battle of ideas

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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

Some will reap monetary rewards after they leave office, part of the process of revolving doors that is endemic in the United States; for others, the pleasures of power today suffice. Backing up these ideas are armies of “experts” willing to provide testimony, arguments, and stories to show the rightness of these views. This battle of ideas occurs, of course, in many playing fields. The politicians have their surrogates, their minions who are not running for office but who advance variants of these ideas, and challenge those of rivals. Evidence and argumentation on both sides are assembled. This “battle of ideas” has two objectives (like advertising more generally)—to mobilize those who are already true believers and to persuade those who have not yet made up their minds.

Advertisers are good at distilling a message down to a sixty-second ad that strikes just the right notes—an emotional response seemingly reinforced by “reason.”33 THE WEAPONS OF WAR There is a real battlefield of ideas. But it does not, for the most part, involve a battle of ideas as academics would understand it, where evidence and theory on both sides are carefully weighed. It is a battlefield of “persuasions,” of “framing,” of attempts not necessarily to get to the truth of the matter but to understand better how ordinary citizens’ perceptions are formed and to influence those perceptions. In this battle of ideas, certain weapons play a central role. In the last chapter, we discussed one of these weapons—the media. It should be obvious that imbalances in the media can lead to a battlefield in the war of ideas that is far from level.

That they had failed miserably was evident: weeks after European financial institutions were given a clean bill of health (from the passage of a stress test, supposedly designed to ensure that the banks could survive a major economic stress), the Irish banks collapsed. A few weeks after they were given a second seal of approval, having supposedly tightened their standards, another major European bank (Dexia) failed.38 MONETARY POLICY AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS A central theme of this book is that there has been a battle of ideas—over what kinds of society, what kinds of policies, are best for most citizens—and that this battle has seen an attempt to persuade everyone that what’s good for the 1 percent, what the top cares about and wants, is good for everyone: lower tax rates at the top, reduce the deficit, downsize the government.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

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

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

Speaking in 1991, when the Labour party was well ahead in the polls, Lawson declared that the Conservatives would win the forthcoming election because it was winning the battle of ideas. Lawson added that the party winning the battle of ideas would always be victorious at elections, even if it faced crises en route. Lawson was right, in relation to the UK. The Conservatives won easily in 1992, albeit under the leadership of the more pragmatic John Major rather than the tonal evangelism of Thatcher. In the US, Bill Clinton was the victor by turning the battle of ideas on its head. He stole from the Republicans the language of economic competence. Above all, he ruthlessly mocked President Bush’s pledge at the previous election not to raise taxes.

Above all, he ruthlessly mocked President Bush’s pledge at the previous election not to raise taxes. ‘Read my lips… no new taxes,’ Bush had declared, before he sensibly raised taxes during his subsequent four years in office.2 Clinton’s onslaught was counter-intuitive and successful. Instead of trying to win the battle of ideas by putting a centre-left case for tax and higher spending on its own, he attacked his Republican opponent for raising taxes and, in doing so, raised questions about Bush’s integrity, too. This gave Clinton space to be the reassuring candidate – the one who could be trusted, in all senses of the term, to run the economy.

Constraints on ‘tax and spend’ force radical modernisation of the public sector and reform of public services to achieve better value for money. The public sector must actually serve the citizen: we do not hesitate to promote the concepts of efficiency, competition and high performance.6 As Philip Stephens had noted, Margaret Thatcher would have agreed with every word. Some on the centre left in the 1990s did not seek to win the battle of ideas, but accepted defeat and, in their contrition, hoped to win elections more or less on the same basis as she did. The parties on the centre left that followed this defensive route suffered severe identity crises, and voters became suspicious of their leaderships – leaderships that worked so assiduously hard to win their respect.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Seager’s final assessment was an endorsement of the Austrian project: “The value . . . consists in the encouragement it gives to original thinking and in the sharpening effect it has upon the critical faculties of all those who take part in it. It has been to me the most valuable economic course I have had in Germany.” Even if Berlin’s institutional apparatus was superior, he maintained that the Viennese were winning the battle of ideas. Vienna was becoming a magnet, “attracting . . . economic students from all countries.”84 That Austria was a premier destination in 1891 for economics would have been shocking twenty years earlier, when Menger finished his Principles. This chapter has traced this surprising story of the Austrian School’s emergence.

They defended the liberal state against the threats of conservatism and—more significantly and much more vociferously—against socialism and Bolshevism. In doing so, they reprised the conflicts of the previous decade within their private seminars—with elevated political stakes. The Mises-Schumpeter generation waged a battle of ideas in the overheated intellectual culture of “Red Vienna.” They cultivated their own “Vienna circles” and developed institutions that supported a new generation of scholars, which reestablished the international reputation of the school. They also sought support from allies in business and finance, reinforcing their ties to Austrian elites.

As the wide array of responses reveals, Mises’s work forced Austrian socialists to rethink their arguments and approaches, a credit to the liberal’s intellectual clout.23 As all participants in the calculation debate recognized, it was not just an intellectual struggle; economic ideas had far-reaching consequences. This was especially true for Mises. He argued that the conflict between capitalism and socialism was primarily a battle of ideas. In an anti-Marxist spirit, he argued, “It is ideas that make history, not the ‘material productive forces,’ those nebulous and mystical schemata of the materialist conception of history. If we could overcome the idea of Socialism . . . then Socialism would have to leave the stage.”24 Mises believed that his ideas had broad implications for politics, society, and culture.


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

As far back as 1976, Charles Koch, who was trained as an engineer, began planning a movement that could sweep the country. As a former member of the John Birch Society, he had a radical goal. In 1978, he declared, “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.” To this end, the Kochs waged a long and remarkable battle of ideas. They subsidized networks of seemingly unconnected think tanks and academic programs and spawned advocacy groups to make their arguments in the national political debate. They hired lobbyists to push their interests in Congress and operatives to create synthetic grassroots groups to give their movement political momentum on the ground.

“Some of my friends—most I’d say—feel a sense of guilt about having money. I do not, and never have.” As he describes it, “An inheritance comes to the person but also to his community and country. It can do powerful good.” He notes, “I’ve felt good about being able to put dollars to work in the battle of ideas.” Scaife recalled his childhood as happy. He liked the governess who raised him, admired his father, and adored his mother. But his sister, Cordelia, who was four years older, saw their upbringing differently. She described the family as excelling principally in “making each other totally miserable.”

