable with the fact that high levels of immigration were a part of the local experience, and that the state had become “majority minority.”

Had I not met her, I would not begin to understand just how rich life becomes when you decide to enmesh your happiness with that of the person you love. Index Abortion, 71 Absolute income mobility, 154–155 Absolute monarchy, 13, 54 Accountability, 69, 95, 125, 241–242 Activists, 143, 150, 187–189, 238 Adams, John, 56–57 Addicting Info, 241 Affirmative action, 178 African Americans, 142, 206; and civil rights movement, 70, 207–209; cultural appropriation by, 204; in Estonia, 176; segregation of, 70–71, 200, 202, 208, 211–212; and slavery, 169, 199–200; Trump’s attitude toward, 192 Africans: cell phone use by, 147–148; as migrants, 176 Agriculture, 91, 222 Agrippinus, 263–265 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 218 Akron, Ohio, 192 Alabama, 209 Alessi, Christopher, 68 Algeria, 109 Allason, Rupert, 78–79 Allport, Gordon, 171 Alternative for Germany, 48–51, 166, 170 America First, 42, 201 American Association of Retired Persons, 77 American Idol, 58 Americanism, 42 American Renaissance, 145 American Revolution, 195, 247 Anderson, Benedict, 210 Ankara, Turkey, 7 Anti-Semitism, 129, 240 Anton, Michael, 174 Apple, 224 Arab Spring, 142, 149 Arcadia County, WI, 173 Argentina, 4 Aristocracy, 57 Aristotle, 162 Armenians, 209 Ascriptive identity, 214, 233 Asian Americans, 169, 199–200, 206 Assembly, freedom of, 127 Association, freedom of, 26–27 Athens, Greece, 7, 243; ancient, 13, 56–57, 151, 161–162, 253 Atlantic, 142 Austerity measures, 11–12 Australia, 2, 123; attitude toward democracy, 106–107; political radicalism of youth, 121; populism in, 7; support for authoritarian leader, 112; support for military rule, 111 Austria: elections in, 42, 188; immigration in, 166; Nazi past, 114; populism in, 2, 33, 42, 122, 166, 188; youth vote, 122 Austrians, 163 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 163, 195 Authoritarianism, 32, 73, 104–105, 113, 146; American attitude toward, 5, 108–112; and civic education, 245; competitive, 93; and elections, 111–113; in Hungary, 2, 252, 254, 257; increasing openness toward, 108–112, 120, 123–124; in India, 188–189, 256–257; in Philippines, 254, 256; in Poland, 2, 128, 188–189, 252, 254–257; and populism, 51, 190, 236, 252–257; in Russia, 2, 35, 188; in South Korea, 185, 255; support for, 5, 112; and Trump as authoritarian leader, 2, 31, 188–189, 200, 254, 257, 260–261; in Turkey, 2, 35, 186, 188, 198, 255–257; in Venezuela, 35, 188, 255 Autocracies.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

It’s called, obviously enough, the myside bias, and it commandeers every kind of reasoning, even logic.27 Recall that the validity of a syllogism depends on its form, not its content, but that people let their knowledge seep in and judge an argument valid if it ends in a conclusion they know is true or want to be true. The same thing happens when the conclusion is politically congenial: If college admissions are fair, then affirmative action laws are no longer necessary. College admissions are not fair. Therefore, affirmative action laws are necessary. If less severe punishments deter people from committing crime, then capital punishment should not be used. Less severe punishments do not deter people from committing crime. Therefore, capital punishment should be used.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

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

In May of 1985, Attorney General Ed Meese appointed a commission to study the effects of pornography and suggest ways to control it.34 The recommendations had little effect because the individualistic ethic of the time valued choice and consumption over any standard of government control of cultural morality. For most Americans, the return of economic prosperity was tacit proof that an improvement of black and white relations was imminent. An expanding economy meant gains for everyone. Discussions of race revolved around the place of affirmative action, but the nation was occasionally treated to sensational stories of scandal, and introduced to new leaders. In November 1987, a black teenager covered in dog excrement with racial slurs written on her body was discovered crawling in the garbage of a town south of Poughkeepsie, New York. The girl, Tawana Brawley, was soon represented by the Reverend Al Sharpton of New York City and two lawyers.35 Sharpton had no congregation, but did have a reputation as a community activist and spokesman for dissident causes.

According to this doctrine, courts can protect only those liberties guaranteed as rights under the Constitution; all other liberties are subject to limitation by the legislative branch. Throughout his career, Bork was highly critical of the judicial activism of the Supreme Court in cases involving abortion, affirmative action, and civil rights. The courts, he said, should not thwart the will of popularly elected lawmakers. For example, Bork had written that the Fourteenth Amendment should apply only to race, and not to gender issues. Yet in his testimony, the judge said equal protection should apply to women.6 As he tried to moderate some of his positions to be acceptable to Democrats in Congress, Judge Bork alienated his supporters and further infuriated his detractors.


pages: 474 words: 136,787

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

There may be professions, such as car mechanic or big-game hunter, that men are psychologically more suited to than women, just as there are professions, such as doctor and nanny, that women are probably naturally better at. But there is no general support in biology for sexism about careers. Indeed, in a curious way, an evolutionary perspective justifies affirmative action more than a more egalitarian philosophy would. For it implies that women have different ambitions even more than different abilities. Men’s reproductive success depended for generations on climbing political hierarchies. Women have rarely had an incentive to seek success of that kind, for their reproductive success depended on other things.

., 1990, ‘Parasites and Mate Choice in Red Junglefowl’, American Zoologist, 30:235–44 Index Abortion, sex-selective, 117, 122 Aché people, 185, 220 Acheulian technology, 314 Adaptation and Natural Selection (Williams), 35 Adapted Mind, The (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby), 303 Adrenogenital syndrome, 247 Adultery, 170, 187, 195, 210–36 among birds, 213–16, 219 concealed ovulation and, 222–4 among hunter-gatherers, 220–21 inheritance patterns and, 230–35 jealousy and, 227–30 orgasm effect and, 216–19 polygamy and, 224–7 testicular size and, 211–14 violence and, 196–7 Aeschylus, 197 Affirmative action, 254–5 African Queen, The (film), 199 Aggression, 306–7 gender differences in, 242, 244 Agriculture, 187–8 AIDS, 68, 72, 73, 99, 175 Aka pygmies, 187 Akhenaten, 191, 273 Albatrosses, 177 Alexander, Richard, 319–20, 322 Alliance theory, 276 Altitude, 76–7 Altmann, Jeanne, 113 Altruism, 34–6, 74 reciprocal, 187, 189 Anaxagoras, 115 Anderson, Roy, 81 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 10–11 Anthropology, 4, 266, 307, 308 Antibiotics, 68 Antibodies, 71, 72 Antigens, 72 Apes exogamy of, 182–3 gender differences in behavior of, 242 mating systems of, 170, 180–81, 205–9 violence among, 195–6 See also Chimpanzees; Gibbons; Gorillas; Orang-utans Aphids, 55, 57 Aquinas, Thomas, 6 Aristotle, 115 Arms race analogies, 65–8, 69 Artificial intelligence, 310 Artificial life, 66–7, 75 Assortative mating pattern, 296 Attractiveness, see Beauty Augustus, 193 Austad, Steven, 111 Austen, Jane, 296, 322 Australian aborigines, 186, 221 Australopithecus afarensis, 183, 300–301, 316–17 Automixis, 37 Aztecs, 191 Baboons, intelligence of, 324–6 Babylon, 191, 199 Bacteria, 63–4, 68, 69, 90–91 antibiotics and, 68 descendants of, 96 fusion and, 98–9, 99–100 male-killing genes in, 103 Badcock, Christopher, 331 Baker, Robin, 216–18 Baldwin, James Mark, 244 Baldwin effect, 312 Bamboo, 77–8 Bangladesh, 198 Barlow, Horace, 321 Basolo, Alexandra, 157 Bateman, A.


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

I, who come from Soviet Russia, can assure you that debates and differences of that kind were and are permitted in Soviet Russia. What about political or philosophical issues? Why didn’t those upholders of the American Way show people disagreeing about nuclear weapons? Or about abortion? Or about “affirmative action”? If that committee stands for the American Way—there is no such Way any longer. Observe also that in today’s proliferation of pressure groups, the lowest sort of unskilled laborer is regarded as “the public,” and presents claims to society in the name of “the public interest,” and is encouraged to assert his “right” to a livelihood—but the businessmen, the intelligent, the creative, the successful men who make the laborer’s livelihood possible, have no rights, and no (legitimate) interests, are not entitled to their livelihood (their profits), and are not part of “the public.”

To be progressive in history today means precisely this: it means to respect the rewriting of all the newest groups, especially if their spokesmen make no sense to you; that shows that you are open-minded, and are not trying to impose your group’s private views on others. To each his own subjectivism. Is this an exaggeration? A prominent history professor at Stanford University, Carl Degler, recently made a plea for women’s history, explaining that history varies subjectively from men to women. He declared: “The real test of the success of affirmative action for women will come not by counting the number or proportion of women in a department or profession, but by the extent to which men ... are willing to accept the new and peculiar interests of women as legitimate and serious, even when those interests are strikingly novel and perhaps even bizarre when compared with current acceptable work in a given field.”9 [Emphasis added.]


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In Detroit and New York, an alliance of liberals and African Americans elected Jerome Cavanagh and John Lindsay respectively. While his predecessors had been seen as abettors of police brutality, Cavanagh promised fairer law enforcement. He launched affirmative-action programs and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. John Lindsay also fought police brutality and supported affirmative action. Lindsay’s finest hour may have been in the after-math of King’s shooting, when he walked the streets of Harlem and cooled tempers with warmth and compassion. But ultimately neither mayor could control the forces that were convulsing his city.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

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

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

“It was very isolating.” Three years later, when she was a sophomore, Michigan passed a ballot initiative that prohibited public institutions from making any decisions based on race, a veiled attack on affirmative action programs. Lauren immediately felt a chill on campus. There were only a few black students in the School of Nursing, and once her classmates started handing out anti–affirmative action flyers, Lauren felt even more isolated. Even small interactions would remind her that some of her classmates were questioning her qualifications. “I was having to account for how I got in,” she said.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

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

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

While overall enrollment of African-American and Hispanic students has increased since 1971, they are, as the New York Times found in 2017, “more underrepresented at the nation’s top [100] colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago.” Jeremy Ashkenas, Haeyoun Park, and Adam Pearce, “Even with Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges than 35 Years Ago,” New York Times, August 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html; see also Andrew McGill, “The Missing Black Students at Elite American Universities,” Atlantic Monthly, November 23, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/black-college-student-body/417189/. 57.Gregor Aisch et al., “Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent than the Bottom 60.


pages: 418 words: 134,401

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, SoftBank, Ted Sorensen, traveling salesman, two and twenty, urban planning

Watching his friend from his law office in Washington, Jordan had arrived at the same conclusion. Progressives to their core, both men realized that the only way to attain and keep power was to moderate their views and appeal to the center. For Clinton, that meant reframing divisive issues like affirmative action and welfare reform in terms that wouldn’t scare away more conservative white voters; for Jordan the civil rights leader, that meant at times abandoning the strident rhetoric and tactics of some of his more activist colleagues, like John Lewis or Jesse Jackson, and working collaboratively with the white power establishment.

At his nadir in the spring of 1995, Clinton became such an afterthought that he was forced to defend his continued “relevance” as president to a public starting to doubt he had any. But by election day, the public liked the president’s new, more centrist approach. Over the last two years, he had reasserted his role by reviving the economy, passing welfare reform, and creating a sensible affirmative action program—“mend it, don’t end it”—which Jordan had actively helped shape. The country seemed at peace, the White House more serene, and voters liked their vigorous, youthful leader enough to give him another four years—the first Democratic incumbent since FDR to accomplish that feat. Throughout it all, Jordan functioned as the “unseen, steadying hand, maintaining the balance of what at times was a rocky situation inside the White House, smoothing over the edges among competing power centers that could have really hurt the President,” said Don Baer, Clinton’s White House communications director at the time.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

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

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

The model for all of this was a young conservative named Dinesh D’Souza, who was six years older than Thiel and who’d played an almost identical role to Thiel on the East Coast in the early ’80s as a founding editor of the Dartmouth Review. The paper would serve as the template for the Stanford Review and many similar campus publications founded in the same era. It was unapologetically reactionary and relentlessly provocative, often to the point of cruelty. During D’Souza’s tenure it had published, among other things, an anti‒affirmative action column written by a white student entirely in mock-Ebonics, an interview with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and a confidential list of members of the gay student group, some of whom weren’t out. By the time Thiel hit Stanford in 1985, D’Souza had parlayed his talent for grabbing attention into a job editing The Prospect, a right-wing magazine for Princeton University alumni backed by wealthy conservatives.

He’d watched a documentary, The Red Pill, in which a self-described feminist comes to question her beliefs—the film’s title used Curtis Yarvin’s preferred term for enlightenment. He’d also been watching lectures by Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist and self-help author who inveighs regularly against affirmative action. Peterson’s ideas had persuaded Damore, who wrote that Google managers had been “shaming” conservatives “into silence” about the possibility that maybe women were underrepresented at Google, not because of discrimination, but because they were less interested in coding than men were. That made sense to Damore since women seemed more extroverted and neurotic, traits that Damore claimed were inconsistent with being a good coder.


pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

McVeigh wrote Hodge from Fort Riley, “I used to call black people ‘black,’ because I only saw one side of the story. Now you can guess what I call them.” Fellow soldiers later reported to the FBI that McVeigh was fond of the n-word and referred to Black children as “nig-lets.” In the Army, McVeigh thought he was a victim of affirmative action; when two African Americans were chosen over him to attend sniper school, McVeigh was outraged because he thought he was better qualified. Later, with his lawyers, McVeigh tried to downplay his bigotry, explaining that he was “thrust into a new culture” in the military, a culture of Black people who were “loud, sort of arrogant, touchy.”

Tim needed work and thought he could parlay his military experience into a job with the U.S. Marshals Service. In a story that he would tell over and over, McVeigh said he did very well on the written test, but was turned down because he was a “white male.” Just as McVeigh felt the Army cheated him out of sniper school because of affirmative action, he thought the Marshals didn’t consider hiring him because they only wanted women and African Americans. (This story is impossible to verify and likely untrue.) McVeigh found a job in the Buffalo area that was a lot like his last one. With a pistol permit and a security clearance from the Army, he became a supervisor at Burns Security.


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

With the dawn of the new decade, Americans elected the first president born within the 20th century and the second-youngest (43) since Theodore Roosevelt. By the time John F. Kennedy entered office in 1960, The New Deal Coalition was severely fractured. New, contentious issues of the times—the Vietnam War, race relations, riots, and activists’ demands for civil rights and affirmative action—drove many members of Congress in different directions. These issues, when mixed with escalating confrontations with the Soviet Union and the growing popularity of Republican candidates who promised lower taxes and control of inner-city crime, hampered Kennedy’s efforts to repair the splintered coalition.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Lehren, “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College,” New York Times, 12 May 2012. Janet Lorin, “Student-Loan Debt Reaches Record $1 Trillion, Report Says,” Bloomberg News, 22 March 2012. 13. Ron Lieber, “Student Debt and a Push for Fairness,” New York Times, 4 June 2010. 14. On racism under the GI bill, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 114. 15. Paul de la Garza, “Mexico Students Strike over Higher Fees,” Chicago Tribune, 20 May 1999. Julia Preston, “University Officials Yield to Student Strike in Mexico,” New York Times, 8 June 1999. 16.


pages: 234 words: 53,078

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

Nanny State Subsidies for Small Businesses There are three basic ways in which the government provides subsidies to small businesses: favorable tax treatment, below market rate loans, and exemptions from labor and safety standards that apply to other businesses. In addition, various levels of government often apply affirmative action standards for small businesses, setting aside a certain portion of their contracts for businesses that are below a specific size.5 The government provides tax benefits to small businesses through two mechanisms, one of them legal, and the other not quite legal. The first mechanism is a large set of tax breaks that are explicitly designed to help small businesses.


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

They have long warned of “the hazard facing industrialists” in “the newly realized political power of the masses,” and the need to wage and win “the everlasting battle for the minds of men” and “indoctrinate citizens with the capitalist story” until “they are able to play back the story with remarkable fidelity”; and so on, in an impressive flow, accompanied by even more impressive efforts, and surely one of the central themes of modern history.10 It is a tribute to the skill of the warriors fighting the everlasting battle that when the dam finally broke during the 1996 primaries, there was real surprise and alarm at the appeal on class lines by a demagogue assuming a populist mantle. Pat Buchanan “opened a second front” in the “class war,” New York Times commentator Jason DeParle reported. Before that, unhappy people were expressing their anger and frustration by targeting “welfare families, immigrants and beneficiaries of affirmative action.” But now, they were discovering bosses, managers, investors, speculators, even class conflict, features of our harmonious society that had somehow escaped notice.11 Ears that were tuned to a different part of the spectrum might have made the discovery a few years earlier; say, in 1978, when UAW President Doug Fraser condemned business leaders for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”12 Or twenty years before that, in the labor press when it still existed on a substantial scale and was seeking—in its own words—to combat the corporate offensive to “sell the American people on the virtues of big business,” and to provide “antidotes for the worst poisons of the kept press,” the commercial media, which have the task of damning labor at every opportunity while carefully glossing over the sins of the banking and industrial magnates who really control the nation.”13 And long before, back to the early days of the industrial revolution.


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

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

The first are class-neutral, race- or gender-based policies to remove barriers to the advancement of racial minorities and women, including native white women. The second are policies that include skills training or retraining for unsuccessful native white men. Class-neutral, race-based policies in the United States include affirmative action in hiring, government set-asides for specified groups in contracting, and gerrymandering of congressional districts to create majority-minority districts likely to elect a member of a racial minority as a representative. In most cases the beneficiaries of these policies tend to be members of the affluent elite within a particular racial or ethnic group.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

Accusing your opponent of changing his mind is, I will grant, a standard move in the playbook of American politics. But in John Kerry’s case, that accusation was the playbook. It wasn’t just his altered stances on Vietnam and Iraq that attracted criticism. Kerry’s detractors also charged him with vacillating on the death penalty, welfare reform, social security, gay marriage, affirmative action, the Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind, among others. To give you a sense of the tenor of the election season, William Safire, the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine, took on the phrases “wishy-washy,” “waffle,” and “flip-flop,” all between March and October of 2004.† Jay Leno proposed two possible slogans for the Kerry campaign: “A mind is a terrible thing to make up,” and “Undecided voters—I’m just like you!”

Moreover, it is most unreliable precisely with respect to accurately recalling past beliefs. This effect is widely documented. For instance, in 1973, the psychologist Greg Markus asked over 3,000 people to rate their stances (along one of those seven-point “strongly disagree / strongly agree” scales) on a range of social issues, including affirmative action, the legalization of marijuana, and equal rights for women. A decade later, he asked these same people to assess their positions again—and also to recall how they had felt about the issues a decade earlier. Across the board, these “what I used to think” ratings far more closely reflected the subjects’ current beliefs than those they had actually held in 1973.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Lacking other resources, currency reserves have been Singapore’s force multiplier. Through the state company Temasek, Singapore holds shares in major conglomerates across Asia, and it invested in China long before others, earning it long-term credibility and leverage. “Since Asia produces such technically skilled workers these days,” the businessman continued, “affirmative action in Singapore means hiring more Caucasians.” Singapore is the most successful avatar of the Asian way—and a model packaged for export. Lee’s one-word answer to explain Singapore’s success is “confidence,” for he has sought to be “correct, not politically correct.”16 Under Lee’s “Nothing is free” value system, rich and poor alike adjust to incentives—fares, fines, fees, penalties—for excessive consumption or even multiple car ownership.