They would have to change how politicians thought if they wanted to implement what were then considered outlandish free-market ideas. To do that would require an ambitious and somewhat disingenuous public relations campaign. The best way to do this, Hayek told Fisher, who took notes, was to start “a scholarly institute” that would wage a “battle of ideas.” If Fisher succeeded, Hayek told him, he would change the course of history. To succeed, however, required some deception about the think tank’s true aims. Fisher’s partner in the venture, Oliver Smedley, wrote to Fisher saying that they needed to be “cagey” and disguise their organization as neutral and nonpartisan.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

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

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

They’re equally unwelcoming for sane, decent people who happen to be fiscally conservative, classically liberal, libertarian, or—dare I say it—the worst thing of all: straight, white, and male. Rather than being all-inclusive and fair, the left is now authoritarian and puritanical. It has replaced the battle of ideas with a battle of feelings, while trading honesty with outrage. So, instead of retracing why I left the left, what you need is a book about how to leave the left—and where to go next. You need a path forward—a road map of how to get there. And even if you’ve left the left already, or never were part of the left in the first place, this book will help you understand our crazy political climate.

There’s an old joke that if you have three Jews at a table, then you have four opinions. Now try a family of thirty! That was my home life and I truly loved the endless debate. But our differences never surpassed our respect for one another. By the time dessert was done we’d pressed the reset button and let it all go. It was a playful battle of ideas. It was also the original safe space because there was no punishment for having an “incorrect” view—well, apart from the time my aunt claimed that the Friends sitcom was funnier than Seinfeld, which almost split the family apart. Naively, as I grew up, finished school, and graduated from college, I’d hoped to have the same understanding with my peers in the real world.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

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

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

Yet, while we have made some incremental progress here and there, policy-makers have too often been more interested in conflict than compromise. At present, there is a large political problem. The very political polarization that has resulted from economic inequality has made it much harder to come up with an effective policy response to the inequality.4 Solving this problem is not easy, but it begins with a battle of ideas. This book argues that economic inequality is indeed the dominant economic problem of our time, but that the policy solutions to this problem should involve both an embrace of globalization, trade agreements, immigration, and international business, and a much more thorough policy framework to make sure that the benefits from these economic forces accrue to all Americans.

Wind and rain may be kept outside, but so are light and air.” 8. The phrasing of this last line evokes a book that I found inspirational early in my college education: Alan S. Blinder, Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society (Reading, MA: Basic Books, 1987). Acknowledgments This book contributes to the battle of ideas that surrounds us, hoping to improve the world in some small way. Whether or not it succeeds in this aim, it has been an immense pleasure to bring together knowledge I’ve accumulated in three decades of thinking about international economics. I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity, and for the unwavering support of colleagues, friends, and family.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

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

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

Our effort therefore differs from any political task in that it must be essentially a long-run effort, concerned not so much with what would be immediately practicable, but with the beliefs which must gain ascendance if the dangers are to be averted which at the moment threaten individual freedom.22 The Society thus made a ‘commitment to a long-run war of position in the “battle of ideas” … Privatized, strategic, elite deliberation was therefore established as the modus operandi.’23 Opening the ten-day event, Hayek diagnosed the problem of the new liberals: a lack of alternatives to the existing (Keynesian) order. There was no ‘consistent philosophy of the opposition groups’ and no ‘real programme’ for change.24 As a result of this diagnosis, Hayek defined the central goal of the MPS as changing elite opinion in order to establish the parameters within which public opinion could then be formed.

A hegemonic project therefore implies and responds to society as a complex emergent order, the result of diverse interacting practices.22 Some combinations of social practices will lead to instability, but others will tend towards more stable (if not literally static) outcomes. In this context, hegemonic politics is the work that goes into retaining or navigating towards a new point of relative stability across a variety of societal subsystems, from the national-level politics of the state, to the economic domain, from the battle of ideas and ideologies to different regimes of technology. The order which emerges as a result of the interactions of these different domains is hegemony, which works to constrain certain kinds of action and enable others. In the rest of this chapter, we examine three possible channels through which to undertake this struggle: pluralising economics, creating utopian narratives and repurposing technology.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

The battle is an “eternal state, as truth and falsity cannot co-exist on this earth.”58 In Qutb’s view, those who think that the war is not about ideas but instead about imperialism are fools: “This group of thinkers, who are a product of the sorry state of the present Muslim generation . . . have laid down their spiritual and rational arms in defeat.”59 Even worse, Qutb warned, Christendom is attempting to “deceive us by distorting history and saying that the Crusades were a form of imperialism.”60 The medieval Crusades, the European wars against the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the establishment of the State of Israel, the support of repressive Arab regimes—these events are presented by the West as though they were the ordinary stuff of power politics, the lamentable, but entirely routine, tendency of the strong to dominate the weak. But this “admission,” according to Qutb, is a lie. The Crusades were never about power or territorial control. The war with the West has always been a battle of ideas—between those who recognize that only God possesses sovereignty and those who impute it to man. Qutb’s crusade is not a nationalist one. Seeing the history of the Middle East as a legacy of foreign control, he argued, misleads Arabs into thinking that the solution must be local control. Arab nationalists think that the antidote to imperialism is nationalism—Churchill must be replaced by Nasser.

“There has been a Ph.D. dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion.” 19 After returning to Egypt, Qutb became a leader of Islamic extremist thought. He wrote his most influential work, Milestones, while imprisoned. In it, he argued that the war with the West has always been a battle of ideas between those who recognize that only God possesses sovereignty and those who impute it to man. 20 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State, gave his first public address on Ramadan in 2014. Qutb’s worldview permeated his message. Baghdadi called all Muslims to join the Islamic State—a state defined by belief, not ethnicity, nationality, or international law. 21 In 2014, the Islamic State released a video in which a follower declares that his group will eliminate all state borders.