Asian values, Islam, and democracy are all stirring together in the Malaysian pot, but without yet coming to a boil. “Many wonder if an economic crisis would precipitate ethnic violence as it did in 1969, but we would rather achieve income equality than test the notion,” remarked a conservative politician privately. Like South Africa, Malaysia has a unique affirmative action scheme for its majority Malay population—referred to as the Bumiputra (“sons of the soil”)—which has created a stable middle class by providing low-interest loans to companies they own. The tension between ethnic Malays and the powerful Chinese population is nearly invisible, but it is still palpable.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

Robbin ( 1 998) recounts the struggle over the decision taken by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1 997 to allow people to choose more than one racial category on the U.S. Census and in other federal government forms. This decision was known by the innocuous name of Statistical Directive 1 5 . Argu­ ments over the nature of racial classification in the U.S. census go back over many decades but with the advent of affirmative action and other similar measures in the late 1 960s and early 1 970s, race classification became even more consequential and contested. Robbin identifies three major issues involved in arguing for or against changing the categories: the controversy about whether or not to name (and how to name) racial and ethnic groups in government data; the exclusion of minority populations from the decision-making process within the U.S.

Most schools now are lousy places to grow boundary objects because they both strip away the ambiguity of the objects of learning and impose or ignore membership categories (except artificial hierarchi- 3 06 Chapter 9 cally assigned ones) .55 In mass schooling and standardized testing, an attempt is made to insist on an engineered community of practice, where the practices are dictated and the naturalization process is monitored and regulated while ignoring borderlands. They are virtual factories for monsters. In the 1 970s and 1 980s many attempts were made to include other communities in the formula via affirmative action and multicultural initiatives. But where these lacked the rela­ tional base between borderlands and the naturalization of objects, they ran aground on the idea of measuring progress in learning. This is partly a political problem and partly a representational one. As femi­ nists learned so painfully over the years, a politics of identity based on essences can only perpetuate vicious dualisms.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

In 1955 a little fewer than 30% of a representative sample of large firms had personnel / human resource management offices. By 1965 about 35% had such offices. Bolstered by the need to comply with new workplace laws governing pensions, occupational health and safety (including the Occupational Health and Safety Act), discrimination, and affirmative action passed in the later 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the number of firms with human resource offices grew quickly: by 1975 the proportion with such departments reached just under 50%, and by 1985 it hit 70%.29 Large firms with internal labor markets were not only characterized by explicit human resource policies administered by departments and personnel specialists.

The estimates are based on Dobbin and Sutton (1998), using a stratified random sample of 279 public, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations in thirteen sectors with offices in California, New Jersey, or Virginia. The growth was particularly dramatic in personnel / human resource functions dealing with discrimination and affirmative action, with no company respondents reporting an office (or officer) with such responsibility in 1967, up to 25% so reporting in 1977, and over 40% so reporting by 1987. 30. C. Brown and Medoff (1989) provide the most comprehensive evidence that workers in large firms and large establishments earn significantly higher wages even after controlling for the above factors as well as occupation and industry.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and see below at note 8. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); see also Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983). Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969).

James Kindall, “Searching for Uncle Sam,” Star [weekly insert of Kansas City Star], December 16, 1984, 24; direct quotation from Steve Trollinger. 14. Uncited clipping displayed at Wal-Mart Visitors’ Center, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2005. 15. “People’s Platform of 1896,” in National Party Platforms, Volume I, 1840–1956, comp. Donald Bruce Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 104–6. 16. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). 17. On federal promotion of agriculture in the early twentieth century, see Postel, Populist Vision, 278–79; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 391–94; on federal serÂ�vice to commerce in the 1920s, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 349–78. 18.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“The Industry in 1941—A Panoramic Review,” Super Market Merchandising, January 1941, 6–8. 48. “The Present and Future of the Super Market,” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, October 1937, 250. 49. “Mapping the Nation’s Super Market Growth,” Super Market Merchandising, February 1941, 22–30. 50. For example, Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 25–79; and David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 199–244. 51.

Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Kargon, Robert H. Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2017. Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. Kemmerer, Edwin W. “The Work of the American Financial Commission in Chile.”


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

We didn’t have internships, which now even all the undergrads have at St. Thomas. We had no international travel, no semesters abroad. So you were really much more naïve as a student graduating in the ’70s—even with a double major and a minor and some other good stuff thrown in. But I felt empowered. The early ’70s was a big era of affirmative action and companies were forced to go hire women. I was interviewed for some really interesting jobs, and one that I thought sounded really great was this job at the Federal Reserve Bank. It was a brand new building, built by one of I.M. Pei’s designers. The president of that Federal Reserve Bank was a really young guy.

The president of that Federal Reserve Bank was a really young guy. They had all state-of-the-art hardware, software, and furniture for the time, so it felt like, “Wow, I get to be in this brand new hot place, the Federal Reserve Bank.” That sounds like an oxymoron saying it now. The truth was that all these jobs they were recruiting for affirmative action, if you weren’t really a competent young woman, you would fail. There was a gap between skills and jobs because they had to hire you and they had to hire you in stretch positions to get women populated. In fact, I Ann Winblad 299 got my masters degree at night and Saturdays while at the Federal Reserve Bank, and I was only the second woman in the whole Federal Reserve banking system that had a masters degree.

Index Numbers and symbols 1984 recession, 144 37signals, 309–316 5K contest, 258 A Accel Partners, 101–102, 108 Accidental Empires, 64 Acorn, Al, 44 acquisition offers, 137, 215, 217–218 Adams, Tracy, 326 Adobe Acrobat, 293 Adobe Illustrator, 287 Adobe Systems, 281–296 Adobe Type Manager (ATM), 292 AdSense, 161–163, 171 advertising, 130, 131, 311. See also click-through; targeted advertising affirmative action, 298 aggregators. See desktop-based aggregators @Home, 61 Alexa Internet, 274–277 Allen, Paul, 182, 198 Alliant Computer Systems, 427–446 Alsop, Stewart, 194 Altair computer, 33–34 Altman, Sam, 449 Amazon, 277 Anderson, Eve, 326 Andreessen, Mark, 134 angel investors, 209, 213–216, 260, 447 Anybot, 451 AOL, 132 Apple Computer, 31–58, 173, 186, 267, 268, 281, 285–286 Apple I, 38–42, 44–45 Apple II, 31, 42–43, 49, 50, 78, 89, 94, 185 Apple II user group, 89 Apple III, 51 455 456 Index arcade games, 32 Architext.


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

{265} “The Least Interesting Lawyers in the World,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2013, p. A12. {266} Thaddeus Herrick, “One Word of Advice: Now It’s Corn,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2004, p. B1. {267} Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), p. 163. {268} Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, p. 183. {269} Robyn Meredith, “Tempest in a Teapot,” Forbes, February 14, 2005, p. 120. {270} Ibid. {271} Vibhuti Agarwal, “Indian Steelmakers Gain Strength,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2007, p.

{342} “Economic and Financial Indicators,” The Economist, September 7, 2013, p. 92. {343} “Hong Kong’s Jobless Rate Falls,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 1991, p. C16. {344} Jim Powell, “Harding and Coolidge: 1.8 Percent Unemployment,” Washington Times, September 13, 2010, p. B1. {345} Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), p. 39. {346} Erin Lett and Judith Banister, “Labor Costs of Manufacturing Employees in China: An Update to 2003–04,” Monthly Labor Review, November 2006, p. 41. {347} Jason Clemens et al., Measuring Labour Markets in Canada and the United States: 2003 Edition (Canada: Fraser Institute, 2003), pp. 1–68

{491} Karen Damato, “Index Funds: 25 Years in Pursuit of the Average,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2001, p. R6. {492} Theo Francis, “Five Years of Feast and Famine,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2003, p. R1. {493} Ian McDonald, “Survivor: How One Fund Avoids Losses,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2003, p. R1. {494} Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), p. 70. {495} U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2011), p. 731. {496} “NAIC Research and Actuarial Department: Data at a Glance,” CIPR Newsletter, April 2013, pp. 21–22


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

The same might be said of the latest ethnic category, Middle East and North Africans (MENAs), which the Obama administration pushed through just before it left office.26 At the stroke of a pen, the White House had conjured up ten million new non-whites. Again, the move betrayed a technocratic itch to channel people into corrals. Lebanese Christians and secular Turks may have less in common with Sudanese Muslims than with whites. Yet overnight they could benefit from the same affirmative action to enter university as other minorities. Hillary­land was inured to how badly this game of favourites came across to non-college-educated whites, who still form America’s largest voting bloc, and will continue to do so for some time. A few weeks before the election Mrs Clinton described half of them as belonging in a ‘basket of deplorables’, whose racial prejudices would consign them to history’s trashcan.


pages: 203 words: 58,817

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

Generating your core desired feelings doesn’t just happen with affirmations you stick on your bathroom mirror, or from sitting in the lotus position and om-ing your way into an altered state. Mindfulness and contemplation is only half of the equation. You’ve got to take some action, Jackson. Small things, incremental things, tiny gestures: anything to counter the glums or the clench of despair. Do it. Daring, grand, big, dramatic, life-affirming actions. Whatever positively generates the feelings you long for and moves your life forward. Take baby steps or go quantum. Stay focused on your feelings. One of my core desired feelings is affluence. For me, affluence is about abundance and flow. I long for flowing ideas and creativity. It’s about having influence in the lives of the people I can touch—whether that’s a smile to let them know that they are seen and loved, or an insight that I can offer.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

All of that would save training dollars, and probably produce better field officers. The proposal had been File-13'd by two successive DDOs, but Mary Pat had known about it from the beginning, and approved the concept. “Can you sell it?” “John, you're going to help me sell it. Look how well Domingo here has turned out.” “You mean I'm not affirmative action?” Chavez asked. “No, Ding, that's only with his daughter,” Mrs. Foley suggested. “Ryan will go for it. He isn't very keen on the Director. Anyway, for now I want you two to do your debrief on SANDALWOOD.” “What about our cover?” Clark asked. He didn't have to explain what he meant. Mary Pat had never got her hands dirty in the field-she was espionage, not the paramilitary side of the Operations Directorate-but she understood just fine.

“What's most disturbing, however,” Kealty was saying now, “is what Ryan said about his appointments to the Supreme Court. It's pretty clear he wants to turn the clock back on a lot of things. Litmus tests on issues like abortion, appointing only strict-constructionists. It makes you wonder if he wants to overturn affirmative action, and heaven knows what else. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where the sitting President will exercise immense power, particularly in the courts. And Ryan just doesn't know how, Barry. He doesn't, and what we learned today about what he wants to do-well, it's just plain frightening, isn't it?

The position paper's guidance hadn't exactly been clear on that. Having already shot himself in the foot on the issue of abortion-higher up and more to the centerline, Arnie van Damm had remarked acidly the previous day, to reinforce his earlier lesson-now Ryan would have to make his political stance clear on a multitude of issues: affirmative action at one end of the alphabet, and welfare at the other, with taxes, the environment, and God only knew what else in between. Once he'd decided where he stood on such things, Callie Weston would write a series of speeches for him to deliver from Seattle to Miami and God only knew where else in between.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

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

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

For example, in order to increase the participation of indigenous Africans in many of the industrial and mining opportunities, some African governments are legislating for a required minimum level of participation by the local population. In much the same way that South Africa introduced its Black Economic Empowerment regulations, and the US has its affirmative-action policies, Zambia recently announced the Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission, which covers similar ground.10 They’ve got what we want, and we’ve got what they need Bartering infrastructure for energy reserves is well understood by the Chinese and Africans alike. It’s a trade-off, and there are no illusions as to who does what, to whom and why.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.


pages: 178 words: 61,242

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul

affirmative action, airport security, David Sedaris, feminist movement, microaggression, PalmPilot

And when that message comes from a non-white non-male person themselves, someone young enough to not yet have any inherent gravitas and—this part is important—just enough privilege to be powerful, that’s when they target you. The response was fine, initially. I was handling it, the general misunderstanding of the worth of affirmative action. But then a few users twisted the knife and I started to get lightheaded. “Whites are literally GODS compared to all you shit colored freaks,” wrote one user, and for some reason, it gave me pause. “Act like an insufferable cunt and then turn around and play the victim when people put you in your place,” said another, and so I decided to go home early that day.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

by William Poundstone The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley Good to Great, by Jim Collins On Becoming a Leader, by Warren Bennis 179 180 APPENDIX C Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian eBoys, by Randal Stross Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Compassionate Capitalism, by Marc Benioff Love Is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders Globalization The World Is Flat, by Tom Friedman Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen Globaloney, by Michael Veseth Money Makes the World Go Round, by Barbara Garson How “American” Is Globalization? by William Marling Intellectual Life The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman Reflections by an Affirmative Action Baby, by Stephen Carter Integrity, by Stephen Carter The Accidental Asian, by Eric Liu Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson Socrates Café, by Chris Phillips Self-Renewal, by John Gardner Public Intellectuals, by Richard Posner Psychology Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl Biography/Memoir My Life, by Bill Clinton This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff Swimming Across, by Andy Grove All Over But the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg Personal History, by Katherine Graham Emerson: Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson In an Uncertain World, by Robert Rubin The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion Religion End of Faith, by Sam Harris The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama APPENDIX C The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith The Bhagavad-Gita Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer Politics/Current Affairs Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll Running the World, by David Rothkopf Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukuyama Holidays in Hell, by P.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

The effect was that Ron’s black arm appeared to be Judy’s. Through a left-side hole, the white TFNG extended his excessively hairy arm as if it were also Judy’s. Clothing was pinned to the sheet to give the appearance the mutation was dressed. And what a mutation—a woman with one black and one white arm, an affirmative action wet dream. The skit continued as an “astronaut selection board”—fellow TFNGs, of course—interviewed this androgynous creature. All this time, the arm and hand movements, comically uncoordinated, brought howls of laughter. The final question posed was “What makes you qualified to be an astronaut?”

Had she been waved through some of those gates because her smile had melted a professor or perhaps her dynamite body had influenced a male astronaut sitting on the selection committee? We males are suspicious of female beauty because we know ourselves too well. But, over the years, Judy had proven she wasn’t an astronaut because of her sex appeal or because of an abuse of the affirmative action program. She was an astronaut because she was qualified to be one. I had watched her fly formation from the backseats of T-38s and lead instrument approaches in bad weather and do it as well as me (and my backseat fighter and T-38 time had made me a damned fine instrument pilot). I had seen her expertly operate the robot arm.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

What robs technologically advanced capitalism of its legitimacy is not that it tears down national barriers and produces ever more with ever less labour, but rather that it blocks political initiatives towards a new European social model and social contract. Anyone today who thinks about unemployment should not remain trapped in old disputes about the ‘second labour market’, ‘falling wage costs’ or ‘affirmative action’. The question that needs to be asked is how democracy will be possible after the full-employment society. What appears as a final collapse must instead be converted into a founding period for new ideas and models, a period that will open the way to the state, economy and society of the twenty-first century.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt. It could mean Congress would no longer be allowed to legislate rules from which it exempts itself. (There are many rules from which Congress has exempted itself, including affirmative action hiring requirements and the necessity of preparing environmental impact statements.) A great deal of responsibility was lost when rulers who declared war were no longer expected to lead the troops into battle. Warfare became even more irresponsible when it became possible to push a button and cause tremendous damage at such a distance that the person pushing the button never even sees the damage.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Here is Hoppe’s thesis: In the United States, less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion and crime. As a result of an ever-expanding list of non-discrimination—“affirmative action”—laws and non-discriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial ethnic and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

This hybrid model would make only three mistakes (two for the Circle cutoff and 1 for the Square), better than the seven mistakes for the aggregate single cutoff previously discussed, and it is also more fair, since it falsely rejects the same number (one) of Circle and Square applicants. So we’ve permitted a more complex model but have improved on both criteria. This might indeed be a good thing to do, increasing both fairness and accuracy at the same time. In fact, it’s not so different from how certain affirmative action policies are implemented. But note that this model (which really involves first picking which submodel to use based on the applicant’s race) now explicitly uses race as an input, which, as we discussed above, is something some notions of fairness (and many laws) forbid, since race can equally well be used to increase rather than reduce discrimination.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

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

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

They offered a single, objective standard of comparison, and so would break the stranglehold of the patrician WASP families. The new approach to admissions quickly allowed for more Catholic and Jewish students in elite universities—and later also for more students of Asian ancestry. Over time, and partly with the aid of affirmative-action formulas, they were soon joined by a greater number of African American and Hispanic students, while the integration of women into elite universities (largely in the 1960s and ’70s) meant that these schools also stopped being boys’ clubs. Although family-legacy admissions certainly continue, and the WASP lines are still overrepresented in elite schools, there is no doubt that today’s American elite is far less narrowly drawn in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and sex.


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

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

Another allegation was that she was being considered for the highest office in the land only because the politically correct had decided it was time for a female president. In April 2016, during the same interview in which Trump introduced the world to the term “Crooked Hillary,” he also claimed, “The only thing she’s got is the woman card.” The implication was that Clinton was unqualified for the job and that her claim to it lay solely on a gender-based affirmative action principle.37 This was ludicrous. As President Barack Obama put it, “I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.”38 We saw earlier how perceiving others as enjoying unmerited gains can trigger a spiteful response.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Declaring myself a creature of the night helped cement my desired place as the Weird Kid, as if being the smartest and also the blackest person at my small, rural school didn’t already make me stand out enough. That’s not an empty flex; I was voted most unique and was easily the valedictorian of my class after skipping sophomore year. People still said I only got into college because of affirmative action. Don’t get me wrong, most people I interacted with were very kind, and I’m grateful for the experiences had and connections made that let me empathize with a part of the country that rightfully feels ignored by the very class of intellectual elites I worked my ass off to break into. I learned valuable lessons in coal country, like how to chop firewood, do a deep-conditioning treatment with nothing but a bucket of water and a cup, and look past obvious differences to find common ground.


pages: 252 words: 71,176

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris

affirmative action, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, data science, Donald Trump, Francisco Pizarro, green new deal, lockdown, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, random walk, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, statistical model, Works Progress Administration

By way of empirical results, political scientists Scott Keeter and Michael Delli-Carpini devoted an entire book to this topic, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. They found eyebrow-raisingly low levels of knowledge of domestic politics among the masses. For example, less than a third knew what affirmative action was, and “more than 60% of [over 300 questions] could not be answered by as many as half of [people] asked.”32 Elaborating upon Lippmann’s skepticism of the people to make purely rational decisions, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government that voters do not in fact act rationally in accordance with the “folk theory” of democracy.33 Instead, elections are fights between different factions of citizens in which our psychology is swayed by our affiliations to different candidates.


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

They were convinced the banning of the back rooms was what it would take to win in 1972. Richard Nixon understood things differently. His political operation was all back rooms. Reformers such as Fred Dutton saw the Democrats’ moves toward what would later be called affirmative action as an imperative to save the Democratic Party. When Richard Nixon had made his own steps toward affirmative action, he saw it as a tool to destroy the Democrats. Building trades unions controlled apprenticeship opportunities that often passed from father to son, making construction sites among the most segregated workplaces in the nation. Labor Secretary George Shultz, hoping to reform them, came up with the idea of voluntary goals for integrating government building projects.