., 257–58 “Astor Orphans,” 258 Atlantic Charter (1941), 189–92, 322, 330, 345–46 Atlantic Wall, 250 Attlee, Clement, 283 Augusta, USS, 189 Augustine of Hippo, 10, 438n Australia, 349 Austria, 82, 231, 240, 269, 284–85 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 101–2, 317, 323–24 Axis powers, xvii, 186, 189, 190–93, 214, 248–61, 267, 270–71, 300, 316, 318, 320n, 322, 332, 346, 415 see also specific countries and leaders Ayala, Balthazar, 25, 442n Baal, 74 Ba’ath Party, 407, 412 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 397, 411–15 Baldwin, Frank, 60–61 Balfour, Arthur James, 356 Balfour Declaration (1917), 356, 399 Baltic states, 318–19, 506n, 532n see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania Baltimore Sun, 128 Bangladesh, 328 bankoku kōhō (“international law”), 144–50 Bankoku Kōhō Yakugi (“Elements of International Law”) (Wheaton), 144 Banna, Hassan al-, 403–4 Bansho Shirabesho (Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books), 142 Basdevant, Jules, 267 Basic Law (Germany), 214 Bastille, Storming of the (1789), 83 “battle of ideas,” xxi, 110, 142, 288, 293, 342, 408–11, 414, 423 “Battle of Production,” 371 Baudius, Dominicus, 7 Beck, William, 129 Beelzebub, 65 Beer Hall Putsch (1923), 251 Behemoth (Neumann), 229, 295 Beinecke Rare Books Library, 38 Beirut Marine barracks attack (1984), 388 Belarus, 208–9, 318 Belgium, 102, 349, 463n Ben-Gurion, David, 356 Benin, 324, 347, 531n Berlin, 93, 217, 220, 224, 226, 228–30, 235–36, 274, 276, 292, 297n Berlin, University of, 235–36, 297n Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 463n Bible, 20, 74–75, 96, 375, 404, 455n Biddle, Francis, 261–62, 277, 286 bin Laden, Osama, 408–9, 414–15 Bir Tawil, 355 Bismarck, Otto von, 45–46 Black Coyote, 58 Black Hills, 50–51 Black Sea fleet, Russian, 310 Black Tuesday (1929), 225 Blaine, John J., 129 Blücher, Marshal, 67 “blurry lines,” 355, 357–59 Bodin, Jean, 294 Boehner, John, 393 Boettiger, John, 261, 262–63 Bohlen, Charles E., 207 Boko Haram, xiii, 368 Bolivia, 323, 358 Bolles, Blair, 186 Bonn, University of, 226 Borah, William E., 111–15, 118, 120, 127, 128, 129, 162, 165, 177, 195, 272, 470n, 472n, 474n-76n, 522n Borchard, Edwin, 170, 171 borders and boundaries, xv–xvi, 34, 35–36, 51–52, 53, 102, 105, 116, 148–49, 321–23, 328, 332, 354–58, 363, 368–69, 396–402, 400–401, 401, 419 Bormann, Martin, 290 “botched handoffs,” 355–57, 359 Bowman, Isaiah, 194 Braun, Eva, 264 Braun, Otto, 217 Brazil, 349 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 221 Brewster, Owen, 198 Briand, Aristide, x–xiii, xxii, 120–26, 129, 130, 132, 133, 167, 170, 175, 194, 195, 214, 217, 223–24, 249, 424, 471n, 472n–73n, 502n see also Peace Pact (1928) Briand-Kellogg Pact (1928), 129, 167, 170, 175, 249, 477n, 502n see also Peace Pact (1928) British Antarctic Survey, 386 British East India Company, 22, 68 British Empire, 22, 40, 67–69, 82–92, 102–6, 120, 133, 159–60, 165, 176–82, 184, 189, 191–94, 246, 247, 267–68, 312, 343, 348–49, 396–402, 401, 407, 463n, 500n, 531n Brooks, Mel, 382 Brulé Sioux, 58 Brüning, Heinrich, 245 Brussels Conference (1874), 79 Bryan, William Jennings, 103 Buchanan, James, 445n Buchenwald concentration camp, 264–65 Bullitt, William Christian, Jr., 197–98 Bulwer-Lytton, George Robert, 155–56 Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S., 57 Burma, 387 Bush, George W., 371–72, 373, 380 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 121–22, 124, 469n Butwal, 312 Byelorussia, 208–9, 318 Bynkershoek, Cornelius van, 72–73 Cadogan, Alexander, 190, 191, 199 Caesar, Julius, 45 Cain, 375 California, xvi, 31, 34, 48, 52–53, 133, 445n caliphate, 411–15 Calvinism, 19 Cambodia, 355 “Cambridge Group,” 248, 249, 253 Cameroon, 328 Camp Bucca, 411 Campo de Cahuenga, Treaty of (1847), 52 Canada, 349 “Can Peace Be Enforced?”


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket design by Faceout Studio, Emily Weigel Jacket images © Shutterstock and Thinkstock All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brunnermeier, Markus Konrad, author. | James, Harold, 1956- author. | Landau, Jean-Pierre, author. Title: The euro and the battle of ideas / Markus K.

In good times, tax revenue from banks would thus accrue to a European budget, while in bad times, this taxing power could provide the necessary backstop to guarantee restructuring without adverse spillover and contagion effects. This would be unpopular with small countries with large financial sectors, but also politically impossible for the United Kingdom. PART IV OTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES 12 Italy The battle of ideas in Europe occurs between countries, but it also takes place within countries. Italy—which in many other respects replicates on a national level the problems of the European continent—also reproduces the European contrast in economic philosophies. Every aspect of the recent European tragedy has its equivalent in Italy’s much longer historical experience.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

Just so, but by any definition Europeans, even with all their problems, live a far better life than they did in 1980 and intelligent political choices can help. As the British economic historian Harold James shows in his book written with Markus Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (2016), there are no immutable truths about how nations approach economic decision making. There have been times when France was excessively liberal and Germany keen on state intervention and deficit spending, even if more recently the opposite economic theories and practice appear more in evidence.

In the 800-page award-winning biography of Alan Greenspan by the British financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby there is no index entry for Trichet, let alone his warning at Davos in January 2007 that a financial crash caused by Greenspan’s ideology lay round the corner. In their book The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, Harold James of Princeton University and his co-authors observe that ‘A great deal of the interpretation of the course of the euro crisis was shaped by the British and American press – the Financial Times, the Economist, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – and that outside vision has filtered through a sort of condescension about Europeans not really getting it.’


pages: 391 words: 102,301

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

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

In subsequent years, it has become almost compulsory for political commentators to take a sideswipe at Fukuyama and to dismiss the end-of-history thesis as hubristic nonsense.5 Part of the problem is often a misunderstanding of what Fukuyama was actually saying. He was not predicting the end of events. His argument was rather that the battle of ideas had ended. Communists had stopped believing in their own system, and there was no new ideological challenger to liberal democracy on the horizon. This did not mean that all countries would become liberal democracies immediately, or that conflict would disappear from the world. Instead Fukuyama predicted a “steadily expanding post-historical world”6 of liberal democracies, which would clash intermittently with a “historical” world of countries that had not yet made the transition to liberal democracy.

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 253. Wilentz makes the same case in Age of Reagan, 177. 10. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 143. 11. Ibid., 147. 12. Reagan, American Life, 311. 13. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 275. 14. Ibid. 15. D’Souza, Reagan, 26. 16. Robert Wade, lecture at “The Battle of Ideas,” London, October 31, 2009. 17. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, 207. 18. Reagan, American Life, 204. 19. Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: Ending the Socialist Era (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 210. 20. Ibid. 21. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (London: Penguin, 2007), 88. 22.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

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

What the election result showed was that, though the weight of received opinion and ingrained assumptions should not be dismissed, they are also no longer decisive. There is an opening. To ensure that Labour is able to keep moving in this direction, it would be useful to think about a division of labour, wherein the grass roots continually sought to push the agenda farther than Corbyn is able to. Indeed, since ideology is not just about a ‘battle of ideas’ staged in the national media, but about where those ideas connect with lived experience, activists in their local communities are best placed to win ideological battles. Ideology in this sense is close to what Raymond Williams meant by ‘culture’, when he argued that ‘culture is ordinary’.19 It is what people take for granted in their everyday practice, the basic axioms they live by and which shape their tastes, their sense of justice and fairness, as well as their sense of the possible.

Ideology in this sense is close to what Raymond Williams meant by ‘culture’, when he argued that ‘culture is ordinary’.19 It is what people take for granted in their everyday practice, the basic axioms they live by and which shape their tastes, their sense of justice and fairness, as well as their sense of the possible. It is also the beliefs, conscious or otherwise, which they take pleasure in, cherish, and are passionately committed to. One reason why it simply isn’t good enough to ‘win the battle of ideas’ is precisely that people take far too much pleasure in their beliefs to give them up for a well-put policy statement. Put like this, winning ideological space is clearly not something that can be separated from organisation. There is no way of shifting people’s beliefs and assumptions without regularly spending time with them.


Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

“I WILL NOT BE PUSHED, FILED, STAMPED, INDEXED, BRIEFED, DEBRIEFED, OR NUMBERED. MY LIFE IS MY OWN.” —NUMBER SIX, THE PRISONER WHEN PATRICK MCGOOHAN’S Number Six angrily defies his captors with this litany in the seminal British secret-agent series’ opening installment, he crystallizes everything we need to know about the battle of ideas, ideology, and identity that spans the show’s all-too brief run. The premise, featuring the dogged, dogmatic Six bedeviled at every turn in his attempts to escape from mysterious captors and reclaim his identity, hinges on the idea that we’re all boxed in by a system—whatever that system is—that controls us at every step, and any notions of breaking free from that box are themselves just one more level of control.


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

The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a purely identitarian self-oriented progressivism that fomented in online subcultures and moved on to college campuses is that the very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left, like the one that began on campuses like Berkeley in 1964. Milo may be vanquished but not through a battle of ideas. The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything we could have possibly imagined and it doesn’t look like there is any easy way out of the mess that has been created. Suddenly, how far away the utopian Internet-centric days of the leaderless digital revolution now seem, when progressives rejoiced that ‘the disgust’ had ‘become a network’ and burst suddenly into real life.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

But these citizens of 2050 are being taught an economic mindset that is rooted in the textbooks of 1950, which in turn are rooted in the theories of 1850. Given the fast-changing nature of the twenty-first century, this is shaping up to be a disaster. Of course the twentieth century gave rise to groundbreaking new economic thinking, most influentially in the battle of ideas between Keynes and Hayek. But though those iconic thinkers held opposing perspectives, they inherited flawed assumptions and common blind spots that lay unexamined at the root of their differences. The twenty-first-century context demands that we make those assumptions explicit and those blind spots visible so that we can, once again, rethink economics.

There may be no perfect frame waiting to be found but, argues the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, it is absolutely essential to have a compelling alternative frame if the old one is ever to be debunked. Simply rebutting the dominant frame will, ironically, only serve to reinforce it. And without an alternative to offer, there is little chance of entering, let alone winning, the battle of ideas. Lakoff has for years drawn attention to the power of verbal framing in shaping political and economic debate. He points, by way of example, to the notion of ‘tax relief’ widely used by US conservatives: in just two words, it frames tax as an affliction, a burden to be lifted by a heroic rescuer.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

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

Having financed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, among other movies with a message, Skoll is now looking to further increase the impact of his philanthropy on policy, particularly towards climate change. Marion and Herbert Sandler, who made their fortune from banking, are trying to influence the battle of ideas by improving the quality of journalism (see “Up to a Point, Mr. and Mrs. Sandler” box). Google.org and Omidyar Network are philanthropic organizations that have deliberately given up tax advantages available to traditional foundations so that they can engage in political campaigning in order to achieve their goals.

And, as both Richard Branson and Ted Turner have noticed, there may be huge opportunities for philanthropists in the current failings of the institutions of global governance—the solving of which is shockingly low on the agenda of the world’s governments. To encourage them, the public should support formal roles being given to philanthropists in global governance, along the lines of the Gates Foundation seat on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. And, of course, there is the battle of ideas to be won. Philanthropists can provide a vital check and balance to often erroneous or ill-informed conventional wisdom by funding think tanks and even movements for social change, as Soros and Gates did with Bono’s campaigning organization, One. Skoll’s backing of films like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and Google’s focus on Darfur, for example, have helped put neglected issues on society’s agenda.


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 has produced the highest immigration levels in the OECD and increased the non-European share of the Canadian population from around 2 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent today. With this in mind, I pay close attention to the scope of the anti-racist taboo across different societies. Evolutionary psychology is not irrelevant, but the battle of ideas and political forces is what’s decisive. Flee or Join? Right-wing populism dominates the news, but white majorities are also responding to ethnic change in quieter ways. The economist Albert Hirschman spoke of the difference between ‘voice’, fighting for change within one’s social group, and ‘exit’, leaving it.38 Likewise, if voting for the populist right is ‘voice’, a way of combating change, white ‘exit’ consists of withdrawal into white residential areas or social networks.

The rise of right-wing populism with its anti-immigration agenda doesn’t threaten the integrity of the EU. Instead, the populist right is shifting the ideological compass in Brussels, just as it has altered immigration and integration policy in member states. Indeed, the EU’s popularity rose after the Brexit vote, revealing its resilience in the face of repeated challenges. THE BATTLE OF IDEAS Europe’s encounter with Islamist terrorism and large-scale immigration has also roiled the world of ideas though it is difficult to know how far-reaching these developments will turn out to be. In the 2000s, writers such as Bernard Lewis, George Weigel, Oriana Fallaci, Bruce Bawer and Niall Ferguson warned of the challenge that Europe’s growing Muslim population posed to liberal values.