George Mitchell, the national committeeman from Maine, Edmund Muskie’s representative, said it would be interpreted as “some sort of quota.” Professor Ranney said he feared he’d opened a “Pandora’s box.” Will Davis of Texas said the South would never stand for it. The vote was called; what would later come to be called “affirmative action” won 13–7. However, Mandate for Change included a footnote: “It is the understanding of the Commission that this is not to be accomplished by the mandatory imposition of quotas.” The New York Times gave the release of the McGovern Commission’s report on April 28, 1970, a big spread. They led with the commission’s apocalyptic claim that “the only alternative to broader citizen participation in politics was the anti-politics of the street.”

Failed antiwar candidacies and voting-age referendum: Washington Star, June 8, 1970. Michigan survey on young voters and Wallace: Reg Weaver and Hal Gulliver, The Southern Strategy (New York: Scribner, 1971), 105. Delegates would now have to be: Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 29. “Philadelphia Plan”: Thomas J. Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969,” Journal of American History 1 (June 2004): 145–73. Electoral college reform: Alexander Keyssar, “Peculiar Institution,” Boston Globe, October 17, 2004. “Our ability to change this system”: PPP 289, September 11, 1970.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

A number of inci- dents in the conference created a stir within the management hierar- chy. In one case, a member had posted information about affirmative action in the conference. In another case, some members discussed a personal issue with little business relevance. The head of systems development, the division responsible for main- taining DIALOG, received complaints from the industrial relations divi- sion concerning the possibility of female employees organizing a union and from the legal department complaining that the women might file affirmative action suits. He responded by compiling hard copies of con- ference transcripts and a list of members.


The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

v=T1zr8Fr1Nbs; “Sekretnyi stsenarii razvala SSSR i Rossii v planakh TsRU,” YouTube video posted by AndreyFLKZ, January 31, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeiGv6IkQc. 5. On the Soviet Union as a multinational state, see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–23 (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2005). 6. For the interpretation of the Soviet collapse as the fall of an empire and the role of political nationalism in that process, see Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA, 2000); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, CT, 2002), ch. 9; Mark R.

Mark Beissinger, “The Persistent Ambiguity of Empire,” Post-Soviet Affairs no. 11 (1995); Mark R. Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse,” in Ethnic Politics and Post-Communism: Theories and Practice, ed. Zoltan Barany and Robert Moser (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 14–44; S. Becker, “Russia and the Concept of Empire,” Ab Imperio, 2000, nos. 3–4: 329–342; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Terry Martin, “The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a Dubious Theoretical Category,” Ab Imperio, 2002, no. 2: 91–105; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010), chap. 14; Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, CT, 2002), chap. 9; S.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In their hands would lie the future of scheme liability. From what Bill Lerach knew about the three men, he was not encouraged. Jerry Smith was a Reagan appointee from the Texas border town of Del Rio known primarily for writing the majority opinion striking down affirmative action at the University of Texas Law School, a decision that would be superseded seven years later by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. The next jurist, James Dennis of New Orleans, was appointed by President Clinton in 1995. Although he had figured in few noteworthy decisions, Lerach considered him sympathetic toward victims of corporate fraud.


pages: 649 words: 185,618

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

I still have universalist dreams—visions of one world without the rancors of nationalism, tribalism, and patriarchy—but now I dream them only when fully awake, and I take my inspiration not from some naive UNICEF greeting card but from a pluralist feminism founded on a mutual respect for each other’s “identity politics,” which include the particularities of culture, peoplehood, and history. . . . If feminists can understand why history entitles lesbians to separatism, or minorities and women to affirmative action, we can understand why history entitles Jews to “preferential” safe space. To me, Zionism is simply an affirmative action plan on a national scale. Just as legal remedies are justified in reparation for racism and sexism, the Law of Return to Israel is justified, if not by Jewish religious and ethnic claims, then by the intransigence of worldwide antisemitism. . . .


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

However, the era’s bloodshed effectively silenced law enforcement critics. Instead, neighborhood watches and church groups lobbied for more cops and tougher approaches to crime. The OPD was also a dramatically different department. As a result of changes initiated by Charles Gain, George Hart, and a 1974 affirmative action hiring mandate, it had diversified to the point where, by 1985, 39 percent of its officers were people of color, up from less than 1 percent in the mid-1960s.45 With more Oakland-raised Black and brown cops on the job, the force finally had genuine community connections. However, the fiscal crisis did not spare the police department.

Oakland also underbid San Francisco with free land to convince the federal government to build new offices downtown. A state office building soon followed. Wilson’s first term mostly satiated liberal and even radical aspirations; in addition to supporting the Citizens’ Police Review Board’s creation, he upended Oakland’s system of contracting and city jobs, ramming through an affirmative action measure that gave Black businesses a leg up. In his last two terms, Wilson used his reputation as a civil rights advocate to stave off criticisms that he’d grown too cozy with the downtown business community and neglected the poor.70 But by the late 1980s, progressives and Black people were defecting from the coalition that had elected Wilson to three consecutive terms, citing the worsening poverty and violence in East and West Oakland.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

Once Obama won and became president, Snowden came to dislike him intensely. He criticised the White House’s attempts to ban assault weapons. The lodestar in Snowden’s thinking, at this time and later, was the US constitution; in this case the second amendment and the right to bear arms. Snowden was unimpressed by affirmative action. He was also against social security, believing that individuals shouldn’t go running to the state for help, even in times of trouble. A couple of users called him out on this, one posting: ‘Yeah! Fuck old people!’ TheTrueHOOHA responded with fury. He wrote: ‘You fucking retards … my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year and, you know what, she still supports herself as a goddamned hairdresser … maybe when you grow up and actually pay taxes, you’ll understand.’


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

I hired somebody the other day who was not only the first in her family to go to college but worked full-time in college so that her sister could go as well. We hired that person, and she went to a very non–Ivy League school.” It might be more accurate to say that Google acts like an Ivy League school in evaluating candidates. Its policy could be described as affirmative action for the very, very smart. “We do go out of our way to recruit people who are a little different,” Larry Page once said. Carlisle therefore sees his role as “finding the people we would ignore. Like, who’s the kid in his village in India who repairs all the phone lines even though he’s twelve, because no one else can do it, and he’s got that technical aptitude?”


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

In 2014 the awards were dominated by writers of color and women, myself included. So it was a surprise when a majority of voters woke up April 4 to a nomination slate almost exclusively overrun by novels, stories, and related fan efforts promoted by a small group of writers who claim the Hugos are turning into affirmative-action awards catering to left-wing ideologies. Their efforts to influence the voting process are led by a notorious right-wing novelist and internet personality who’s best known for his desire to deny women the right to vote2 and his firm belief that black people are “savages.”3 When I won two awards last year, it seemed like an impossible achievement for me, because I knew the history of the Hugos.


pages: 275 words: 77,955

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Corn Laws, Deng Xiaoping, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, liquidity trap, market friction, minimum wage unemployment, price discrimination, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing

Closer to home, the intellectuals, always devotees of big government and by wide majorities supporters of the national Democratic party, had been disillusioned by the Vietnam War, particularly the role played by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Many of the great reform programs—such guidons of the past as welfare, public housing, support of trade unions, integration of schools, federal aid to education, affirmative action—were turning to ashes. As with the rest of the population, their pocketbooks were being hit with inflation and high taxes. These phenomena, not the persuasiveness of the ideas expressed in books dealing with principles, explain the transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980—two men with essentially the same program and the same message.


pages: 236 words: 77,735

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game by Lee Munson

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, call centre, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, follow your passion, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, High speed trading, housing crisis, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, off-the-grid, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, power law, price discovery process, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, short squeeze, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, too big to fail, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money

It suggests that something exists that you should stay away from, like the plague or bird flu. Most often a sell is placed on a stock that is so dead and buried that nobody cares in the first place, but a firm selling research can get credit for a fair and balanced lineup of recommendations. It is kind of like affirmative action for stock ratings. The general trap for intrepid investors is letting the cynicism take over and looking for buys in the sell list. While I get the idea of looking for treasure in another person’s trash, you are still fighting the tide. Sometimes it is better to just leave them alone. Plus, most of the time sells are really bad stocks!


pages: 263 words: 78,433

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

affirmative action, classic study, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, job satisfaction, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, Multics, RAND corporation

What influences my own clinical practice are the lessons I received from a cadre of older, white, male physicians—my own attendings—who wore starched shirts, conservative ties (often of the bow variety), and properly buttoned white coats to every clinical encounter. They trained in an era in which their entire medical-school class looked exactly like them, with no diversity awareness, affirmative action, or cultural competence. Yet they were among the most culturally aware people I’ve ever seen, though they probably would never use such a PC term. These physicians exemplified a very old-fashioned sort of doctoring. For them, approaching the bedside of a patient was a sacred act. They examined each patient—whether a homeless Ecuadoran alcoholic or a veiled Muslim woman or a visiting Swiss diplomat—with a thoroughness that in itself exuded respect.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

Dalits owning or buying land is the most common cause of violence against them by local communities determined to keep them at the bottom of society. Reliable national statistics for caste numbers are difficult to find because the last time the Indian census included caste was 1931. Then the Untouchables constituted 12.5 per cent of the population. Now, despite twenty-seven years of affirmative action, they remain the poorest and most oppressed of India’s people. The major government, judicial, diplomatic and military positions, as well as senior posts in major companies, academia, the media and the education system, are all overwhelmingly dominated by Brahmins despite the fact that they comprise roughly 3.5 per cent of the population.


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

“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. Pedro Noguera, Jill Pierce, and Roey Ahram (New York: Springer, 2015), 32. the GI Bill: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), ebook. Ebony magazine: Ibid. net worth of nearly $40,000: Ibid. Most high-poverty neighborhoods are now majority-minority: Erica E. Meade, “Overview of Community Characteristics in Areas with Concentrated Poverty” (Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Research Brief, May 2014), https://aspe.hhs.gov/​system/​files/​pdf/​40651/​rb_concentratedpoverty.pdf.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Of those surveyed, 23% said that their views had become more extreme after reading the document and all of those whose views had changed had moved in the direction of their pre-existing bias. Taber and Lodge conducted a similar study in which those with strong opinions about gun control and affirmative action were asked to read arguments on both sides of those two issues. Those with the strongest previous feelings and well-identified political preferences showed even greater polarization in the direction of their extant beliefs. When presented with beliefs that challenged their own, the radical became even more radical.


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

Sometimes, it’s suits and boardrooms. We Black and brown people are told to work twice as hard to get half as far, because we never stop auditioning for the jobs we have and we can never stop proving that we belong in the rooms we work our way into. Otherwise, we’re suspected of being beneficiaries of quota systems and affirmative action. Racism is our names on our résumés being perceived as less competent and resulting in half as many job-interview callbacks as others with identical qualifications. It is the fact that Black people with college degrees often make the same as or less than a white person with a high school diploma.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Positional conflict has, therefore, not only cast the rich against poor but created a middle class at war with itself.5 If the American Dream is to be reclaimed, politicians cannot turn a blind eye to this elite self-recruitment. Even the right-wing Noble Prize winner James Buchanan has argued that when the wealthy die, their money should be returned to the community so as to preserve a meritocracy. It can’t be right that selection to America’s top universities amount to what Daniel Golden calls “affirmative action for rich white people” in his book on how America’s elites buy their way into top universities. He argues that the children of wealthy or influential 134 The Global Auction parents enjoy the “preferences of privilege.” This means regular students applying to Ivy League universities may find themselves vying for only 40 percent of places because the rest are reserved for preferential candidates.6 Reforms to close the opportunity gap are therefore required at both ends of the social spectrum to create a fairer competition for a livelihood.


pages: 241 words: 78,508

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Their intent may not have been malicious, but the implication was clear: I had not gotten the job on merit. I also figured that for every person pointing out my “advantage” to my face, there were probably a dozen others saying it less politely behind my back. I considered my possible responses. I could explain that the last time I checked there was no affirmative action for women at Treasury. I could mention that my credentials lined up with those of the men who had previously held this position. If there was enough time, I could recount centuries of discrimination against women. Or I could just slap the person across the face. I tried all these options at least once.


pages: 264 words: 74,688

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

In the National Museum of Malaysia, an impressive building that was opened in 1963 in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, the focus is on the medieval Malay sultanate of Melaka, which is presented as a peaceful multiracial society. This approach implies that Malaysia’s current communal tensions are a consequence of British imperialism. However, it is the Malaysian government, in its consistent affirmative action policies (in effect, positive discrimination) toward the Muslim Malays, that has very much disadvantaged the native Chinese and Indian populations, both of whom did well under British rule. Resistance to Western imperialism is discussed and approved of in the Museum, for example the murder of the British Resident in Perak in 1875.


pages: 229 words: 75,606

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

This is double the amount of the previous year and six times the number of five years ago. The Firm has evolved; it’s now a multi-billion-dollar public company managing hundreds of billions of dollars of investors’ money across investment strategies. It’s giving back a lot more to society: education grants to local community colleges; affirmative action programs for hiring and education; home office setups for employees; plans to hire veterans in portfolio companies; refurbishment of local parks and community sports facilities; and a “Dragon’s Den” style contest for entrepreneurial ideas—for the youngest, newest employees. It’s a far cry from the stereotypical image of excess often heard on Wall Street about private equity.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

When I was working at the CBOE, I remember traders selling options some days and then being so excited they took their wife out for dinner that night. It’s the same idea. They hadn’t made a real profit. They had sold an option and created a liability for themselves. —Myron Scholes interview, July 9, 2011 Financial leaders and followers alike need more and better financial education. In the United States, growing affirmative action (aka diversity) in the workplace and schools, grade inflation, and meaningless degrees are all movements in the wrong direction. More financial education would help people understand their risks, from buying a home to managing a business. Better education could also help financial professionals make appropriate distinctions between helpful derivatives and those of questionable usefulness to society.

A system with less regulation might have more agitated business cycles, more innovation, and higher long-term growth. We must consider the economic impact of universal health care, where the healthier and wealthier substantially subsidize the poor and less healthy, as well as the effects of affirmative action policies that may lead to less efficient workers in the workplace or less able students in the universities.21 Politicians should also concern themselves with system choices rather than easy, rhetorical sound bites that only distract and misinform the general population. My own intuition is that there is a tradeoff.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3 The political expression of the orthodoxy had its origins in the mid-1960s with the legal triumphs of the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism. In the beginning, the orthodoxy consisted of specific allegations and solutions: Racism keeps black unemployment high. Sexism stunts women’s careers. Affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws are needed. But the orthodoxy soon began to incorporate an intellectual movement that gained momentum in the mid-1960s with the publication of The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The authors were dealing with an ancient problem: Each of us thinks we know what reality is, but different people have different perceptions of it.

First, consider the timeline of legal reforms: 1963: John Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its strongly pro-feminist report, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 mandated equal pay for equal work. 1964: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade employer discrimination on the basis of sex. Griswold v. Connecticut invalidated legal restrictions on access to birth control. 1967: A presidential executive order extended affirmative action in employment and education to include women. 1968: Sexual harassment was added to federal antidiscrimination law as a basis for bringing actions against employers. 1972: Title IX of the Education Amendments mandated nondiscrimination in any school receiving government aid (effectively all of them) and included broad enforcement powers.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

“If your kid goes to Stuy, he is going to go to a legit, top-twenty university. The family will be okay.” So how can you get into Stuyvesant High School? You have to live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and score above a certain number on the admission exam. That’s it. No recommendations, no essay, no legacy admission, no affirmative action. One day, one test, one score. If your number is above a certain threshold, you’re in. Each November, approximately 27,000 New York youngsters sit for the admission exam. The competition is brutal. Fewer than 5 percent of those who take the test get into Stuy. Yilmaz explains that his mother had “worked her ass off” and put what little money she had into his preparation for the test.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

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

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

These are the places where you need a high enough income to live in the good part of town (which gets bigger by the year), and there are also sharp divides in terms of education and social connections, and so these cities tend to be racially segregated to a high degree. A lot of lower-income people just aren’t that interested in paying extra to live around college professors. The colleges themselves, for all their embrace of affirmative action and the rhetoric of diversity, are typically highly segregated bastions of well-off, well-educated (by definition), and ambitious future high achievers, and they make the tone of the town all the more that way. Ironically, America’s ethic of tolerance, as it has evolved, is a double-edged sword when it comes to integration.


pages: 294 words: 83,215

The Magic of Thinking Big by David J Schwartz

affirmative action, business cycle, fear of failure

“The second type of action, which you might say is an insurance policy, is to let two or three of your closest business friends in the trade know you might consider an offer from another store, assuming, of course, it is substantially better than your present job. “I don’t believe your job will be insecure after you take some affirmative action to get those sales figures on the rise. But just in case, it’s good to have an offer or two. Remember, it’s ten times easier for a man with a job to get another job than it is for someone unemployed to connect.” Two days ago this once-troubled executive called me. “After our talk I buckled down.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Orville Hubbard: Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 193. Mayor Albert Cobo: Ibid., 100. “I am confident that the sentiment for home ownership”: Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 193–194. In 1933, construction began on 93,000 new homes: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 115–116. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, zoning laws: Richard Rothstein, “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles,” Economic Policy Institute, October 15, 2014. In a 1939 memo about Washington, DC: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 213.


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

They embraced school uniforms and other traditional-sounding gestures, as well as condoms in schools and other liberal-sounding measures. Clinton triangulated above the hard-edged warriors on left and right and presented a soft and comfortable synthesis. He could, he declared, balance the budget without painful budget cuts, reform welfare without meanness, mend affirmative action but not end it, toughen the drug war while spending more on rehabilitation, preserve public schools while championing charter school alternatives. Battered early in the administration with a culture war skirmish over gays in the military, the Clintonites settled on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” If ever there was a slogan that captures the Third Way efforts to find a peaceful middle ground, that was it.


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

Indeed, since 1980 the percentage of people living in “deep poverty”—those living 50 percent below the official poverty line—has expanded dramatically.6 Despite $750 billion spent annually on welfare programs, up 30 percent since 2008, a record 46 million Americans were in poverty in 2012.7 It is possible that, as Franklin Roosevelt warned, a system of unearned payments, no matter how well intended, can serve as “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit,”8 and reduce incentives for the recipients to better their lives. Particularly revealing have been the generally meager gains made by ethnic minorities. Despite the benefits of government programs such as affirmative action, African Americans have not expanded their share of the middle class in recent decades.9 Indeed, racial and ethnic economic disparities are growing. The black unemployment rate remains more than double the white jobless rate and reaches forty percent among youths.10 Similarly, Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority, have also done poorly in recent years and, according to Pew, now suffer a 28 percent poverty rate in the nation, the highest of all ethnic groups and well over two and half times that of whites.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

However, in his capacity as Appropriations Committee chairman, Thiel reversed the recommendation and awarded $4,000 in student funds to the Review. This was Thiel’s “first entrepreneurial venture” and, in its hypocritical reliance upon administrative subsidy as well as its reactionary tilt, indicative of a pattern. After graduating law school, Thiel coauthored a book, The Diversity Myth, attacking Stanford’s tolerant attitude toward affirmative action, feminism, and gay rights activism. Thiel himself was gay, although he said later that he hadn’t realized it at the time. His eager culture warring paid off, and Thiel was selected to interview for clerkships with U.S. Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Neither hired him, but he still landed on a golden pillow at the white-shoe law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Between 2012 and 2014, university enrollment doubled, to 445,000 students.199 Cultural biases that still favor men pose serious obstacles to girls seeking an education in Kenya, especially in the countryside. But the walls of the patriarchy are crumbling. Boys and girls today are equally well represented in primary and secondary classrooms,200 and thanks to affirmative action programs, women now make up at least 40 percent of the enrollment in Kenyan universities.201 Is education leading to empowerment for women and the decision to have fewer babies? According to the Kenyan Bureau of Statistics, fertility in the country has decreased from 4.9 births per woman in 2003, to 4.6 in 2008–09, to 3.9 in 2014.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

For example, it was not only unjust but also inefficient for a black student in apartheid South Africa not to be able to go to better, ‘white’, universities, even if he was a better student. People should be given equal opportunities. However, it is equally unjust and inefficient to introduce affirmative action and begin to admit students of lower quality simply because they are black or from a deprived background. In trying to equalize outcomes, we not only misallocate talents but also penalize those who have the best talent and make the greatest efforts. What they don’t tell you Equality of opportunity is the starting point for a fair society.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

Kenneth Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ tells us there is no system for choosing between three political candidates under which all voters’ preferences are fairly represented.13 Peyton Young’s book Equity, which uses mathematical game theory to treat the subject matter, is by the author’s own admission ‘a stock of examples that illustrate why equity cannot be reduced to simple, all-embracing solutions’.14 And Cynthia Dwork and her colleagues’ 2012 work ‘Fairness through Awareness’, resorts to looking at how we can best balance affirmative action for groups with fairness to the individual.15 Like in Jon Kleinberg and his colleagues’ work on bias, when these authors did the maths they found paradoxes instead of rational certainty. I thought back to the motto, once so proudly stated by Googlers: ‘Don’t be evil.’ It isn’t used as frequently at the company now.


pages: 286 words: 79,601

Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh

Of course, like all right-wing National Review tough guys, Jonah hates handouts; believes strongly in the glorious virtues of self-sufficiency and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps (and, apparently, by one’s unsevered umbilical cord); demands meritocratic policies; and is teeming with stiff-spined courage. These are the kind of people who hate affirmative action because of how unfair it is, but who thrive on legacy admissions to college and have their mommies and daddies secure them jobs and careers. Our coddled, cowardly warriors on the Right (with an eager assist from their media enablers) have made masculinity and Tough Guy iconography a central part of their political identity.


pages: 314 words: 94,600

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge by William H. Inmon, Bonnie K. O'Neil, Lowell Fryman

affirmative action, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, continuous integration, corporate governance, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, informal economy, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, semantic web, tacit knowledge, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application

A document may be authored or owned by one division of the company but perceived as being part of another functional area, for search purposes. For example, Hannon (2005) points out that tuition reimbursement policies may be set by Finance but are considered related to HR, so the average searcher would expect to find tuition reimbursement guidelines under the HR category; the same applies to something like Affirmative Action policies, which may be written by the legal department but should be searchable under HR. Therefore, the originator of the document may not always be the appropriate place for it to reside for search. The decision of where documents belong is a decision for governance. 4.6 Summary 4.5.2.7 77 Governance and Taxonomy Zach Wahl points out that it is critical to have a cross-disciplinary team assisting in taxonomy creation (Wahl, 2006).


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Getting out of the house is good for both body and brain, but inertia is tempting, and all the more so when excursions mean busting out of age silos. Except for simulcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, my partner, Bob, and I are often the oldest people in the room, and often by decades. We don’t like it, but we don’t want to stay home just because we’ll stick out. I think of it as affirmative action, which God knows is necessary in this age-segregated society. A few years ago, at a huge, outdoor DJ-fest called Electric Zoo, Bob and I were plenty conspicuous. The friends we went with were in their mid- to late thirties, but the median age barely topped twenty. Sure, we got some weird looks, but most of the neon-garbed club kids paid us no attention at all.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

This Blackness has been used primarily in the United States so “its functionality outside the US cannot be guaranteed.” No pictures of Obadike accompany this item’s description. Instead, potential buyers are provided with a list of “Benefits and Warnings” regarding Obadike’s Blackness: “This Blackness may be used for instilling fear” and “this Blackness may be used for accessing some affirmative action benefits (Limited time offer. May already be prohibited in some areas)”; also, “the Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while voting in the United States or Florida,” as well as not recommending “that this Blackness be used while demanding fairness.” Or simply put: “The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while demanding.”


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

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

The just-world hypothesis flourishes because we tend to blur out the disadvantages that our social differences have created for us, and if a person is not solvent or successful on paper, they are somehow inherently weaker. This leads to disturbing related beliefs and attitudes. For instance, those who believe in a “just world” also tend to disapprove of affirmative action. The just-world theory: “Americans Overestimate Social Mobility in Their Country,” Economist, February 14, 2018, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/americans-overestimate-social-mobility-in-their-country. “Somebody will say, ‘We have a problem’”: This remark was in archival footage in the fine 2020 Showtime documentary series The Reagans.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

And moving only the best-performing kids or those from the most motivated families will end up draining the top talent out of the least-advantaged neighborhoods, further concentrating poverty among those left behind. Overcoming decades upon decades of persistent poverty also requires comprehensive and coordinated place-based investments in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Robert Sampson, who is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on concentrated poverty, has called for “affirmative action for neighborhoods” to ensure that each and every neighborhood offers its residents access to economic opportunity and upward mobility. As he aptly put it, “what poor residents seem to want most is not to move but simply to have their communities revitalized.”25 To be effective, these place-based investments cannot be eked out piecemeal; they must span the full gamut of essential social and economic services, from education and economic opportunity to efforts to reduce crime and violence and more.


pages: 292 words: 94,324

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

Although there has been a significant increase in the number of women in medicine—now more than 50 percent in many parts of the country—as well as in the number of minorities, prejudice remains. Bigby believes this prejudice factors into her doctoring. She still feels, some thirty years after her residency, that she has to prove herself as a black woman, that she has to strive to be flawless, because some people still assume that she arrived at her senior post because of affirmative action and political correctness. "I...,"she said, her voice faltering briefly, "feel that I have to do everything better just to be judged as okay. It is something I wish I could let go of. It's something that I wish just wasn't there." In 1997, Dr. Eric J. Cassell wrote an insightful and illuminating book, Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

This is not a trivial accomplishment. Suppose that back before the advent of screens, you and I had been on a committee charged with addressing the terrible problem of discrimination against women in major symphony orchestras. What would we have proposed? I think we would have talked about creating affirmative action programs for women in the music world. I think we would have talked about awareness programs for gender bias, and how to teach female musicians to be more assertive in making the case for their own ability. We would have had long discussions about social discrimination. I think, in other words, that our suggestions for change would have been fairly global and long-term.


pages: 271 words: 87,303

Trust Me, I'm a (Junior) Doctor by Max Pemberton

affirmative action, mass immigration, young professional

Monday 8 September Mrs Sankaraja’s blood pressure is dropping rapidly and she hasn’t passed urine for several hours. Her feet have swollen and it looks like her heart is failing. Supriya and I look at each other, bemused. The nurses look at us expectantly. While Supriya leafs through her pocket textbook to see what we should do, I take affirmative action and seek senior assistance. Not too senior, of course; I don’t want to get shouted at. Instead I try and find Daniel. He is, after all, supposed to help us instead of just ingratiating himself to the consultants. I page him a few times but he doesn’t respond. Ruby, who is busy in the doctors’ office, says she thinks he’s assisting Housewives’ Favourite in theatre this morning.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Turco, “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 6 (2010): 894–913. 13 Alicia DeSantola, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana, “New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member,” Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings (2017). 14 Carolyn Wiley and Mireia Monllor-Tormos, “Board Gender Diversity in the STEM&F Sectors: The Critical Mass Required to Drive Firm Performance,” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 25, no. 3 (2018): 290–308. 15 Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly, “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 589–617. 16 Emilio J. Castilla and Stephen Benard, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2010): 543–76. For more on how diversity programs, when misused, can undermine racial justice, see Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 17 Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work?


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

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

Delgado and Stefancic claim that “[i]n our system, rights are almost always procedural (for example, to a fair process) rather than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education). Think how that system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resists programs that assure equality of results, such as affirmative action at an elite college or university or efforts to equalize public school funding among districts in a region. Moreover, rights are almost always cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful. For example, hate speech, which targets mainly minorities, gays, lesbians, and other outsiders, receives legal protection, while speech that offends the interest of the empowered groups finds a ready exception in First Amendment law….


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

We were at the home of my cousin Vinnie, who used to ride his big wheel up and down our driveway. No longer a small child with curly black hair, he is now a captain in the Manchester police force. His brother, Peter, is a former marine, former fireman, and policeman now out on disability. They talked about affirmative action in the police force, how standards had been lowered three times to hit the quota, and how that wasn’t fair. They talked about immigration and how everyone has to sacrifice for those who don’t want to work (never mind that we were a family of immigrants from Italy and the Philippines). My parents live in Florida, voted for Clinton, then switched to Trump after Obamacare raised the prices of their medicines.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, older professors habitually protected younger students and colleagues from police investigation.31 Ties of family, loyalty, and academic influence often proved stronger, at least behind the scenes, than fear of the party or the secret police. But the proletarianization of the student body was, for the communist parties, far more important. Bourgeois professors would die out eventually, and then they could be replaced by eager members of the working classes. In Polish, the term for this wave of academic affirmative action was awans społeczyny, a rather ugly bureaucratic phrase that translates, more or less, as “social advance.” The term took on enormous significance over time, referring both to a policy—the rapid promotion of peasants’ and workers’ children into higher education—as well as to the “socially advanced” class that emerged as a result.

One former Polish schoolteacher, though not a communist himself, spent the first part of his career teaching adult literacy classes to refugees from Ukraine and marveled at the impact: “They became different people.” Participating in the campaign helped convince him that the party, though it made mistakes, ultimately meant well.34 But the mere teaching of reading and writing would not by itself create a new elite. Across the bloc, other forms of more aggressive affirmative action were also put in place. The children of workers and peasants had privileged access to university places, training programs, jobs, and promotions. In East Germany, education bureaucrats actively recruited workers and peasants to join special courses designed to move them quickly up the ladder.


pages: 801 words: 229,742

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, David Brooks, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, invisible hand, low interest rates, oil shock, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Congress. Unlike virtually every other country, Israel is largely immune from criticism on Capitol Hill. This situation is remarkable by itself, because Congress frequently deals with contentious issues and competing viewpoints are usually easy to find. Whether the issue is abortion, arms control, affirmative action, gay rights, the environment, trade policy, health care, immigration, or welfare, there is almost always a lively debate on Capitol Hill. But where Israel is concerned, potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all. The absence of serious deliberation when Israel is involved was revealed in a hearing on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process held on February 14, 2007, by the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia in the House of Representatives.

In the Perlmutters’words, “Today the interest of Jews are not so much threatened by their familiar nemesis, crude anti-Semitism, as by a-Semitic governmental policies, the proponents of which may be free of anti-Semitism.” These policies include “thirst of Western economies for recycled petrodollars,” neo-isolationism, and compensatory group rights (such as affirmative action), among others. And in their view, “Jews today face greater jeopardy from quarters which though innocent of bigotry, nonetheless pose us greater danger than do our long time, easily recognizable anti-Semitic nemeses. Unchallenged and unchecked, these issues in surface appearance Semitically neutral, can hurt Jews and resisted as need be, can loose once again classical anti-Semitism.”


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

Competition for a smaller number of admission slots, not growing income inequality, has driven increased preparation. Attending college is like running a marathon. It doesn’t matter much which marathon you enter. What matters is your time. Work by Princeton economist Alan Krueger finds that, except for the most disadvantaged students—that is, students who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action—students with the same test scores and other characteristics who graduate with a lower class ranking from a top college and those who graduate with a higher ranking from a less prestigious college achieve the same career success.43 Enrollment at less prestigious colleges has expanded to meet the growing demand of students with all levels of capability.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

The same year, a U.S. chemical company challenged a Canadian ban on a gasoline additive and received $13 million in a settlement.13 Perhaps the most worrying case to date involves a suit brought against the South African government in 2007 by three Italian mining companies. The companies charge that South Africa’s affirmative action program, called Black Economic Empowerment, violates the rights provided to them under existing bilateral investment treaties. The program aims to reverse South Africa’s long history of racial discrimination and is an integral element in the country’s democratic transition. It requires that mining companies alter their employment practices and sell a minority share to black partners.


pages: 309 words: 95,644

On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) by William Zinsser

affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, feminist movement, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, popular capitalism, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman

The first President Bush, questioned about his stand on assault rifles, said: “There are various groups that think you can ban certain kinds of guns. I am not in that mode. I am in the mode of being deeply concerned.” But my all-time champ is Elliot Richardson, who held four major cabinet positions in the 1970s. It’s hard to know where to begin picking from his trove of equivocal statements, but consider this one: “And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success.” A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse, though a rival would be his analysis of how to ease boredom among assembly-line workers: “And so, at last, I come to the one firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.”


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

Prior to the mid-1980s, he would sound off to journalists on his favored topics of the Holocaust hoax, the genetic inferiority of the nonwhite races, and the person-from-history-I'd-most-like-to-have-dinner-with, Adolf Hitler. That stopped. It was replaced with calls for abolishing welfare and affirmative action. "1 was too intolerant," Duke told Larry King on his. show. "I thought the problem was with blacks instead of the welfare system." When challenged to recant his old positions, Duke did, more or less. At a Kiwanis Club forum, he was asked: Q. Do you believe blacks are genetically inferior to whites?


pages: 358 words: 95,115

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

Slater, Kang Lee, Liezhong Ge, and Olivier Pascalis, “The Other-Race Effect Develops During Infancy: Evidence of Perceptual Narrowing,” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 1084–1089 (2007). Kurlaendar, Michal, and John T. Yun, “Is Diversity a Compelling Educational Interest? Evidence From Louisville.” In: G. Orfield (Ed.), Diversity Challenged: Evidence in the Impact of Affirmative Action, pp. 111–141. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Publishing Group (2001). Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 551 U.S. ___ (2007). “Mission Statement,” Civil Rights Project web site (2007). http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/aboutus.php Moody, James, “Race, School Integration, and Friendship Segregation in America,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 679–716 (2001).


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

As a result, it is entirely possible that the similarity we see around us has less to do with our own psychological preferences than the restricted opportunities that the world presents to us.16 Resolving problems like this one is important because it has implications for how we go about dealing with controversial issues like racial segregation and affirmative action. Settling the matter with data, however, is extremely difficult because disentangling the various cause-and-effect relationships requires one to keep track of individuals, networks, and groups over extended intervals of time.17 And historically, that sort of data just hasn’t been available.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

When privatizing, care must be taken to sell the right enterprise at the right price to the right buyer, and to subject the enterprise to the right regulatory regime thereafter – if this is not done, privatization is not likely to work, even in industries that do not naturally favour state ownership. SOE performance can often be improved without privatization. One important thing to do is to review critically the goals of the enterprises and establish clear priorities among them. Very often, public enterprises are charged with serving too many goals – for example, social goals (e.g., affirmative action for women and minorities), employment generation and industrialization. There is nothing wrong with state-owned enterprises serving multiple goals, but what the goals are and the relative priority among them need to be made clear. The monitoring system can also be improved. In many countries, SOEs are monitored by multiple agencies, which means either that they are not meaningfully supervised by any particular agency or that there is a supervisory over-kill that disrupts daily management – for example, the state-owned Korean Electricity Company was reported to have undergone eight government inspections, lasting 108 days, in 1981 alone.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

They explained that displacement, impoverishment, Conclusion 157 unemployment, and environmental destruction are not worth a handful of high-tech jobs benefiting highly educated people. Cuemi Gibson’s response was typical: Virginia: If you had the ear of the mayor of Troy, what advice would you give him for developing a socially just Tech Valley? Cuemi: Put plants on the bus line! Provide education and training; provide fair employment. Affirmative action! Have some Black supervisors, female supervisors. Work with an open-door policy. Be fair in what hours people work. Have a day care center. Try to have stress-free environment. Provide employee assistance, like rehab and counseling for long-term employees. [Z]ero tolerance for racism and sexism.


Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

affirmative action, back-to-the-land, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, East Village, Howard Zinn, Lao Tzu, rent control, Telecommunications Act of 1996, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city

As a kid born on March 1, 1982, I grew up in the excess of the Brat Pack–Madonna–Joe Montana–Michael Jackson eighties and the NWA–MJ–Nirvana–World Wide Web nineties, and we saw the residual battles from seminal cases like Roe v. Wade or Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The issues I remember were global warming, gun control, music file sharing, cocaine versus crack sentencing guidelines, C. Delores Tucker versus Hip-Hop, affirmative action, abortion, and United States v. Microsoft. Besides the Rodney King incident and the 1992 L.A. riots, there really wasn’t anything that warranted stopping the Knicks’ game besides O.J. That is, until 9/11. I remember that day. I was sitting in a chair waiting for social problems class to start.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

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

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

What he wanted, and what he had spent a long time earning the chance to call for, was a reining in of the power of people like them. He wanted them to pay higher taxes. He wanted them to give up their legacy preferences at the leading universities. He said, “All my friends who want to talk about education, you say, ‘Let’s talk about legacy programs. Do we really think legacy preferences, when we’re getting rid of affirmative action—shouldn’t we be getting rid of legacy?’ Oh, hell no. People will be like, ‘Oh, absolutely not.’ ” What might have worried his critics the most was Walker’s view that moneymaking had to change. It was one thing to say that rich people needed to pay higher taxes and stop sneaking their children into Harvard; it was another to suggest, as he now did, that the very industry he was about to visit was predatory.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

When privatizing, care must be taken to sell the right enterprise at the right price to the right buyer, and to subject the enterprise to the right regulatory regime thereafter – if this is not done, privatization is not likely to work, even in industries that do not naturally favour state ownership. SOE performance can often be improved without privatization. One important thing to do is to review critically the goals of the enterprises and establish clear priorities among them. Very often, public enterprises are charged with serving too many goals – for example, social goals (e.g., affirmative action for women and minorities), employment generation and industrialization. There is nothing wrong with state-owned enterprises serving multiple goals, but what the goals are and the relative priority among them need to be made clear. The monitoring system can also be improved. In many countries, SOEs are monitored by multiple agencies, which means either that they are not meaningfully supervised by any particular agency or that there is a supervisory over-kill that disrupts daily management – for example, the state-owned Korean Electricity Company was reported to have undergone eight government inspections, lasting 108 days, in 1981 alone.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

The three researchers assembled participants from two quite different cities: Boulder, Colorado, where people often lean to the left (it’s known jokingly as “The People’s Republic of Boulder”) and Colorado Springs, which is well known as a conservative stronghold. Participants were privately asked their views on three politically heated topics: climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex partnerships. Then they were put into groups with others from their town, and asked to discuss the issues as a group.14 Before these discussions, as one might expect, the people from Boulder tended to espouse left-wing views while the citizens of Colorado Springs tended to favor the views of the right.


pages: 362 words: 99,063

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

■ INTRODUCTION 1 Robinson, accessed March 28, 2010. 2 Murray, locations 986–987 on Kindle edition. 3 Cherry, accessed December 19, 2010. 4 See Gladwell’s discussion, in Outliers, of the Michigan Law School study, which found that minority students—despite being admitted with lower grades and test scores, as a part of affirmative action, and despite earning lower grades in law school—went on to have law careers every bit as successful as their white peers. (Kindle edition, locations 1050–1059.) “Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ,” Gladwell concludes, to explain the findings of the study. (Kindle edition, locations 1105–1114.) 5 I want to make clear that while I think certain of Gladwell’s points in his book support the basic message of my book, I doubt he himself would agree with much in my book overall.


pages: 333 words: 99,545

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

Labour has gone much further than the other parties to get more women into politics, and introduced all-women shortlists (AWS) for some selections in order to force an increase in the number of female MPs. In the 1992 election, it compelled all selections to include at least one woman. Harriet Harman insists that these affirmative-action measures were the only option left after the party had tried everything else, and 50 per cent of women elected to Parliament have been chosen using an AWS. Prominent Labour women selected in this manner include Jacqui Smith, Rachel Reeves, Emily Thornberry and Stella Creasy. When the party dropped the policy for the 2001 election, just four new Labour women were elected, while 30 men managed to get in.