Others instrumentally deploy norms to discredit political opponents. Often the two motives overlap.4 Established powers like the Catholic hierarchy during the Spanish Inquisition, or challengers such as radical Islamists, with their heterodox ideas, understand what evolutionary psychologists have shown – that rational arguments alone rarely win the battle of ideas.5 Therefore both use moralistic politics – which triggers our unconscious disgust mechanism – to gain the upper hand. Established groups accuse those with new ideas of being heretics, stooges of enemy powers, or even agents of the devil. Challengers accuse the establishment of betraying religious principle or selling out the uncorrupted people.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

In this era of dysfunction and collapsed principle, our only accomplishment is painstakingly constructing the argument that we’re not to blame and hoping that we’ve gerrymandered ourselves well enough to be safe in the next election. We decided that it was better to build and maintain a majority by using the levers of power rather than the art of persuasion and the battle of ideas. And we have decided that getting nothing done is okay. There are many on both sides who like this outcome so much that they think it’s a good model on which to build a whole career. Far too often, we come to destroy, not to build. As the country burns. And our institutions are undermined. And our values are compromised.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

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

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

By then it was safe to say that the free market had been repulsed. Milton Friedman had long before admitted defeat, writing in 2004, a couple of years before he died: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently). We have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course.”16 At the same time the spell of globalization had begun to fade. Economically, it was still achieving miracles in the emerging world, dragging a billion people out of absolute poverty, but politically it looked tarnished.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

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

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

Heller, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, that was so well attended it spilled out of the lecture hall and took on the heightened atmosphere of a show trial.54 All Friedman now needed to prove his monetarist theories were correct was to persuade a government—any government, but the U.S. government was in his sights—to abandon Keynesianism and adopt his monetarist notions. To overturn the ruling order and replace its ideology with your own was a revolutionary ambition. His AEA address appeared to have caught the public imagination, though he had yet to win the battle of ideas. But finding a political leader who would embark citizens upon a risky economic experiment to display the worth of monetarism would prove far harder. Before long, however, Friedman would be heading for Washington, D.C., with the aim of putting his big idea to the ultimate test. Hayek’s persistent warnings to Friedman to avoid becoming too close to politicians went unheeded.

Johnstone. 21.Friedman’s libertarianism appears to owe little to other libertarian thinkers like von Mises, Ayn Rand, or Murray Rothbard, who are given little or no credit in his writings. Rather, his own libertarianism—which he preferred to call “liberalism”—appears to have stemmed from his own experience, in particular his observations when working for Roosevelt’s New Deal. 22.“Liberty Is Winning the Battle of Ideas,” Register (Santa Ana, Calif.), November 23, 1986. Reprinted in the Mont Pèlerin Society Newsletter, May 1987, pp. 8–9. Excerpted from a speech at a banquet celebrating the move of the Reason Foundation from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, October 18, 1986. 23.Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 9th ed.


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

For many of the billions in the developing world and emerging markets, China, using its distinctive “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics,” has provided a dynamic alternative vision to that of America—whose standing suffered a major blow with the 2008 crisis, and now, an even greater blow with the rise of Trump. And global awareness that American-style capitalism seems to benefit mainly the top, and is leaving large numbers without adequate health care, hasn’t helped America’s soft power. Those who believe in democracy should find this deeply disturbing. There is a battle of ideas going on over alternative social, political, and economic systems, and we should worry about the fact that large parts of the world are turning away from the virtues of our system. Fortunately, the American style of capitalism is but one of many different forms of democratic market economies, as we saw in the reference to Sweden just above.

A misshapen economy creates misshapen individuals and a misshapen society All of this means that this war of interests—cloaked as a war of ideas, about the best way of organizing society—will not go away soon, with corporations, for instance, trying to get more for themselves at the expense of the rest. This battle of ideas is not just a sports contest. The reason we should be looking around for how we can fix our economy’s shortcomings and create one more attuned to our values is not so much because it will enhance the likelihood that our ideas about markets and democracy will prevail globally, but for what it will do to us, both as individuals and our country.


pages: 151 words: 54,074

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

battle of ideas, index card, Rubik’s Cube

After leaving the headmaster’s study, I was sent to an empty classroom where I wrote out the definition of the word pervert two hundred times, lest I ever misunderstand its meaning so grossly again. I look back at my desk, at the remaining mail. There is a council tax bill, which I put into an empty plastic tray marked ‘To do’. The other bits of post relate to my work. There is a thank-you letter from the organiser of the Battle of Ideas, praising me on the recent talk I gave. There is something from the Pro-choice Alliance and an envelope marked with the Catholics for Choice insignia. A technicolour image of a foetus at about twenty weeks’ gestation announces itself immediately to my seasoned eye as anti-abortion propaganda rather than information on advances in ultrasound imaging.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

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

The Soviet Union could not keep up. In contrast to his confidence after Reykjavik, by the end of 1987 Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues that they needed a new direction because “[w]e have no choice. We are… at the end of our tether.”85 Reagan’s Diplomacy: The Battle of Ideas from a Position of Strength President Reagan waged the Cold War as a battle of ideas. His empathy for Gorbachev and the Russians never diverted him from pursuing his ideological vision to victory. John Gaddis admired Reagan’s “ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity.” The president believed he could break the “psychological stalemate”…“by exploiting Soviet weaknesses and asserting western strength.

The actor-president had achieved “more stagecraft than statecraft.” Harsher critics thought the president was “reckless,” “hostile,” and “crude.” TV commentaries ranged from “Vintage Reagan” and “old stuff” to “naïve.” Lou Cannon, the national reporter who knew Reagan best, was the lonely voice who recognized that Reagan “was committed to a battle of ideas, not weapons.” Yet Cannon also thought that “Reagan seemed to be debating with himself,” an intriguing insight that would play out in the years ahead. Many Americans simply did not believe Reagan meant what he said, and a few conservatives feared that he did. The skeptical Cold Warriors worried that Reagan did not appreciate Moscow’s military potency and thought the president was too willing to limit arms.21 Prime Minister Thatcher embraced the “magnificent speech” as “a triumph.”


Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

฀A฀magazine,฀Encounter,฀was฀financed฀ covertly฀by฀the฀CIA;฀it฀was฀co-edited฀by฀the฀British฀poet฀Stephen฀ Spender฀and฀received฀contributions฀from฀some฀of฀the฀best฀writers฀ worldwide.฀ It฀ also฀ paid฀ well฀ since฀ it฀ was฀ well฀ financed.43฀ Modern฀ opera฀and฀abstract฀art฀were฀as฀generously฀financed฀as฀intellectual฀ writing฀in฀this฀battle. The฀idea฀was฀that฀it฀is฀the฀literate฀and฀the฀articulate฀elite฀that฀ is฀ crucial฀ to฀ the฀ battle฀ of฀ ideas฀ and฀ it฀ is฀ the฀ elite฀ that฀ has฀ to฀ be฀ moved฀to฀change฀sides฀or฀stick฀to฀the฀side฀they฀are฀already฀on฀and฀ not฀ be฀ seduced฀ by฀ the฀ other฀ side.฀ The฀ elite฀ were฀ enticed฀ not฀ by฀ crude฀transparent฀propaganda,฀but฀by฀high฀art฀and฀good฀argument,฀ where฀they฀could฀view฀the฀benefits฀of฀freedom.


pages: 651 words: 161,270

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

American Legislative Exchange Council, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, business climate, centre right, clean water, corporate governance, Exxon Valdez, Gary Taubes, global village, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, laissez-faire capitalism, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two and twenty, urban planning

These materials inevitably give a corporate view of environmental problems, and avoid solutions that would involve reduced consumption, increased regulation or reduced corporate profits (see Chapter Ten). The combination of activist techniques and corporate money is a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas. In the US, opinion polling indicates corporate funded anti-environmental efforts produced a major shift in public opinion within the space of a single year. In 1992, fifty-one per cent of those surveyed agreed that environmentalists had “gone too far”, compared with seventeen per cent the year before.50 Andrew Rowell, in his book Green Backlash, dates the arrival of the anti-environmentalist backlash in Britain as Spring 1995, when the media took up the “anti-green tune” and a number of books were published that attacked environmentalism.

‘Right wing think tanks go environmental’, Chain Reaction, no. 73-74. Burton, Bob. 1996. ‘Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP)—all washed up’, Chain Reaction (76):28-31. Burton, Bob. 2001. ‘Environment chair quits over tailings disposal’, Mining Monitor July 2001, 9-10. Burton, Douglas. 1995. ‘To win the battle of ideas, send in the think tanks’, Insight on the News 11 (10):15-17. Butler, Daniel. 1995. ‘Radicals without reins’, Accountancy 116 (1224):36-38. Byrne, Andrew. 1995. ‘Secret fund set up in bid to derail ‘green’ Olympics’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August. Byrnes, Nanette. 1994. ‘The Smoke at General Electric’, Financial World, 16 August, 32-34.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

Her view of the Cold War between the totalitarian East and the freedom-loving West had an epic dimension to it. As she put it in a speech delivered after her time in office: The Cold War was not just about military power and the threat of nuclear holocaust. At its deepest level, at its most important level, it was a battle of ideas, a clash of ideologies each rooted in different conceptions of the state and the nature of man … The great intellectual struggle must continue until democracy and freedom triumph.6 Throughout her premiership she invested heavily in her own image as resolute defender of the West against the USSR and its allies, and this undoubtedly helped her become an influential, if also divisive, world leader.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

While the early developers may have dreamed of the progressive possibilities of videogames, the reality has become much darker. From Gamergate to the alt-right, we can no longer ignore videogames as a field of cultural struggle. This does not call for censoring videogames, but rather for understanding that battles of ideas are won and lost on this terrain. There is much to be celebrated with videogame culture. It is one that I have grown up around and share with many friends. However, as Leigh Alexander has argued, “when you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.


pages: 649 words: 172,080

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 by Seth G. Jones

airport security, battle of ideas, defense in depth, drone strike, Google Earth, index card, it's over 9,000, Khyber Pass, medical residency, Murray Gell-Mann, operational security, RAND corporation, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, WikiLeaks

And in a January 2010 letter to bin Laden, he and Atiyah abd al-Rahman al-Libi had warned that attempts to attack the United States might “not succeed.”4 For Zawahiri and bin Laden, the more difficult struggle, and perhaps the most important one, was still being waged across the Internet and in social media forums. But even the battle of ideas for the hearts and minds of Muslims was not going well. Al Qa’ida had lost popular support because of its resort to violence, failure to achieve any of its strategic objectives, and promulgation of a fringe ideology. The third wave was coming to an end. For the moment, Zawahiri was safe. His longtime colleague, however, was not.

These three steps—utilizing a light-footprint strategy, improving the effectiveness of regimes in countries threatened by al Qa’ida, and exploiting al Qa’ida’s tendency to kill civilians—would help ensure that no fourth wave occurs. One of the most important battlefields will be on the Internet, since the struggle against al Qa’ida and its allies remains in part a battle of ideas. Over the past decade, radicalization has become much less formal than it used to be. “Extremists are moving away from mosques to conduct their activities in private homes and premises,” a British intelligence report concluded. “We assess that radicalization increasingly occurs in private meeting places, be they closed prayer groups at mosques, self-defense classes at gyms or training camps in the UK or overseas.”16 The rise of the Internet and social media fundamentally changed terrorist activities.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

There is a widespread assumption today that divisions are necessarily terrible in liberal societies, as revealed by the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, and we should all want to heal them. But in a sense divisions are what democracy is about. Democracy thrives where there is serious debate across a political dividing line, not a cosy conformist consensus. It is about a contest between clashing perspectives, a full-blooded battle of ideas, through which the majority can decide which way it wants to go. As with all battles, there are winners and losers, bitterness and bravado. That’s democratic life. The alternative is to fix elections or perhaps censor one side, to create an illusion of unity, like those polls where the dictator scores 98 per cent.


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

A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in the New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.” But since the election of Ronald Reagan, these libertarian principles have won the Washington, DC, battle of ideas. Since then, notions that the state should regulate the free market have been out of favor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may be that the Great Recession of 2008 led many to realize that this philosophy is a dead end for both culture and politics, but we seem to be lacking the political and cultural will to direct society onto a new path.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

I am also grateful for comments arising from talks on inequality given at Kings College London; the Houses of Parliament; One Sheffield Many Cultures; the Edinburgh Book Festival; the Hay Festival; the TUC Congress; the Annual Conference of the Howard Reform League; the Royal Geographical Society; the London Battle of Ideas; the ESRC Festival of Science; Oxford University’s Department of Education; the Equality Trust Annual Supporters and Local Groups meeting, during the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry Global Health week; the Regional Studies Association ‘Global Urbanisation: Challenges and Prospects’ conference, at Newman University (Birmingham); Nuffield College, Oxford; the World Economic Group Meeting on the World Economic and Social Survey (United Nations); the Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham; the Oxford Civic Society; the Centre for Social Relations, University of Coventry; the National Institute for Economic and Social research (London); and during the International Symposium on Homelessness, Health and Inclusion, held in London in March 2014.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

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

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

Your base contains many talented and experienced people; treating them as peers is the best way to attract them into leadership; working with them as you would with paid colleagues is the best way to keep them in leadership while bringing out the best in them. “Change never takes place from the top down, it comes from the bottom up” was a major applause line in Bernie’s stump speech. Whenever he would say it, people would cheer. We knew that “bottom up” meant all of us. “Bottom up” described our battle of ideas with the establishment, but it didn’t describe how a huge part of the organizing on the campaign actually worked. “Peer to peer” more accurately describes the concept at the heart of our distributed organizing program. Zack and I have led careers at the intersection of technology and organizing.


pages: 234 words: 67,917

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity by Micah Goodman

augmented reality, battle of ideas, cognitive dissonance, European colonialism, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus

There is one debate over the soul of Jewish secularism, and another over the soul of the Jewish religion. And they are both destined to continue. 11 SELF-CONFIDENCE AND FEARS ABOUT IDENTITY The history of ideas is also the history of battles between ideas. And the fallacies described earlier play an important role in our attempt to understand two of these battles of ideas. They help us understand, at least at this point in time, which side has won the intrareligious Jewish battle and which has won the intrasecular Jewish battle. The debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel ended with a victory for the latter. A Divine Voice emerged and declared that halakha would be determined in accordance with the positions of the side that was also attentive to the other side’s positions.


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

It’s much easier to go to battle for “Americans who did all the right things” and got the rug pulled out from under them than it is to stick up for the hardworking, hard-luck, drew-the-short-end-of-the-stick population who too easily remind us that the American dream is more ephemera than enduring reality. And with a working class that is now more black, Latino, and female, it’s a battle even harder to wage, let alone win. The Sleeping Giant Will Rise But a battle is taking place—a battle of ideas over the fundamental rules of our economy and society. The moneyed and the connected have won the last few rounds. The social contract born of the New Deal is in tatters. Organized labor is limping, and the large majority of Americans are struggling mightily to make ends meet and build better lives for their children.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Like Kim Il-sung, the members of the Kapsan Faction were veterans of Korea’s conflict with Japan, but they had become disaffected with his encouragement of leader worshipping. The group sought to change the country’s economic policies, undermine Kim Il-sung, and appoint a new man, Pak Kum-chol, as his successor. The battle of ideas that played out in a series of grandiose speeches before Kim Il-sung and his twenty-six-year-old son, Kim Jong-il, launched a purge against the movement. Some were exiled to the countryside, and others were killed. But more important, it became the moment when Kim Il-sung’s hold on power became unparalleled and the concept of dynastic succession took hold, according to the historical research of the South Korean academic Lim Jae-cheon.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Probably most important of all was the network of think-tanks established by British farming entrepreneur Antony Fisher, whom Milton Friedman later credited with being ‘the single most important person ‌in the development of Thatcherism’.23 Inspired by Hayek’s ideas after reading a Reader’s Digest condensation of The Road to Serfdom, Fisher had considered going into politics to promote the free-market cause. But Hayek talked him out of it, explaining, Fisher later recalled, ‘that the decisive influence in the battle of ideas and policy was wielded by intellectuals whom he characterized as the “second-hand dealers in ideas”.’ Hayek urged Fisher instead to form an academic research organization ‘to supply intellectuals in universities, schools, journalism and broadcasting with authoritative studies of the economic theory of markets and ‌its application to practical affairs’.24 Fisher followed Hayek’s advice, establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which was to become hugely influential in shaping British public attitudes as the years went on.


pages: 304 words: 84,396

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success by Matthew Syed

barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, combinatorial explosion, deliberate practice, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, sugar pill, zero-sum game

For understandable reasons, they are fearful that if their methods leak out, their competitive advantage will be diluted just as surely as if a patent had expired. In this context, sport no longer looks like the pure, untainted, objective battle between two individuals or teams; instead it is revealed, at least in part, as a battle of ideas; a battle between the men and women who, behind the scenes, design and construct the training systems. And if, by whatever dint of circumstance, an individual does not have access to the most enlightened system of training, no amount of hard work is likely to get him there. As we saw in the opening chapter, circumstance and opportunity are deeply and inevitably implicated in the success of every high achiever.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The death of capitalist realism has led to the rebirth of ideology, and of history. The political upheaval of the last decade is a response to the re-emergence of fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in. Politics is no longer a question of making technocratic tweaks to a stable system; it is once again a great battle of ideas and the movements that champion them. But with the death of capitalist realism, the greatest challenge faced by contemporary capitalist societies is no longer imagining a different kind of future, it is getting from here to there. Building a new politics does not simply mean changing the party of government.


pages: 263 words: 81,527

The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind by Nick Chater

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, classic study, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, double helix, Geoffrey Hinton, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine translation, speech recognition, tacit knowledge

For example, if the intricate mechanism of Nature is like the workings of a watch, as the eighteenth-century clergyman and theologian William Paley famously suggested, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that it must have a designer, and one far more skilled and intelligent than any watchmaker. Evolutionary biology, of course, tells a very different story. Battles of ideas are often fought over which metaphor is appropriate: is light made up of particles or waves? Are humans ‘risen’ apes or fallen gods? Is nature a harmonious society or a brutal war of all against all? Such metaphors are not marginal to thought, but its very essence. Our continual search for meaning is the struggle to find patterns in our present experience, in the light of the past.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

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

Other countries, peoples, and groups now have access to their own narratives and networks. They will not quietly accept the version of events handed down to them. Washington will have to make its case, and persuasively. This task has gotten more difficult, but it has also become more vital. In an increasingly empowered and democratized world, in the long run, the battle of ideas is close to everything. The Bush administration never seemed to understand the practical value of legitimacy in the run-up to the Iraq War. American officials would contest the view that they were isolated by pointing to their allies in “new Europe,” Asia, and Africa—many of whom were bribed or cajoled into the coalition.


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

The Democrats refuse to countenance cuts in entitlements, the Republicans refuse to raise taxes, and America is caught in a fiscal trap, taxing itself like a small-government country, spending like a big-government one, and borrowing massively from private savers to make up the difference. Where does this leave the state? In 2004, two years before his death, Friedman took a depressing view of his achievement: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently). We have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course.”38 That verdict would arguably be even more depressing today, especially when you look not just at the size of government, but its power.