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

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

These were the white Democrats who supported school busing but sent their own kids to majority-white private schools, or who professed to care about the inner city but lived in gated communities. “The Dems always treat blacks like children,” Bannon said on one call. “They put them in projects…give them welfare…affirmative action…send white kids to hand out food in Africa. But Dems are always afraid to ask the question: Why do those people need so much babysitting?” What he meant was that white Democrats revealed their prejudices against minorities without realizing it. He posited that although these Democrats think that they like African Americans, they do not respect African Americans, and that many Democratic policies stemmed from an implicit acknowledgment that those people cannot help themselves.


Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, company town, congestion charging, Edward Glaeser, invisible hand, market clearing, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Economic Geography, profit maximization, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, urban sprawl

Equal outcomes, however, mean unequal opportunities, since more police must be allocated to the poor neighborhood to equalize crime. Conversely, equal opportunities yield unequal outcomes, since an equal division of the police leads to more crime in the poor neighborhood. The choice between equal opportunities and equal outcomes is often faced in discussions of public policy. For example, affirmative-action rules, which give minority job applicants an advantage in hiring, represent an attempt to generate equal outcomes via unequal opportunities. Liberals and conservatives have argued for decades about whether society should attempt to offer equal outcomes or equal opportunities (with liberals tending to favor the former), but there is no right answer in this debate.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.4 An outside observer watching the way YC went about selecting the teams for the summer 2011 batch would not see any evidence that female entrepreneurs enjoyed a special advantage nor were they openly devalued for being female. Paul Graham and the other partners with technical backgrounds were ideologically committed to a gender- and race-blind view of merit. Yin Yin Wu was a standout hacker, period. She did not come in under an affirmative action initiative. (Wu’s relatively late start in hacking showed that there were side paths—albeit unusual ones, like computational chemistry—that could lead women into computer science after middle school.) Graham says that, at the seed stage, investors are backing the founders more than the ideas, and he believes women are generally better judges of character than men.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

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

In a follow-up study, Craig and Richeson handed some white subjects newspaper articles about geographic mobility, while others read a piece explaining that “ethnic/racial minorities will comprise a majority of the U.S. populace by 2042.” The group that read the racially tinged release shifted toward more conservative views not just on directly related policy questions—like immigration levels, affirmative actions, and paths to citizenship—but on health-care reform and defense spending.I13 Perhaps the most striking experiment in this space was conducted by Harvard social scientist Ryan Enos. He attempted something rare in social science: an actual test of what seeing more diversity in our everyday surroundings does to our political opinions.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

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

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

“It is beyond disturbing to learn”: John Herrman and Mike Isaac, “Conservatives Accuse Facebook of Political Bias,” New York Times, May 9, 2016. 6. rumored to be on a short list for a cabinet position: Zachary Warmbrodt, Ben White, and Tony Romm, “Liberals Wary as Facebook’s Sandberg Eyed for Treasury,” Politico, October 23, 2016. 7. On May 18, sixteen prominent conservative: Mike Isaac and Nick Corasaniti, “For Facebook and Conservatives, a Collegial Meeting in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, May 18, 2016. 8. Beck later wrote on his blog: Brianna Gurciullo, “Glen Beck on Facebook Meeting: ‘It Was Like Affirmative Action for Conservatives,’” Politico, May 19, 2016. 9. Beck had falsely accused a Saudi national: Daniel Arkin, “Boston Marathon Bombing Victim Sues Glenn Beck for Defamation,” NBC News website, April 1, 2014. 10. “We connect people”: Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel and Alex Kantrowitz, “Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned that Facebook Could Get People Killed,” Buzzfeed News, March 29, 2018. 11.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

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

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

They would serve as a so-called blocking coalition, ensuring that, so long as he was pursuing peace, Rabin’s government wouldn’t fall.* Equally important, he would treat them like partners. And he did. Between 1992 and 1995, government spending on infrastructure, education, health care, and affirmative action programs for Israel’s Arab citizens increased exponentially. For the first time, the Arab parties wielded real power: when they insisted that the government abandon plans to confiscate Palestinian-owned land in Jerusalem to build a new police station, Rabin called an emergency cabinet meeting and announced that he would halt the move.


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

* * * Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but worldwide. In 1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.27 A huge 2008 survey by the World Public Opinion poll of twenty-one developed and developing nations found that in every one, large majorities of respondents (around 90 percent on average) say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and religions to be treated equally.28 Notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant.

Because of changes in definitions and coding criteria, those data are not commensurable with the series plotted here in figure 15-4. 25. Cooperation breeds sympathy: Pinker 2011, chaps. 4, 7, 9, 10. 26. Justification as a force for moral progress: Pinker 2011, chap. 4; Appiah 2010; Hunt 2007; Mueller 2010b; Nadelmann 1990; Payne 2004; Shermer 2015. 27. Decline of discrimination, rise of affirmative action: Asal & Pate 2005. 28. World Public Opinion Poll: Presented in Council on Foreign Relations 2011. 29. Council on Foreign Relations 2011. 30. Council on Foreign Relations 2011. 31. Effectiveness of global shaming campaigns: Pinker 2011, pp. 272–76, 414; Appiah 2010; Mueller 1989, 2004, 2010b; Nadelmann 1990; Payne 2004; Ray 1989. 32.


pages: 326 words: 29,543

The Docks by Bill Sharpsteen

affirmative action, anti-communist, big-box store, collective bargaining, Google Earth, independent contractor, intermodal, inventory management, jitney, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, new economy, Panamax, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, women in the workforce

Her anger fueled her, kept her strong. “I had other things in mind that I wanted to be doing. [But] I had to be here and now for this thing. And to be threatened at the same time. So by then I was hot.” And yet incredibly, in the end, Williams tells me without a hint of irony, “This has been the most successful affirmative action program in the country. Ever.” As for the Golden Consent Decree, Judge Takasugi ruled in 1999 that his 1983 court order had done its job. Women were now a permanent part of the waterfront workforce. Williams agrees. Now a ship planner, working in an office before a computer for the most part, she says women have been largely accepted at the docks.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

Emphasizing markers, distinctions, and borders in the enlarged EU is unlikely to produce personal gains. This is not to say that they do not remain salient and influential, only that using them is not a good game plan. Saying you are Welsh or Latvian or Slovene is unlikely to impress anyone in a Europe become more knowledgeable about itself. There are no affirmative action considerations to speak of and it is the marketplace that determines one’s place in the enlarged community. As one esoteric example, Latvia has become a favorite destination for people from England because they can throw cheap stag and hen parties there—not because they are Latviaphiles. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, such travel, it is sometimes said that old Europe still knows little about its new counterpart while eastern Europeans for many reasons have had to learn about the advanced western states.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

It is also necessary for those responsible for the world’s algorithmic infrastructure to engender a dedication in algorithm designers to eliminate obvious biases, whether they are human designed (e.g. the omission of women’s health issues in medical apps) or data driven (e.g. the failure of image recognition systems to detect people of colour). Those writing the algorithms that influence our lives will also need to invest in straightforward technology that attempts to overcome biases, for instance by adding ‘algorithmic affirmative action’ that explicitly checks for discrimination against underrepresented groups, particularly in critical decisions in public services, finance, jurisprudence and the like. However, these straightforward steps aren’t likely to be enough. Algorithms that act without human intervention are most likely a permanent part of our global infrastructure.


Dear Fatty by Dawn French

affirmative action, British Empire, carbon footprint, clockwatching, Desert Island Discs, upwardly mobile

That was the first of many times I saw a glimpse of that stubborn chap who lives inside you and is, I suspect, constantly screaming ‘For fuck’s sake, hurry up, catch up and get it, then just say yes, then you’ll see, you cretin!’ inside your head. Am I right? You ran out of patience with me and my procrastination quite quickly and sent me a list of other, more talented and available actresses including Miriam Margolyes, Alison Steadman and Julie Walters. That certainly jolted me into affirmative action. Thank God I said yes, because honestly, making that series for the next 13 years with you was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. For me, coming to work with you every day was the ultimate lure. I suspected it would be fascinating to watch you sculpt the scripts with Paul, at close hand. I suspected I would learn a lot about teamwork and tolerance and keeping an open mind.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

A few days later, Mercer sent Magerman a book called Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? written in 1984 by Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell that the New York Times had called “brutally frank, perceptive, and important.” The book argues that minorities began moving into higher-paying jobs in large numbers years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and that affirmative action had caused the most disadvantaged segments of the minority population to fall behind their white counterparts.5 Sowell’s argument “focuses on narrow financial measures, but ignores overall human factors,” Magerman says, citing one of many criticisms he and others have of the book. Magerman was unsettled by the conversation with Mercer.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advocated and implemented, first in the areas that it controlled in the 1920s–1930s, and then after its victory in 1949 throughout China, a comprehensive land reform, the abolition of quasi-feudal relations in rural areas, and a weakening of clan-based social relations, which were replaced by a more modern nuclear family structure and gender equality. It also promoted widespread literacy and education with “affirmative action” in education and employment in favor of children from peasant and workers’ families. This was no less than a complete overturning of historical hierarchical relationships.17 It all went together with the rejection of Confucianism, which, through its emphasis on filial piety, unquestioning respect of authority, and meekness, permitted such iniquitous structures to endure for centuries.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

They tend to build tools “for all” that continue, extend, and reify the inequities they overlook. What would happen if social media platforms promised that for the next decade, all of their new hires, 100 percent, would be women, queer people, or people of color? Sounds like an outrageous exercise in affirmative action and social engineering? It sure is. Slight improvements in workplace diversity aren’t going to make the difference; we’ve seen what corrosive environments some of these companies can be for those who do show up. But I suggest this not only for the benefit of the new employees but for the benefit of the platform and its users.


pages: 404 words: 110,290

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

If not for Britain and her allies we would today be living under a different world order, led by German Nazis. Ours is not a nationalism of blood and race. I could live for decades in Turkey, China, Nigeria or Japan, but I would never be accepted as Turkish, Chinese, Nigerian or Japanese. In ‘moderate Muslim’ Malaysia, the law contains a ‘sons of the soil’ affirmative action policy, favouring native Malays over members of other ethnic groups, even if these arrived centuries ago. In Britain, by contrast, newcomers can become British. Here they can become lawmakers, cultural icons, corporate leaders and scientific innovators. Here, they can thrive. How did Britain become this special place?


pages: 370 words: 111,129

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

Under a political compromise, known as the Poona Pact, that year separate electorates for the Depressed Classes were abandoned but additional seats were reserved for them in the provincial and central legislatures—an increase from 71 to 147 in the former and to 18 per cent of the Central Legislature. (Interestingly enough, the leader of the Dalits who clashed with Gandhi over the issue, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, went on to serve after Independence as chairman of the Drafting Committee for India’s Constitution, and ensured that his country would have the world’s first and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme for his community. Though separate electorates were dropped for good, 85 seats in independent India’s 543-seat lower house were reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, as were a quota of places in government service and universities—guaranteeing not just opportunities but assured outcomes.)


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

At the time, the threshold was set on a sliding scale according to the number of senators voting, so senators who did not vote lowered the threshold. 20.Ibid. 222. 21.Proposed Amendments to Rule XXII. 292. 22.Caro, Robert. Master of the Senate. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. 90. 23.See, e.g., Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 24.McIntosh, Kriston; Moss, Emily; Nunn, Ryan; and Shambaugh, Jay. “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap.” Brookings Institution. February 27, 2020. 25.Fite, Gilbert C. Richard B. Russell, Jr., Senator from Georgia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 226–31. 26.Lawrence, W.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

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

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

News stories abounded about incidents like one at Sarah Lawrence college: when a professor wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that college administrators lacked ideological diversity, students mobilized to demand his firing (euphemized as “tenure review”), saying his presence on campus threatened their “safety and well-being.” A professor I met, who taught sociology at a university widely regarded as conservative-leaning, told me, “Everyone is ‘careful’ on campus these days. Including me: I have not and will not discuss my research on affirmative action and diversity outside my own classroom.” At one private university, a young neurobiologist told me she had dropped a module on autism from her course on brain development. A student had complained that the module might be interpreted as demeaning to the autistic. Her dean had dismissed the complaint, she told me.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

The history of migration teaches that not only immigrants but also their descendants confront social inequalities (limited professional Germany opportunities, negative stigmatization). It takes time—sometimes up to the fourth or fifth generation—in order for these negative consequences to vanish. However, the public debate on the introduction of affirmative action, a decidedly controversial measure aimed to create equal opportunities, is still in its infancy in Germany. The question if an implementation of such measures for certain sectors could make sense in Germany and has yet to be widely discussed. Even the antidiscrimination law that passed in 2006 does not play a decisive role in the National Integration Plan (Nationaler Integrationsplan).

While many critics expected the new center-right government to abandon what is called in France ‘‘the fight against discrimination’’ (la lutte contre les discriminations) this turned out not to be the case. Instead, the center-right government set up the High Authority for the Fight against Discrimination (HALDE) as required by the European directives. In addition, Nicolas Sarkozy turned out to be open toward measures of affirmative action as well as other measures to increase diversity and repeatedly started a national debate on the issue, which many French consider to be in complete contradiction with the republican ideals. A few years earlier, a heated academic debate between Michèle Tribalat and Hervé le Bras, the first in favor of and the latter against the introduction of ethnic categories to the French census, showed just how emotive the subject of the public recognition of ethnic difference in France really is.


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

On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair. This basic disagreement animated virtually every major political controversy in America, from immigration to health care to welfare reform.


pages: 338 words: 112,127

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

This man and I are far apart on pretty much everything else (he tells me later that women are genetically disabled in terms of our spatial relations, especially at night, a disability responsible for as many traffic accidents as alcohol; when I ask him politely why, if this is so, women have successfully landed the space shuttle—the most difficult feat any pilot or astronaut can face—including twice at night, he answers, “affirmative action”), but we have spaceflight in common, and so today we share binoculars, information, and snacks. We look off agreeably into the sky together, and our companionship today, the companionship of many unexpected groupings and pairings like this one, is one of those things the space program has given us that is hard to put a value on.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

The counterfactual, in which education continued to be a private affair after 1870, but with the state providing grants to those who could least afford the fees, would almost certainly have continued to provide an expanding and evolving education system, in which innovation and competition produced a curriculum and standards that improved just as fast as they actually did, perhaps much faster. Instead, the myth grew up that the British state stepped in where there was no education and caused the education of succeeding generations. Such a system might well have avoided the recent deterioration of standards in state education, which has led to ever more desperate calls for affirmative action so that children from state schools can get into the best universities. Private schools disproportionately supply the best candidates for Oxford and Cambridge, a state of affairs that either indicates that the rich are innately cleverer than the poor, which seems generally unlikely, or that private schools are providing a better education, which is a shocking indictment of the quality of state education.


pages: 395 words: 114,583

Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith

A Pattern Language, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, carbon footprint, food miles, Higgs boson, Sloane Ranger

From his position on the pavement, seated at the feet of a human being whom he had only just met but instinctively liked, Freddie de la Hay, Pimlico terrier, sniffed at the air. He had a very good nose—a trained nose, in fact, because before he had been acquired by the opinionated columnist Manfred James, he had been employed as a sniffer dog at Heathrow Airport. He had been good at his job, but had been dismissed as part of an affirmative action programme when it had been discovered that all the dogs at the airport were male. After this matter had been raised by a local politician, it was announced that there would be a policy of equal opportunity for female sniffer dogs—an absurd notion that had provoked outraged rants in those newspapers given to such things.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Nor, as Jack Grubman surmised, would making a well-directed contribution. The competitive nursery school phenomenon is a New York singularity that is difficult for normal folk to fathom. Many of those parents fiercely competing for spots for their children are simultaneously pushing for diversity, affirmative action, and social equality on many fronts; it’s just that the public school down the street is not one of them. We have had friends implore us to donate to school fund-raisers they were sponsoring so that they could demonstrate their worth as a valuable asset for the “parent body”—the first time I had heard that term. 131 ccc_demon_125-142_ch07.qxd 2/13/07 A DEMON 1:46 PM OF Page 132 OUR OWN DESIGN These nursery schools are also a feeder for the next rung up the New York private school ladder, which also wrangles the affluent parent body.


pages: 382 words: 116,351

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

I had to laugh thinking how Kelly would have reacted not only to the security headaches but to the exasperating management regulations that never existed in his day. I might be cleared for top secret, but I was also on a government contract and that meant conforming to all sorts of mandatory guidelines and stiff regulations. Kelly had operated in a paradise of innocence, long before EPA, OSHA, EEOC, or affirmative action and minority hiring policies became the laws of our land. I was forced by law to buy two percent of my materials from minority or disadvantaged businesses, but many of them couldn’t meet my security requirements. I also had to address EEOC requirements on equal employment opportunity and comply with other laws that required hiring a certain number of the disabled.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

If we look at statistics and discover that Warmlander firms have few Coldians in senior positions, this may result not from racist discrimination, but from good judgement. Should Coldian immigrants feel resentment at this situation, and claim that Warmland is reneging on the immigration deal? Should we force Warmlander firms to hire more Coldian managers through ‘affirmative action’ laws, in the hope of cooling down Warmland’s hot-tempered business culture? Or perhaps the fault lies with Coldian immigrants failing to assimilate into the local culture, and we should therefore make a greater and more forceful effort to inculcate in Coldian children Warmlander norms and values?


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Laws passed throughout the developed world since the pathbreaking civil rights legislation in the United States have increasingly required both public and private sector employers and civic institutions to ensure members of a range of social groups are not disadvantaged. The ebb and flow of the heated debate over affirmative action and the “political correctness” wars are testament to how divisive these laws are in fact. Again, liberal-minded people would prefer not to acknowledge that there is real opposition to mandatory diversity of this kind, but it certainly exists. Thomas Frank argues that the left’s failure to take cultural concerns of a large group of Americans seriously led them to repeated electoral defeats, at least until Barack Obama’s election as president in November 2008.35 The weight this should be given in explaining the pattern of election results is debatable, given the range of other factors at play.


pages: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

affirmative action, call centre, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, information security, John Markoff, Menlo Park, old-boy network, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable

It was an all-day feed, starting with fresh oysters from the San Francisco wharf, moving on leisurely to Martha’s wild mushroom soup, then the goose. Then we lay around like beached whales until we worked up the energy to take a short walk. Over pie and herbal tea, the talk turned to law, and Martha’s friend Vicky held forth on environmental regulation while a couple of professors argued over affirmative action. Finally, too full and contented for intelligent conversation, we lay in front of the fire and roasted chestnuts. Vicky and Claudia played piano duets; Laurie sang a ballad, and I thought about planets and galaxies. Worries about computer networks and spies seemed unreal in this warm world of friends, food, and music.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

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

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

For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan—very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts—that Democrats were proposing. Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency. It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson—whom Mr.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Nationalist political economy: Timothy Snyder, “Soviet Industrial Concentration,” in John Williamson, ed., The Economic Consequences of Soviet Disintegration (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1993), 176–243. Within the Soviet Union The locus classicus on the national question within the USSR is Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001). Invaluable on the relationship between 1989 and 1991 is Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 2003; vol. 6, no. 4, 2004; vol. 7, no. 1, 2005.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

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

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

To help identify and deter such manipulation, both social networks and search engines should crack down on manipulative bots. If they fail to do so, laws should require every account to disclose whether it is operated by a person or a machine. All users should be able to block bot accounts as part of their user settings—or better, such settings should default to blocking bots, with affirmative action required to open a user’s feed to their automated emissions. Some technophiles worry that such restrictions could interfere with free expression. But a purely automated source of information and manipulation, with no humans directly taking responsibility for it, should not enjoy such rights.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

An employee may disclose their disability: in application form; at the interview stage; when they first start in their role; during their employment; when they receive a diagnosis. What is positive action? ‘Positive action’ means the steps that an employer can take to encourage people from groups with different needs or with a past track record of disadvantage or low participation to apply for jobs. Reverse or affirmative action is illegal in the UK. Putting something in place The Code of Practice (6.19) in the UK advises that, for the purposes of making reasonable adjustments ‘the employer must, however, do all they can reasonably be expected to do to find out whether [a worker is disabled and subject to a substantial disadvantage]’.8 What is reasonable will depend on the circumstances.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Stanworth, P. and Giddens, A. (1974) Elites and power in British society, 8, Cambridge University Press Archive (http://books. google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Syg4AAAAIAAJ&oi=f nd&pg=PR7&dq=Stanworth+and+Giddens,+1974%3B&o ts=4hIfX8nZvS&sig=2pdEVgm8oGgapvHOczsZoISS_hQ). Steinbugler, A.C., Press, J.E. and Johnson Dias, J. (2006) ‘Gender, race, and affirmative action: Operationalizing intersectionality in survey research’, Gender & Society, 20(6), 805-25 (https:// doi.org/10.1177/0891243206293299). Steinmetz, G. (2006) ‘Bourdieu’s disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic theory and the concepts of “habitus” and “symbolic capital”’, Constellations, 13(4), 445-64 (https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2006.00415.x).


pages: 398 words: 112,350

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy

affirmative action, Charles Lindbergh, company town, desegregation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, market bubble, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, New Journalism, strikebreaker, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Barnes Dies,” Around the White Tops (Circus Fans of America publication), September 1931; on file at Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI. “his zest for life”: “Al G. Barnes Dies; Noted Circus Man,” New York Times, July 25, 1931. George and Willie feigned servitude: Stanley Elkins’s views were influential during the development of affirmative-action programs designed to counteract the lingering effects of slavery on black culture; Quarles, Negro in the Making of America, 74–75, and Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). frustration behind a façade of happiness: Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896).


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

This is the one area where politicians often have the edge over the corporate community. It’s very difficult to craft advertising language that touches people at the most fundamental, primal level, by speaking to their deepest hopes, fears, and dreams. Not many products or services have an impact as serious and significant as abortion, affirmative action, immigration, taxation, and the other topics most often addressed by political figures. The key to successful aspirational language for products or politics is to personalize and humanize the message to trigger an emotional remembrance. As Warren Beatty, perhaps the best student of the human condition in Hollywood, once told me, people will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel.


pages: 347 words: 123,884

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism by Temple Grandin, Sean Barron

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, fundamental attribution error, index card, Mars Rover, neurotypical, theory of mind

Unfortunately, today, that environment has changed, which places an even greater responsibility on parents and educators to artificially create a new environment that meets the needs of children with the social, sensory, language and perception impairments that are characteristic of autism-related disorders. While affirmative action and special education laws have been instrumental in bringing needed services to people with disabilities, the flip side is that it has also fostered a “handicapped mentality” in some really brilliant people. They feel “entitled” to assistance and are increasingly blaming their success or failure on the world at large, rather than taking personal responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions.


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

These grow larger over time, as the children of the rich, living in rich enclaves, get a better education than the one received by those attending schools in poorer areas. Economic segregation has become the order of the day, so much so that even those well-off and well-intentioned selective colleges that instituted programs of economic affirmative action—explicitly trying to increase the fraction of their student body from lower socioeconomic groups—have struggled to do so. The children of the poor can afford neither the advanced degrees that are increasingly required for employment nor the unpaid internships that provide the alternative route to “good” jobs.


pages: 394 words: 124,743

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

He liked to compare his style to that of the patient in a dentist's chair who grabs the dentist by the genitals and says, "Now, let's not hurt each other." His sense of humor extended to himself. "I get it," he said one day early in his tenure, as the team was filling with Wall Street veterans, "I'm affirmative action." Like me, Ron was used to running his own show. Yet I liked him and we had a lot in common. We'd both been through many restructurings. Like me, he was soft-spoken and fact-based. We shared a firm capitalist perspective: companies had to be viable, and saving loss-makers was pointless. And we agreed on another key issue that Ron raised.


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

I’m the person that is supposed to drink. I’m the person that is supposed to smoke weed. I’m the motherfucker that is supposed to fill your jails. I’m the person that you make examples to your kid of what not to be like. I’m supposed to be a basketball player. I’m supposed to make it only because of affirmative action. I’m not supposed to be positive. I’m not supposed to be educated. I’m not supposed to know what I know. But I do.39 When we home in only on the dark side of areas of concentrated poverty, we fail to appreciate what a life lived there is really like. Most descriptions of our early slums and of poor neighborhoods since then have been through the eyes of the middle-class observers who have focused on the worst in them.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Birch, Job Creation in America: How Our Smallest Companies Put the Most People to Work (New York: Free Press, 1987), https://ssrn.com/​abstract=1496185. anachronisms but veritable job generation machines For an eye-opening look at the rise of the small business myth, see Jonathan J. Bean, Big Government and Affirmative Action: The Scandalous History of the Small Business Administration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). Start-ups, by his reckoning Tim J. Kane, “The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction,” Kauffman Foundation Research Series: Firm Formation and Economic Growth, 2010, http://dx.doi.org/​doi:10.2139/​ssrn.1646934.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The most expansive and controversial of all such efforts is the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).64 The CRA was created to respond to banks fleeing from low-income neighborhoods, a process labeled “redlining,” or drawing a literal or figurative line around geographic areas and refusing to lend there either because of profitability concerns or racial discrimination.65 The CRA responds to this phenomenon much the same way that affirmative action laws respond to discrimination: it imposes duties on banks to lend to underserved communities even while recognizing the economic barriers involved.66 This law is the very embodiment of the tension at the heart of the banking industry. The CRA’s genesis, application, and vilification are where banking past meets banking present—where the public nature of banks is asserted and then rejected.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

., ‘Stereotyped Identification: How Identifying with Fictional Latina Characters Increases Acceptance and Stereotyping’, Mass Communication and Society 21 (2018), 585–605. 14. S. Ramasubramanian, ‘Television Viewing, Racial Attitudes, and Policy Preferences: Exploring the Role of Social Identity and Intergroup Emotions in Influencing Support for Affirmative Action’, Communication Monographs 77 (2010), 102–20. 15. P. E. Baker, Negro–White Adjustment, New York: Association Press, 1934; H. A. Lett, Techniques for Achieving Interracial Cooperation, Proceedings of the Institute on Race Relations and Community Organization, Chicago: University of Chicago and the American Council on Race Relations, 1945. 16.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

The latter saw a decline of 36 percent in the last thirty years, from 1,305 injuries per 100,000 people in 1990 to 835 per 100,000 people in 2019, the latest year for which numbers are available.29 It was wrong that the federal government channeled black families into rental apartments and white people into subsidized homeownership after World War II, but few argue that racism increased since then, and on many measures it declined significantly in the period that addiction worsened. The 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated desegregation by institutions that received federal money. In 1968 the Fair Housing Act closed loopholes on discriminatory lending. And governments, universities, and firms have used affirmative action programs to promote people of color to positions of power within organizations since 1965. America’s social safety net has expanded dramatically over the last half century. New programs included Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program (1972); the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program (1972); Pell Grants (1972); the Earned Income Tax Credit (1975); the child support program (1975); Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (1981); Children’s Health Insurance Program (1997); Medicare Part D subsidy for low-income Americans (2003); and the Affordable Care Act (2010).


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

In the seventies, with liberal justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall in the lead, the Court had declared death penalties unconstitutional, had supported (in Roe v. Wade) the right of women to choose abortions, and had interpreted the civil rights law as permitting special attention to blacks and women to make up for past discrimination (affirmative action). William Rehnquist, first named to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was made Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan. In the Reagan-Bush years, the Rehnquist Court made a series of decisions that weakened Roe v. Wade, brought back the death penalty, reduced the rights of detainees against police powers, prevented doctors in federally supported family planning clinics from giving women information on abortions, and said that poor people could be forced to pay for public education (education was not “a fundamental right”).

abolitionists, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 155, 181–90 passim abortion, 574 Abrams, Elliot, 586, 590 Acheson, Dean, 438 activism, after 1960s, 565 Adamic, Louis, 399–400 Adams, Henry, 258–59 Adams, John, 67, 68, 70, 77, 100, 109, 110 Adams, Mrs. John (Abigail), 109–10 Adams, John Quincy, 130, 132, 153 Adams, Samuel, 60, 61, 66, 93, 95 affirmative action, 574 Afghanistan, 572, 604–05, 659, 678–81 Africa, 363, 429–30 black civilization and culture, 26–27, 28 economic importance, 569 slavery and slave trade, 26, 27–28, 32 African National Congress, 608 Agency for International Development (AID), 569, 658 Agnew, Spiro, 544, 545 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 393, 397 Alabama, Indians in, 127, 128, 133, 136, 137, 141–43 Albright, Madeleine, 659, 666 Aldrich, Nelson W., 351 Allan, Robert, 291 Allen, Ethan, 63 Allen, Robert, 465 Allende, Salvadore, 548, 554 Alliance for Progress, 438 Alperovitz, Gar, 423 Al Qaeda, 678 alternative media, 624–25 American Anti-Slavery Society, 119, 155 American Civil Liberties Union, 436 American colonies, 12–17, 21, 23–25, 29–58 banking and finance, 70, 90, 91–92, 93, 97 business and industry, 48, 49, 51, 52, 65, 84 children, 43, 44, 49, 55 indentured servants 42–47, 23, 25, 32, 37, 42–47 slavery, 23, 27–38 passim, 43, 46, 49, 11, 53–58 passim, 72, 103, 105–06 rebellions, 32–38 passim, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 72 taxation, 39, 40, 41, 48, 52, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 109 women, 43, 44, 49, 72, 73, 102, 104–11 passim see also Revolutionary War American Federation of Labor (AFL), 251, 269, 306, 307, 328–30, 335, 352, 377, 380, 381, 385, 399, 401, 417 American Indian Movement (AIM), 534 American Revolution, see Revolutionary War American Tobacco Company, 254, 260, 310 American with Disabilities Act, 629 Ames, Oakes, 255 Amherst, Jeffrey, 87 Anderson, John, 611 Angola, 618 Anthony, Susan, 342–43 Anti-Imperialist League, 311, 314–15, 317 antinuclear movement, 601–05 passim Aptheker, Herbert, 36, 174, 176, 194, 209 Arab-Americans, 600, 680 Arawak Indians, 1–7 passim, 9, 10, 11 Armour, Philip, 255 Armour and Company, 309 Aspin, Les, 584, 652 Astor, John Jacob, 305 Astor family, 238, 242 Atlantic Charter, 412 Attica prison riot, 520–21, 523 Attucks, Crispus, 67 Avillo, Philip, 621–22 Aziz, Tariq, 596 Aztecs, 11–12 Bacon, Nathaniel, 39, 40–41 Bacon, Robert, 351 Bacon’s Rebellion, 37, 39–42, 45, 54, 55, 59 Badillo, Herman, 566 Baez, Joan, 537 Bagley, William, 263 Bailyn, Bernard, 101 Baker, Ella, 404 Baker, James, 596 Baker, Polly, 107 Baldwin, Hanson, 422 Baldwin, Samuel, 52 Ball, George, 561 Ballard, Martha Moore, 111 Baltimore, Lord, 84 Baltimore (Md.), 88, 222–23, 245, 246 Bancroft, George, 90 banking and economy, 101, 130, 189, 206, 224, 238, 242, 254–58 passim, 277, 284, 287 Colonial era; 70, 90, 91–92, 93, 97 crises and depressions, 224, 225, 242–43, 260, 277–78, 323, 386–94 foreign investment capital, 427, 561 international regulation, 349, 414, 561 Banneker, Benjamin, 89 Barbados, 44 Barbot, John, 28 Barnet, Richard, 427 Barlett, Donald, 580 Barsamian, David, 624–25, 671 Baruch, Bernard, 363 Beard, Charles, 90–91, 98, 371 Beecher, Catharine, 116 Beecher, William, 605 Belcher, Andrew, 51 Bellamy, Edward, 264, 278 Bellush, Bernard, 392–93 Belmont, August, 246, 256 Benavidez, Roy, 578 Benin, 26 Benjamin, Judah, 195 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 445–46 Bennett, William, 629 Benston, Margaret, 506 Berger, Victor, 353 Berkeley, William, 41, 42, 44 Berkman, Alexander, 272, 277, 321, 372, 375 Bernstein, Barton, 392 Bernstein, Carl, 545 Berrigan, Daniel, 488–89, 602 Berrigan, Philip, 488, 601, 602 Berthoff, Rowland, 84 Beveridge, Albert, 299 Billings, Warren, 359 Bingham, Eula, 575 bin Laden, Osama, 678, 679 Blackett, P.


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 6; see also Spear, Black Chicago, 148; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 180. 20. Michael Bennett, When Dreams Come True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (McLean: Brassey’s Publishing, 1966); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005). 21. At 43 percent, blacks have the lowest homeownership rates in the country today. At 73 percent, whites have the highest. Robert Callis and Melissa Kresin, Residential Vacancies and Homeownership in the Third Quarter 2014 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, October 2014), Table 7; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014. 22.


pages: 436 words: 131,430

House of God by Samuel Shem

affirmative action, index card, lateral thinking, medical residency, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, placebo effect

You get to know them by their particular shrieks. But what diseases does your gomere have?" "I don't know. I haven't seen her yet." "Doesn't matter. Pick an organ, any organ." I fell silent, so scared that I was having trouble thinking of an organ. "What is this? Where did they get you from? On quota? Is there affirmative action for Jews? What lies inside the chest cavity and beats?" "The heart." "Good. So the gomere has congestive heart failure. What else?" "The lungs." "Terrific. You're really cooking now. Pneumonia. Your gomere has CHF and pneumonia, she's septic from her indwelling catheter, refuses to eat, wants to die, is demented, and has an unobtainable BP.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

But in the political world, India’s lower castes move in the opposite direction from “Sanskritization,” which many now follow in their personal lives. Instead of seeking to emulate their Brahmin role models as they do in their cultural and religious behavior, the lower castes use politics to play out their revenge against the upper castes and to extract compensation for their low social status. Usually they get what they want. India’s affirmative action program is the largest in the world. It is far larger and more extensive than that of America. In India, half of all government jobs are reserved for three separate categories of underdog: Adivasis, who are Indians of tribal origin, making up almost 10 percent of the population; Dalits officially accounting for 12.5 percent of the population; and “Other Backward Classes,” which include castes such as the Yadavs, accounting for 27 percent of the population.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

If people can see what they want to see in the figure , just imagine how much room there is for partisans to see different facts in the social world.38 Several studies have documented the “attitude polarization” effect that happens when you give a single body of information to people with differing partisan leanings. Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39 In 2004, in the heat of the U.S. presidential election, Drew Westen used fMRI to catch partisan brains in action.40 He recruited fifteen highly partisan Democrats and fifteen highly partisan Republicans and brought them into the scanner one at a time to watch eighteen sets of slides.


pages: 525 words: 146,126

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

For example, a few years after IOS pulled the plug on its weekly radio show In Focus with co-hosts David Kelley and Raymond Newman, Peikoff began hosting a daily one-hour talk show on KIEV radio in Los Angeles. Students of Objectivism can obtain audiocassettes of the first year of programs for a mere $750. It is unlikely however, that the following KIEV incident will make it onto an audiocassette for sale: In February 1998, a liberal organization ran a pro-affirmative-action ad in The New York Times featuring this quotation from Alan Greenspan: “It is good for business. It is good for our society, and it is the right thing to do.” Ever since Greenspan’s favorable comments on The Passion of Ayn Rand, he had been disdained by ARI and its affiliate newsletter, but Peikoff had never personally performed the excommunicatory rites.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

—Brent, law firm hiring manager The nearly exclusive focus on students at listed schools tilts the playing field by socioeconomic status. My research shows that it also limits competition by gender and race.28 As federal contractors, most of the firms I studied are required to demonstrate that they are taking “affirmative action” to increase their representations of qualified women and minorities.29 Compared to many other types of white-collar, high-prestige employers in the United States, these firms devote significant monetary and human resources to attracting and retaining diverse talent. Many have diversity councils, full- or part-time diversity staff, and nearly all participate in targeted recruiting programs aimed at increasing the demographic diversity of applicant pools.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

East Asian nations feel that it is their responsibility to maintain full employment and actively promote growth, and their governments remain concerned about inequality and social stability. In Malaysia, the role of government has extended in yet another direction. For decades, the Malaysian government has carried out an aggressive affirmative action program to help the ethnic Malays. This was an important part of nation building; the view that all groups would benefit from a more stable and equitable society was widely accepted, even though some members of Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese community may have lost opportunities as a result. However, because the government made sure that all shared in the fruits of development, ethnic conflict has largely been avoided.


pages: 508 words: 137,199

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

affirmative action, Brownian motion, Burning Man, carbon-based life, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, dark matter, PalmPilot, phenotype

"Oh, and organize a secure video link to all the section chiefs for six p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Okay, Steve? I want hearts and minds for all areas on local responses... "No," Paula said heavily. "Not the execution. The equations." Steve Duffy was pretty, enthusiastic and ticked off the boxes for a handful of the government's affirmative action requirements, being trailer poor, dyslexic and gay. Unfortunately he was also none too bright. "And get me Professor Mayer on the secure line, then Vice Questore Pier Angelo... the Italian," she said, "and the President's private secretary. In that order." CHAPTER 46 Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future] "I'm winning," Zaq said.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

“She had domestic help … She wouldn’t have called them nannies, but she had people in her home,” Schlafly’s niece, writer Suzanne Venker, told the Los Angeles Times. “Did she mention that fact enough to get her point across to young people about how she managed to do it? No, she did not.”12 10 NEW DADS Were I Queen, my principal affirmative action plan would have three legs. First, it would promote equal educational opportunity, and effective job training for women, so they would not be reduced to dependency on a man or the state. Second, my plan would give men encouragement and incentives to share more evenly with women the joys, responsibilities, worries, upsets, and sometimes tedium of raising children from infancy to adulthood.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

According to McKinsey, the Gulf economies need to create 280,000 jobs a year to employ their young people. But despite some of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the world, the religious schools give their students few marketable skills: indeed, foreign firms are forced to take quotas of the locals through affirmative action programs. McKinsey reckons a quarter of native employees in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE fail to show up for work.22 As for the southern Mediterranean, it has a lot of catching up to do. The MEDA ten (a group of southern and eastern economies) have an average income per head of only $6,200, putting them roughly where Western Europe was in 1950 and Romania was in 1975.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Even most progressive journalism—just like the kind that emerged in the early 1900s—tends to frighten and isolate the middle classes rather than bring them out of their homes to improve their communities. Populists such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, and others speaking out on behalf of working stiffs, stoke more rage and discontent than thoughtful engagement. In the isolation of our living rooms and surrounded by bills, the menaces of immigrants willing to take our jobs for less pay and affirmative-action candidates offered our jobs with fewer qualifications feel all too real. Experiencing all this through the sensationalist lens of Big Media only reduces our connection to the real world in which all this stuff is supposedly occurring. We seek to take on our institutional enemies vicariously through our late-night comedians, or “directly” through our laptops.


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

White parents who want to adopt a black child in America are still subjected to “cultural competency” training—a nod to the days (from the 1970s through the early 1990s) when transracial adoptions were denounced as “cultural genocide.” But apart from needing our respect and support, interracial families of all sorts are owed our attention, because very quietly they are eroding the assumptions that have guided America’s race-related policies, customs, and habits for decades. For example, what does affirmative action mean, in an era when people’s ancestors were both victims and oppressors? Do such people get preferential treatment, or not? How long will we adhere to the “one drop” rule in identifying people’s race? Illinois senator Barack Obama has a white mother, who raised him exclusively, but does anyone (including the senator) tell his story without reflecting on his blackness?


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

For all his declamations against hierarchies, he had also never fully expelled the aristocrat within him. Visiting India as a young soldier, he had observed scathingly: “The Hindu caste system is the greatest glorification of snobbery that the world has ever known.” Now, living in the country as an older man, he still censured the indignities of caste regularly; even if affirmative action enrolled lower-caste students at the expense of deserving Brahmins, he wrote, for example, it was “a rough kind of justice. It certainly does not outweigh the huge injustices which the ancestors of Brahmins inflicted on their fellow Indians in the past.” But Haldane also admitted to a “sneaking sympathy” for the Brahmin class.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

The eventual choice of the name Sojourner Truth had less to do with political correctness than a desire by Shirley to get young people involved. The fact that it was named after an African American reformer from the time of the Civil War who traveled the country advocating the right of people to be free was an incidental benefit. Some of the older people at JPL disagreed. “I’d had enough of all this affirmative action crap about blacks and minorities,” said one veteran JPL flight engineer (in the hearing of the older author) who was taking early retirement in the early 1990s. Today, it is doubtful that those who have followed in his footsteps would think such a thing, let alone articulate it. Where once Donna Shirley had been the only female engineer on staff at JPL, the situation for women has markedly improved.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

Chapter 9: Sweet Ole Bob (SOB) Interviews: Frank Snyder, Maury Hammack, Naomi Hodge-Muse, Reuben Scott, Garet Bosiger, Bob Merriman, Howard Altizer, Joe Philpott, Jim Philpott, Junior Thomas, Bill Young, Coy Young, James Riddle, Rob Spilman, Jerry Epperson, Carolyn Blue Segregated factory departments: Bassett wasn’t alone in its discriminatory practices. According to a 1998 analysis by Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, at the time, just 20 percent of American employers had established affirmative-action policies. By 1976, more than 80 percent of large firms had equal-employment policies, according to the Bureau of National Affairs. First to make alcohol and “do it legal!”: Dwayne Yancey, “Hey, Sugar, She’s No Average Republican,” Roanoke Times, October 20, 1991. Naomi Hodge-Muse family: Her husband, William Muse, got his Imperial Savings and Loan federal insurance during the Nixon administration—via a connection with a White House cook (Naomi Hodge-Muse, interview with the author, September 18, 2012).


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

And there is no reason. There’s no reason unless I said, ‘I want to hook up with you in the bathroom’; there’s no reason to make that assumption. But it happens all the time.” Christopher and Williams recalled a letter to the Chronicle, in December 2003, from Duke junior Paul Musselwhite, who argued that affirmative action was detrimental to the student population, especially to some minority students whose SAT scores were found to be some two hundred points lower than their peers’ and yet were still admitted to the university. “Having a group of clearly identifiable students that are part of an educational cohort that is considerably lower than the general population of the school is bound to lead to ghettos, socially and academically,” he wrote.

“Having a group of clearly identifiable students that are part of an educational cohort that is considerably lower than the general population of the school is bound to lead to ghettos, socially and academically,” he wrote. “Making academic excellence, as opposed to academic competence, a universal standard will encourage beneficial interaction. The end of affirmative action would allow students to interact with each other as true peers, and thus increase the chances for racial mixing. Try ending institutionalized discrimination before killing frats and selective living groups.” They still remembered Musselwhite’s provocative letter. “When people got offended, all you heard was ‘Black students just complain all the time, all you do is complain and self-segregate,’ ” Christopher said.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

When they seize narcotics, the campus cops don’t get prosecuted for drug possession themselves, he noted. The warrant directed at DSS is designed “to ‘legalize’ the process by cloaking the search with judicial approval.” The prosecutor appealed successfully to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Without proof that a private party’s search was induced by prior “affirmative action by a governmental official,” it said, no agency relationship could be shown. The court found multiple facts establishing the independence of the college security officers: They were not asked by the police to do the search; they received no equipment, information, or assistance in the case; and they neither trained with, took instructions from, nor formulated policies jointly with the police.


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

January. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/01-30-FedPay.pdf. Fang, Hanming. 2006. “Disentangling the College Wage Premium: Estimating a Model with Endogenous Education Choices.” International Economic Review 47 (4): 1151–85. Fang, Hanming, and Andrea Moro. 2011. “Theories of Statistical Discrimination and Affirmative Action: A Survey.” In Handbook of Social Economics, vol. 1A, edited by Jess Benhabib, Matthew Jackson, and Alberto Bisin, 133–200. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Farber, Henry, and Robert Gibbons. 1996. “Learning and Wage Dynamics.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111 (4): 1007–47. Farrell, Edwin, George Peguero, Rasheed Lindsey, and Ronald White. 1988.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

This will lead to some surprising twists. In the United States, for example, nativist sentiment has historically been tinged with more than a slight tincture of racism. This is a tradition that began with the nineteenth-century "White Caps" and Ku Klux Klan. Yet blacks, as a group, are major beneficiaries of income transfers, affirmative action, and other fruits of political compulsion. They are also disproportionately represented in the U.S. military. Therefore, they are likely to emerge, along with blue-collar whites, as among the most fervent partisans of American nationalism. Politicians willing to cater to the insecurities of those whose relative talents fall well down on Ammon's turnip will come noisily to the fore in almost every country.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

This gives Dubai’s authorities the right to send anyone packing. The rulers’ top priority is, rightly, the Emirati nationals who have been loyal subjects for generations. They are given lavish subsidies to maintain their contentedness, forcibly promoted in foreign companies through an upscale affirmative action program known as Emiratization, and hold the upper hand in the all-important real estate market. But extreme wealth has meant the onset of serious lifestyle diseases such as obesity for men and plummeting fertility for women (now among the lowest in the world). As the relentless demographic dilution of Emiratis continues, the U.A.E.’s most noted intellectual dissident, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, speaks of the “agony of being a minority in my own country.”4 He laments that Emiratis are too few in number and powerless over the forces reshaping the country to enjoy for much longer the global phenomenon Dubai has become.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Things were a bit less lopsided between the 1962 and 1983 surveys; the upper middle class (the 90th to 99th percentiles) did notably better and the bottom 80% even gained wealth rather than losing it. Even so, wealth concentrated between 1962 and 1983. It seems to be in the very nature of wealth to concentrate, much as interest compounds over time. Despite myths of affirmative action and upward mobility, the tendency of wealth to concentrate, for advantage to breed advantage, makes it hard on people who start with nothing. Quite surprisingly, economists don't really have a very solid idea of what share of personal wealth comes from savings during individuals' lifetimes, and what share is inherited.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Impatience with difficult stages in the process can lead to dramatic or violent episodes of social criticism. Even people who agree on the fundamental desirability of tolerance frequently deride each other over differences in preferred technique for achieving the same end (for example, whether affirmative action programs redress old injuries or serve to perpetuate racialism as an unfair means of judging people). Today, large segments of the population push inclusiveness further still, calling it “murder” to slay a dolphin, or an ape, or members of a threatened species—even species that our hard-pressed ancestors considered vital food sources.


pages: 655 words: 151,111

London: The Autobiography by Jon E. Lewis

affirmative action, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Brixton riot, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, side project, strikebreaker, Winter of Discontent

The forces of error, doubt and despair were so firmly entrenched in British society, as the ‘winter of discontent’ had just powerfully illustrated, that overcoming them would not be possible without some measure of discord. The election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher had profound implications for London. The Greater London Council (GLC, the successor to the LCC) was headed by Ken Livingstone, a populist Labour politician bent on pursuing affirmative-action programmes for ‘minorities’ and a subsidized ‘Fares Fair’ transport policy that slashed Tube and bus fares. Mr Livingstone also had the pronounced habit of using the GLC as a platform to criticize the Conservative government’s policies on nuclear armament and Northern Ireland. All of the above were anathema to Margaret Thatcher, doyenne of traditional values and free enterprise.


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

GRIEVANCES OF RIGHTS AND JUSTICE Rights and justice have traditionally been guaranteed by national constitutions, and thus protests have been cast in terms of “civil rights” directed to national authorities. Significant grievances in terms of civil rights continue to be expressed today, particularly among minority groups in the dominant countries, such as struggles to maintain affirmative action for women and people of color in the United States, for the rights of Muslims in France, and for native populations in Canada and Australia. Increasingly, particularly in the subordinated countries, where the nation-state is not capable of guaranteeing rights, protesters appeal directly to international and global authorities, shifting the discussion from “civil rights” to “human rights.”


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Aus- tralians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food- producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment. Guns, Germs and Steel CHAPTER 16 How CHINA BECAME CHINESE I MMIGRATION, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, MULTILINGUALISM, ethnic diversitymy state of California was among the pioneers of these controversial policies and is now pioneering a backlash against them. A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system, where my sons are being educated, fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children.


pages: 641 words: 147,719

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route by Rough Guides, James Bembridge, Barbara McCrea

affirmative action, Airbnb, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, colonial rule, F. W. de Klerk, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, out of africa, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transfer pricing, young professional

Apart from between 2002 and 2006, when Capetonians elected an ANC mayor and administration, the Western Cape and its capital have bucked South Africa’s trend of ANC dominance, by repeatedly electing the National Party and, after its dissolution, the Democratic Alliance (DA). During the ANC’s first term in national government under Mandela (1994–1999), affirmative action policies and a racial shift in the economy led to the rise of a black middle class, but even so this represented a tiny fraction of the African and coloured population, and many felt that transformation hadn’t gone far enough. Indeed, after twenty-five years of non-racial democracy, Cape Town is still a very divided city.


The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

affirmative action, Columbine, game design, Lao Tzu, Maui Hawaii, music of the spheres, place-making, the scientific method, trade route

Examples might be multiplied, ad infmitum, from every corner of the world.1" Refusal of the Call Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur.


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

His administration created several whole new regulatory bureaucracies targeting business, between 1970 and 1972 alone establishing the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency—the last empowered by two expansive new laws that set strict standards on air and water pollution. After he signed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act to root out racial and gender discrimination, his administration quadrupled its staff and increased its enforcement power, almost tripled the budget for civil rights enforcement, and instituted the first affirmative action policies throughout government to hire more nonwhite workers. “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” the president said in 1971, officially surrendering to the New Deal consensus, certifying his rejection of the Goldwater right. He proved it beyond doubt that summer by undertaking a radical intervention in the free market, ordering a three-month freeze of all U.S. prices and wages in order to slow inflation—a year after Milton Friedman himself had warned there was “nothing that could do more in a brief period to destroy a market system” than imposing “governmental control of wages and prices.”


pages: 566 words: 160,453

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

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

Le Pen, Brexit, and Trump provided alternative narratives for those who were left behind by economic change. They were told it wasn’t their fault. These were the people who were bypassed by the march of progress, globalization, and technology. The elites told them they were ignorant, racist bigots. They needed to get with the program and to get with gay marriage and affirmative action and Black Lives Matter. Arguments in the United States over LGBTQ bathrooms were the last straw. Everyone in their town thought Hillary Clinton was a crook. It was the fault of immigrants, job-killing regulations, Muslims, trade deals, TPP, NAFTA, and the EPA. The mainstream media, what Rush Limbaugh calls the “drive-by media,” and their fake news were culpable.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

The strong emphasis on the nuclear family in West German legislation must be seen in the larger Cold War context. The East German government gave women full equal rights in 1949, and the 1950 Law for the Protection of Mothers and Children created social services for working mothers, expanded women’s opportunities to work, and mandated equal wages and affirmative action programs. In West Germany, by contrast, the notion of the “family as a refuge” from outside influences (Fluchtburg Familie) promoted the idea that families provided security against the intrusions of (Communist or National Socialist) totalitarian governments as well as against the degrading forces of individualism, materialism, and secularism.22 Labor Organization in IBM’s German Subsidiary Of course, there was no such thing as an IBM family.


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

Gillon, “That’s Not What We Meant to Do”: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), chap. 4. Also see David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), chap. 3; and Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 3. 149. Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 150. For example, a recent summation by a leading immigration scholar— Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004)—includes nary a mention of overpopulation concerns. 151.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

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

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

In his gentlemanly and fair-minded manner, Tommy asked D’Souza whether his defense of the fairness of America’s racial hierarchy had properly accounted for the massive government discrimination in distributing veterans’ benefits and preferences after World War II to whites but not to African Americans and the accumulated disadvantages attached to such discrimination. The clarity and moral power of Tommy’s questions threw D’Souza for a loop, and he dodged the question. Then he struggled in vain to regain his footing and his audience, finally telling Tommy that if he really supported race-based affirmative action (which Tommy quickly pointed out he had never mentioned), he should walk over to the registrar’s office and give up his seat at Amherst, an argument that was an irrelevant distraction and a complete non sequitur on multiple levels that got the audience laughing in amazement. Tommy’s calm and thoughtful response put this ad hominem attack to shame.


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

In 1966, a federal judge sided with a group of female employees who sued the company for paying them lower wages than male employees operating the same machinery. Then, in 1968, federal authorities targeted the company for racially discriminatory hiring policies. In response, the company agreed to institute an affirmative action plan. Meanwhile, unionized employees at the plant went on strike, causing an eleven-day work stoppage. The combination of antitrust, race, gender, and labor disputes at the company provided fertile ground for the politics of backlash building in the executive suite. — The Bradley Foundation, meanwhile, also became increasingly politicized.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement.


pages: 568 words: 174,089

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

In his emphasis on politics and economics, Mills underestimated the important role that powerful symbolic and moral crusades have had in American life, including McCarthy’s witch-hunt after communist influence. Had he paid more attention to McCarthyism, Mills would have been more likely to predict such events as the 1998–99 effort by Republicans to impeach President Clinton, the role played by divisive issues such as abortion, immigration, and affirmative action in American politics, and the continued importance of negative campaigning. Real substance may not be high on the American political agenda, but that does not mean that politics is unimportant. Through our political system, we make decisions about what kind of people we imagine ourselves to me, which is why it matters a great deal at the end of the twentieth century which political party is in power. 5 How, then, does The Power Elite stand in retrospect?


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

Legacy preferences, racial restrictions, Jewish quotas, and other systems that had perpetuated the old order began giving way to more merit-based criteria, while generous subsidies ensured that admissions offers were more than notional promises. Colleges may not have been as diverse as they are now in absolute terms, but the midcentury revolution in admissions makes today’s affirmative action (partly eroded by Boomer courts and legislatures) seem timid. Having supplied adults with college degrees, jobs, roads, and homes, all of great but sometimes indirect benefit to the Boomers, the nation began to care expressly for its newest citizens—a debt the Boomers never seriously considered repaying.


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

A geophysicist at the University of Chicago, Abbot was scheduled to speak about his research on climate change and the potential for life on other planets. Before long, however, controversy arose. Abbot had written an op-ed and recorded some videos proposing that university admissions be based solely on merit and thus both affirmative action and legacy admissions should be abolished. The op-eds and videos were not connected to his geophysics research or his planned lecture. A group of MIT students and alumni took to Twitter to demand that Abbot be disinvited, saying that his invitation to speak was “unacceptable,” “infuriating,” and inconsistent with the department’s DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Carter argued that his foreign policy was based on an historical vision of the US role in a changing world: “Our policy is rooted in our moral values, which never change. Our policy is reinforced by our material wealth and by our military power. Our policy is designed to serve mankind.” These policies were reflected in Carter’s Foreign Service appointments. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance practiced affirmative action, increasing the proportion of minorities from 6 to 11 percent and of women from 10 to 14 percent in the Foreign Service. Black ambassadors, a rarity during the Nixon years, were appointed to serve all over the world, not just in black states. By the end of his term, Carter had appointed a record fourteen black ambassadors.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

., 1972), 89–95; Untitled document. C. 1947, Folder 2, Box 1, Series 1, Admissions Office Records, PU. 114. “Interviews: Shelby Cullom Davis, ’30,” Daily Princetonian, October 4, 1974; T. Harding Jones, “Opinion: The Importance of Seeking Conservatives,” Daily Princetonian, May 29, 1974; Paul Mogin, “Opinion: Affirmative Action,” Daily Princetonian, March 12, 1975; Sonia Sotomayor, “Opinion: Anti-Latino Discrimination at Princeton,” Daily Princetonian, May 10, 1974; Paul Horowitz to the chairman, Daily Princetonian, April 14, 1975; Ken Foote to the chairman, Daily Princetonian, April 13, 1976; and Daily Princetonian, October 16, 1973, February 20 and April 29, 1976. 115.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

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

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

You always see things you had no idea were possible. I had that experience in 2014, when I decided to write a column about General Electric’s research center in Niskayuna, New York. GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like one of those multiethnic Benetton ads. But this was not affirmative action at work; it was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it. On that trip I was given a tour of GE’s three-dimensional manufacturing unit by its then director, Luana Iorio. In the old days, explained Iorio, when GE wanted to build a jet engine part, a designer would have to design the product, then GE would have to build the machine tools to make a prototype of that part, which could take up to a year, and then it would manufacture the part and test it, with each test iteration taking a few months.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers for almost two decades, was “neither a leader nor a dazzling intellect.”21 In the culture of the deal, banks endlessly copy each other’s strategies or products, chasing the same customers, competing on price and the ability to take risk. Complex systems of fealty exist within firms. Fiercely secretive, bankers are reluctant to share information, seeking an edge over their internal and external competitors. People eat what they kill. Despite affirmative action programs and considerable lip service to modern employment practices, the firms are backward in their treatment of women, minorities, and cultural differences. A proudly misogynist culture dominates at every level. Joseph Akermann, head of Germany’s Deutsche Bank, thought that adding women to the firm’s men-only management board would make the forum “more colorful and prettier.”22 In 2007 Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $62 million to settle a number of gender discrimination claims bought by female employees.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

Such inequalities ensure that when a society is under pressure, the feeling of unity is brought to bear with most conviction among the majority, who have more to lose, and more feebly among any ethnicities treated as second-class citizens.47 This disparity between majority and minorities in their perception of proprietorship over the society is the Achilles heel of nations. Even in cosmopolitan America, where all men are created equal by decree, respect for citizenship is one thing, for the diversity of those citizens another. Though minorities can have clashing interests and prejudices about each other, support for pro-diversity policies such as affirmative action is greater among them, with diversity reinforcing diversity in ways that bring discord with the monolithic majority.48 In such matters both the minorities and the majority can be equally self-serving. NATIONALISTS AND PATRIOTS Not only did Paleolithic societies lack ethnicities, but their people would not have abided the emergence of radical groups such as the American Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.


pages: 812 words: 180,057

The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks

affirmative action, airport security, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, hiring and firing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Yom Kippur War

After retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September 1993, he had veered onto the thin ice of an old general involved in politics. Like Douglas MacArthur, he delivered the keynote address at a Republican National Convention. Just as the Chicago convention of 1952 had soured on MacArthur in response to his talk, the San Diego convention of 1996 was unhappy with Powell’s speech, in which he emphatically supported affirmative action and abortion rights. (In another odd parallel, the 1952 Republican convention had been the first to nominate a World War II vet, Eisenhower, while the 1996 convention would be the last, selecting another Kansan, Sen. Bob Dole.) Had Powell left for private life at that point, his reputation would have remained unblemished.


pages: 742 words: 202,902

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Gunnar Myrdal, Kitchen Debate, land reform, Neil Armstrong, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, Torches of Freedom, William of Occam

“What would you do?” “I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.” Kennedy shook his head. If he moved on Cuba, Khrushchev might move on Berlin. “I just don’t think we can take the risk.” When the subject turned to another front in the war against communism, Laos, Nixon again suggested “affirmative action.” Again, Kennedy demurred. “I don’t see how we can make any move in Laos, which is five thousand miles away, if we don’t make a move in Cuba, which is only ninety miles away.” Nixon assured Kennedy that if he did take action in either Cuba or Laos, he could count on Nixon’s support, even if they faced each other again in 1964.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

For the right wing also embraced a cultural critique, one squarely aimed at the very advances in racial and gender equality sketched above. Social democracy, conservatives declared in a Polanyian backlash, was flawed because it treated unequals equally. Remember University of Chicago economics professor and Nobel laureate George Stigler, who wrote in 1962—before the Civil Rights Act, before the Voting Rights Act, before affirmative action—in his essay “The Problem of the Negro” that, as he saw it, Blacks deserved to be poor, to be disliked, and to be treated with disrespect: “The problem is that on average,” Stigler wrote, “he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end.” And although prejudice might be part of the problem, “the Negro boy,” as Stigler put it, “is excluded from more occupations by his own inferiority as a worker”: “Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers’ competition.”


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

At the Lancaster House conference in the early 1960s, where Kenya’s independence constitution was negotiated, just one out of around 70 Kenyan delegates was a woman and the resulting constitution made no mention of women’s rights. Under the 2010 constitution things improved, at least on paper: women are described as a disadvantaged group, and the bill guarantees equal treatment for men and women, protects against discrimination on the basis of gender, calls on the state to undertake affirmative-action policies and sets aside 47 special seats for women in parliament – as a result, 19% of MPs in 2014 were women, compared with 1% in 1990. Even so, major discrepancies remain in the ways in which women and men have access to essential services and resources, such as land and credit, while traditional gender roles still largely prevail.


pages: 647 words: 201,252

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan by Samuel R. Delany

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, East Village, gentrification, index card, Pepto Bismol, place-making, publish or perish, rent stabilization, sexual politics

He was here the night it happened. I mean, we must have talked about it nonstop over the whole next three weeks! He doesn’t come in a lot anymore. But he drops in from time to time. You say this is going to get you your Ph.D?” “Well, it’ll make my getting it a little easier.” “Okay. I’m going to do my bit for affirmative action. Look, write your phone number down here.” He handed me a card. “Next time Blossom comes in, I’ll ask him if he wants to talk to you about it. And if he says okay, I’ll give you a call, and you can set up a time to talk.” “He was in the bar? When it happened.” “He said he saw the whole thing.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

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

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

., who, visiting the Bunker home to retrieve a briefcase left in Archie’s cab, put his own stamp on a good-bye photograph by kissing Archie on the cheek just as the picture was taken. It was one of the series’s most famous episodes, but from the very start, with a premiere episode that talked about religion and atheism, affirmative action, and several different minority groups, All in the Family was intentionally inflammatory. And according to creators of other groundbreaking TV series, it was influential as well. “All in the Family was extraordinary,” says James L. Brooks, whose own controversial sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was part of a 1973–74 CBS Saturday night schedule that began with All in the Family, followed by M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Republicans of that era—Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, Howard Baker, and Charles Percy—reflected what historians such as Sean Wilentz and Douglas Brinkley term the socially progressive “heart and soul” of the pre-Reagan-era Republican Party.6 They joined Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson in expanding the American social safety net. Community-focused Democrats like Hubert H. Humphrey were supported by centrist politicians such as Percy and Dirksen who represented the Republican Party in Washington. President Nixon, for example, supported: affirmative action and wilderness preservation; Indian tribal autonomy; Supplemental Security Income for the disabled and elderly poor; and the antipoverty Family Assistance Plan. He also quadrupled the staff of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and established the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

When an Indian villager came to see him, he received the petitioner with every courtesy, sat down beside him, patted him on the back, radiated interest and warmth. But let a landowner or bourgeois seek an audience, and Dr. Francia had him cool his heels and drum his fingers, eventually to be admitted into a disdainful, impatient presence. This was class discrimination (affirmative action), but also racial: the lines of division in Paraguayan society were the same for both. The Dictador Supremo wanted to build on the special Guarani character o f the society, to subdue the old Spanish and Creole elite. To this end he forbade the whites to marry among themselves, requiring them rather to take their spouses from among Indians, mulattoes, and blacks.

International partnerships have 6 7 478 T H E W E A L T H AND POVERTY OF N A T I O N S developed along ethnic lines. Thus H o n g Kong, Taiwan, and Singa­ pore are launching platforms to Thailand, where many Chinese have taken Thai names, the better to fit in;* and to Malaysia, where the Chi­ nese run the business show, although affirmative action and smart pol­ itics urge them to adopt Malay partners. " Thailand prides itself on transcending differences, in part by strongly discouraging separate Chi­ nese schooling. The Chinese smile politely, publicly approve, but often supplement the Thai curriculum with school abroad. The community balances "on an invisible see-saw between two or more identities."


pages: 795 words: 212,447

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy, Grant (CON) Blackwood

active measures, affirmative action, air freight, airport security, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benoit Mandelbrot, defense in depth, dual-use technology, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Earth, Panamax, post-Panamax, Skype, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl

Reynolds was well spoken and had a good academic mind, of that there was no question, but after nearly a year on the job, she was still far, far down the wrong side of the learning curve and realizing, McMullen suspected, that the real world and the world of textbooks had little in common. And what about you, Wes, old buddy? he thought. A black man, under thirty, a Yale-graduated lawyer with half a dozen years of quasigovernmental think-tank service under his belt. He had no doubt the media and gossip mavens said the same thing about him: He was an affirmative-action choice and in way over his head, which was partially true, at least the last part. He was in over his head but learning to swim quickly. The problem was, the better his backstroke got, the dirtier the pool seemed. Kealty was a decent enough man, but he was too concerned with the big picture—about his “vision” for the country and its place in the world—and less focused on the “how” of making it happen.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As the following three decades unfolded and the South was gradually forced to change its ways, the cultural domain continued to work out the meaning of race relations in the United States and the history of slavery. The actual slogging of regulation of discrimination, implementation of desegregation and later affirmative action, and the more local politics of hiring and firing were punctuated throughout this period by salient iconic retellings of the stories of race relations in the United States, from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? to Roots. The point of this chapter, however, is not to discuss race relations, but to understand culture and cultural production in terms of political theory.


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

The first stemmed from a fascination with rightwing American intellectuals: William Buckley at National Review, Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, and the neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset and Nathan Glazer. Aside from the admirable ‘cutting edge’ they gave to US foreign policy, the neocons were also ‘muckrakers of the Right’, ‘discrediting government’ by exposing affirmative action and welfare dependency. In fact, they were quite close to the philosophical traditions of the Economist. ‘As they grew older, neocons embraced old-fashioned liberalism – the liberalism of meritocratic values, reverence for high culture and a vigorous mixed economy.’ Looking past the misleading label, ‘America’s conservatism is an exceptional conservatism: the conservatism of a forward-looking commercial republic rather than the reactionary Toryism of old Europe.’


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

Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a secularist, and a professor or student. Why on earth should people’s beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military?


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

When he returned with his fistful of diplomas, they told him they weren’t hiring Americans due to the recent reduction of financial support from Washington to the World Bank. It was a punch in the gut for him. Not knowing where to turn, he responded to a newspaper ad from UC Berkeley. After they hired him as a professor, he later found out that they ran the ad to comply with affirmative action, but had no intention of getting qualified candidates to respond. Years later he moved on to Wharton to teach multiple subjects related to finance. But he isn’t just a bookworm. A paper he had written on how to reduce risk in bond portfolios caught the attention of Goldman Sachs. He took a leave of absence and spent seven years running the risk management and insurance division at Goldman Sachs (while still holding down a part-time professorship at Wharton).


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

“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.”


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

In the early 1980s, the Dartmouth campus was a major battleground of the culture wars, which were inflamed by the emergence of a right-wing campus newspaper, The Dartmouth Review. The paper, which produced prominent conservative writers such as Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, published a number of incendiary stories, including one that featured a list of the members of the college’s Gay Students Association, and another a column against affirmative action written in what was purported to be “black English.” Taking the bait, liberal Dartmouth students waged protests against the paper. Geithner played conciliator, persuading the protesters to channel their outrage by starting a rival publication. After college, Geithner attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he graduated with a master’s degree in 1985.


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

Gathering more evidence may not bring biased reasoners to agreement. (2) People who are more skilled sceptics - who know a larger litany of logical flaws - but apply that skill selectively, may change their minds more slowly than unskilled reasoners. Taber and Lodge (2000) examined the prior attitudes and attitude changes of students - when exposed to political literature for and against gun control 1 00 Global catastrophic risks and affirmative action, two issues of particular salience in the political life of the United States. The study tested six hypotheses using two experiments: 1 . Prior attitude effect. Subjects who feel strongly about an issue - even when encouraged to be objective - will evaluate supportive arguments more favourably than contrary arguments. 2.


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

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: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Loewenthal was, of course, enough of a cynic to know exactly why they had. The participants, taken together, represented the power establishment of southern California with an exquisite sense of proportion. Railroads, banking, newspapers, utilities, land development—it was a monopolists’ version of affirmative action. Besides, William Kerckhoff was a prominent conservationist and friend of Gifford Pinchot, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, whose influence with President Theodore Roosevelt could prove invaluable. Harriman’s railroad owned a hundred miles of right-of-way along the aqueduct path that the city would need permission to cross, and Huntington owned the building that housed the regional headquarters of the Reclamation Service!


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

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

As a consolation, early on he issued an executive order barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or “affectional preference,” bringing New York in line with a number of other progressive cities. But his measure was decidedly limited, covering only the agencies under his direct control, including the police, but specifically barring any affirmative action on the grounds that intentionally reaching out to the community would be, as he tactlessly put it, “insane.” Nonetheless, the executive order was hugely controversial. Anita Bryant’s anti-gay religious coalition, which she called Save Our Children, helped foment a frothy backlash across the country.


The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, interchangeable parts, plutocrats, rent control, rent stabilization, Socratic dialogue, traveling salesman, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

“Jimmy,” Andriutti said to Caughey, “did you know that Jewish guys—Larry, I don’t want you to take this personally—did you know that Jewish guys, even if they’re real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That’s a well-known fact. They can’t stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don’t like to go hunting or they’re for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?” “Gee,” said Kramer, “I don’t know why you thought I’d take it personally.” “Come on, Larry,” said Andriutti, “tell the truth. Deep down, don’t you wish you were Italian or Irish?” “Yeah,” said Kramer, “that way I wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place.”


pages: 914 words: 270,937

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, affirmative action, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, card file, disinformation, operational security

Clipped to his belt was a portable telephone whose electronic chiming was noticeable over the rumble of the tractor. Jack switched off as he hit the activation button on the phone. "Hello." "Jack? Rob." "How you doing, Robby?" "Just got myself frocked." "Congratulations, Captain Jackson! Aren't you a little young for that?" "Call it affirmative action, lettin' the aviators catch up with the bubbleheads. Hey, Sissy and I are heading over to Annapolis. Any problem we stop by on the way?" "Hell, no. How about lunch?" "Sure it's no trouble?" Jackson asked. "Robby, give me a break," Ryan replied. "Since when did you get humble on me?" "Ever since you got important and all."


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

One might argue that it is unfair to deny a social benefit to individuals because of factors they cannot control, or that a victim of discrimination experiences it as a uniquely painful sting, or that a group of victims is liable to react with rage, or that discrimination tends to escalate into horrors like slavery and genocide. (Those who favor affirmative action could acknowledge that reverse discrimination is wrong but argue that it undoes an even greater wrong.) None of these arguments is affected by anything any scientist will ever claim to discover. The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: “There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.”


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

This attitude still prevailed in 1966. “We must try and bring European culture to the Mizrahi communities,” said the writer Haim Hazaz. The story of this attempt is one of accomplishments and errors, illusion and sobriety, goodwill and arrogance to the point of racism, deliberate and nondeliberate discrimination, and affirmative action both useful and harmful. Above all, it is a story of alienation: the Ashkenazis found it difficult to live with the Mizrahim, who in turn found the Ashkenazis trying. The intermarriage rate in 1967 was approximately 15 percent. A study conducted among young people revealed that Ashkenazi youth felt alienation, and even hostility, toward Mizrahim.


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

“Father-son” decision is in NYT, August 25, 1964. “He exploded”: Martin to Moyers, September 22, 1964, LBJWHAM53. The AFL-CIO budgeted $12 million: Joel Seldin, “The AFL-CIO’s $12 million Backlash Cost,” NYHT, September 8, 1964. For 53 to 47 poll, see Pam Rymer state-by-state summary, AHF, Box W¾. For Cornell affirmative action experiment, see Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 49. For Salinger: Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 390. 419 For “frontlash” hear, for example, LBJT, 6408.39/5.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

In 1950 it was clear to Gorbachev what an ambitsioznyi country boy should do next—“apply to nothing less than the most important university of all, Moscow State University.”4 MGU was to the USSR what Harvard is to the United States—except that in the Soviet Union there was almost nothing else, no Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, no Ivy League, no equally distinguished state universities, no elite liberal arts colleges. Moscow the city was itself unique: Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles all rolled into one, the seat of government, industry, culture, even the film industry: the place to shine if you wanted to rise. To be sure, the Soviet Union had its own version of “affirmative action”: students like Gorbachev of working-class origin enjoyed special favor in university admission. Although he was from a peasant family, his father’s job as a combine driver lifted him to “most-favored” proletarian status. And his Order of the Red Labor Banner certainly wouldn’t hurt; in fact, in the end he was admitted without having to take the required entrance examination.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Below are listed some concepts — just a minuscule subset of the concepts that our culture abounds in — the possession of which would seem to give us a substantial leg up on people from previous generations or centuries: Positive and negative feedback, vicious circle, self-fulfilling prophecy, famous for being famous, backlash, supply and demand, market forces, the subconscious, subliminal imagery, Freudian slip, (Edipus complex, defense mechanism, sour grapes, passive-aggressive behavior, peer pressure, racial profiling, ethnic stereotype, status symbol, zero-sum game, catch-22, gestalt, chemical bond, catalyst, photosynthesis, DNA, virus, genetic code, dominant and recessive genes, immune system, auto-immune disease, natural selection, food chain, endangered species, ecological niche, exponential growth, population explosion, contraception, noise pollution, toxic waste, crop rotation, cross-fertilization, cloning, chain reaction, chain store, chain letter, email, spam, phishing, six degrees of separation, Internet, Web-surfing, uploading and downloading, video game, viral video, virtual reality, chat room, cybersecurity, data mining, artificial intelligence, IQ, robotics, morphing, time reversal, slow motion, time-lapse photography, instant replay, zooming in and out, galaxy, black hole, atom, superconductivity, radioactivity, nuclear fission, antimatter, sound wave, wavelength, X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic-resonance imagery, laser, laser surgery, heart transplant, defibrillator, space station, weightlessness, bungee jumping, home run, switch hitter, slam-dunk, Hail Mary pass, sudden-death playoff, make an end run around someone, ultramarathon, pole dancing, speed dating, multitasking, brainstorming, namedropping, channel-surfing, soap opera, chick flick, remake, rerun, subtitles, sound bite, buzzword, musical chairs, telephone tag, the game of Telephone, upping the ante, playing chicken, bumper cars, SUVs, automatic transmission, oil change, radar trap, whiplash, backseat driver, oil spill, superglue, megachurch, placebo, politically correct language, slippery slope, pushing the envelope, stock-market crash, recycling, biodegradability, assembly line, black box, wind-chill factor, frequent-flyer miles, hub airport, fast food, soft drink, food court, VIP lounge, moving sidewalk, shuttle bus, cell-phone lot, genocide, propaganda, paparazzi, culture shock, hunger strike, generation gap, quality time, Murphy’s law, roller coaster, in-joke, outsource, downsize, upgrade, bell-shaped curve, fractal shape, breast implant, Barbie doll, trophy wife, surrogate mother, first lady, worst-case scenario, prenuptial agreement, gentrification, paradigm shift, affirmative action, gridlock, veganism, karaoke, power lunch, brown-bag lunch, blue-chip company, yellow journalism, purple prose, greenhouse effect, orange alert, red tape, white noise, gray matter, black list… Not only does our culture provide us with such potent concepts, it also encourages us to analogically extend them both playfully and seriously, which gives rise to a snowballing of the number of concepts.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Jick, a social scientist specializing in leadership consulting, to serve as a facilitator among the many stakeholders involved with the memorialization process. He worked closely with the drafting committees, which were “struggling with the question of how to create a memorial that will take all of us through an arc of emotions ranging from the darkest moments of gloom and loss to heroic and life-affirming actions.”17 Contini also put together a series of talks for the families and the community on memorial-related topics to provide insight into the process of commemoration and present for discussion a variety of historical, social, and artistic perspectives, “fabulous talks and open discussions that touched on sensitive issues,” she said.18 Paul Goldberger was among the six19 asked to speak to the group, and his words, some of the most moving of his writings, addressed the paradoxes and contradictions and things that are not quite as they appear at Ground Zero.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The park changed hands several times in the following tear-gas-filled months, with the fence coming down for the last time in 1972. A colorful mural on the side of Amoeba Records (Haste Street at Telegraph Avenue) offers the protestors’ version of park history. Although the area around People’s Park and Sather Gate may seem quiet now, issues such as affirmative action and tuition increases still bring protests to the steps of Sproul. Protests over civil rights, war, and other inequities march through the center of the campus, though students also gather to rally for sports events, social gatherings, and shows of school spirit. –Chris Baty * * * Getting Here and Around BART is the easiest way to get to Berkeley from San Francisco.


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

He just said, ‘Lookit, Warren. In Wall Street still, the “white-shoe” firms, the big investment banks, they don’t hire Jews. We only have the ability to hire a very few people here. And, therefore, we only hire Jews.’ That was true of the two gals in the office and everybody. It was sort of like his version of affirmative action. And the truth is, there was a lot of prejudice against Jews in the fifties. I understood.” Buffett found it impossible to say anything that could be interpreted as critical of Graham, even decades later. Of course, it must have been incredibly disappointing. Couldn’t Graham have made an exception for his star student?


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

Equal Access Clearly, the emerging long-distance companies have to be protected against AT&T, so that they can have a fighting chance. If AT&T were to lower its rates, everyone would use them. Because of AT&T’s position, it’s much easier for them to do this, and reestablish a monopoly. This is prevented by the divestiture agreement, which regulates AT&T more than the other companies. In a weird way, it’s kind of like affirmative action. Another way of protecting the new companies is to give them equal access to the network that AT&T built. What good is it to be allowed to compete for long-distance customers if by the time the customer gets to your dial tone, it sounds like it’s on another planet? Not to mention the fact that to use your service, the customer has to use a touch-tone phone and key in a whole lot of extra numbers to identify himself, since 83 94192c03.qxd 6/3/08 3:30 PM Page 84 84 Chapter 3 your company isn’t able to identify him as soon as he picks up the phone, like AT&T can.