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Brexit harms aside, the UK economy has performed indifferently; growth has been meagre in aggregate and barely registered in terms of household income. Its international reputation blackened, internally fissiparous, the UK is beset. Come 2029, will there be another ‘lost decade’ to chart and regret? It’s not that the Right won what passed for the battle of ideas. Labour’s ‘Marxism’ over the renationalisation of utilities grew in popularity: corporate performance in water, energy, railways and urban transport reduced the appeal of privatisation, even among Tory voters. People never stopped demanding and expecting a strong health service, good schools and a robust welfare state.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

From his ignorance it’s possible to see the conclusion that I have promised: an illumination of the ways that ignorance can be emancipatory. CONCLUSION: THE GREAT ENLARGEMENT The unknown requires humility. We should be wary of any ideology that pretends to have arrived at the end of history, claiming to have permanently silenced critics, to have won the battle of ideas for once and for all. Only the hubristic think otherwise. ‘To judge from the climate of opinion, we have won the war of ideas,’ Milton and his wife Rose Friedman wrote in a memoir published late in life.1 Friedman died in 2006. Signs of the great financial crisis of the early 21st century were mounting, but he missed it by one year, never forced to confront its devastation: the crescendo of home foreclosures, the unmeasurable number of suicides across the US and the world, unmeasurable because we don’t know for certain how many people took their life directly because of the financial crisis.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As will become clear, my own general position is that decisions to bail out insolvent firms are not for central banks. 2 Darling, Back from the Brink, p. 23. 3 A wider discussion of their place in the services state would center on principled limits on their role as architects, engineers, and operators of the core financial-system infrastructure. 4 Lazar, States of Emergency. 5 My version generalizes from Bagehot’s gold-standard context, which blurred the distinction between a country suffering a balance-of-payments crisis and an internal liquidity run on the banking system; and it emphasizes lending to sound firms only, which I believe is implicit in Bagehot (Tucker, “Repertoire”). 6 The costs of contagion are the central theme of Scott, Connectedness and Contagion. 7 Kynaston, City of London, p. 85. 8 For example, Posner, “Legal Authority,” arguing that the Fed stretched the law, saying that was essential, and advocating that it be given more crisis powers, with ex post accountability; and Selgin, “Last-Resort Lending,” arguing the other side. My own concerns are recognized by Posner. 9 Brunnermeier, James, and Landau, Battle of Ideas. 10 In the UK it was clear, under the terms of a published 1997 (refined 2006) memorandum of understanding with the Treasury, that the Bank of England needed executive government approval if it wished to go beyond its published regimes. 11 A more detailed discussion of these and other issues can be found in Tucker, “Lender of Last Resort.” 12 At the time, those published facilities did not cover lending against collateral other than government bonds.

Report of the Committee with Studies of Administrative Management in the Federal Government. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1937. Broz, J. Lawrence. “Political System Transparency and Monetary-Commitment Regimes.” International Organization 56, no. 4 (2002): 861–87. Brunnermeier, Markus K., Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau. The Euro and the Battle of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Buchanan, Allen. “Political Legitimacy and Democracy.” Ethics 112, no. 4 (2002): 689–719. Buchanan, Allen, and Robert O. Keohane. “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions.” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 4 (2006): 405–37. Buchanan, James M.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

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

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

This is, of course, yet another legacy bequeathed to us by the free market counterrevolution. As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president—Richard Nixon—was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S. economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that “We are all Keynesians now.”8 But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the very idea of industrial planning with Stalin’s five-year plans. Real capitalists don’t plan, these ideological warriors insisted—they unleash the power of the profit motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society for all.

Progressives can easily do the same: by showing that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed. But before that can happen, it’s clear that a core battle of ideas must be fought about the right of citizens to democratically determine what kind of economy they need. Policies that simply try to harness the power of the market—by minimally taxing or capping carbon and then getting out of the way—won’t be enough. If we are to rise to a challenge that involves altering the very foundation of our economy, we will need every policy tool in the democratic arsenal.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

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

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

It’s also about the injustice of it all, knowing that the wrenching losses of our era are not being shared, that the Davos class were never really looking after those at the bottom of the mountain. Which means that defeating the rising pseudo-populist Right is not just a matter of electoral strategy, not just about finding the right candidates. It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place. Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

In other words, while people still crave what they don’t have, it’s the fear of loss that ultimately influences elections. Twenty-five years ago things were very different. There were two opposing worldviews (market capitalism versus state socialism) and this tended to reinforce class divisions and angst, certainly in the UK and Europe. As a result, people were engaged with a battle of ideas. Nowadays there is an increasingly convergent worldview; or at least there is in the West. Am I optimistic about the future? Ultimately, yes. Nuclear war — involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a regional conflict, or a terrorist attack on a major city using a dirty bomb — is a serious possibility but still a remote threat.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

The end of the Cold War made a difference in this respect, too. During the Cold War, Americans might not have liked the ideas coming out of Paris or Rome or Berlin, but they clearly mattered, since the United States was engaged in a political conflict, centered on Europe, that was also an ideological one—a battle of ideas. Today, who cares what Paris is thinking? Yet five minutes in any Parisian bookshop shows you how passionately Paris still cares what Washington is thinking. The connection between the balance of power and what we might call the balance of fascination is complex and two-sided. Power is fascinating.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

Jamaat-e-Islami gained support among Karachi’s dislocated refugees, many of whom were seeking to define their identities in this unfamiliar place, and some of whom turned more deeply to religion. In November 1955 Jamaat-e-Islami held a conference in Karachi attended by two thousand people. The streets of the capital city reflected a battle of ideas. People painted graffiti for and against the mullahs. Secularists painted slogans in English, the language of the elites, while religious parties painted graffiti in Urdu, the leading language of the refugees. Questions about religion’s role in the government affected the interminable debates over Pakistan’s constitution in Karachi, and when the basic law was finally ratified in 1956 the country would be formally named the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

(As one promising response to the problem of extreme content, Google’s think-tank Jigsaw launched something called the “redirect” method, which serves potential recruits video testimonials from credible voices and other content designed to dissuade them when they search for a range of keywords typically used by wannabe ISIS members.) The United States and its allies need a decentralized social media army of credible figures—moderate Muslims and others, who probably aren’t going to be big fans of U.S. foreign policy—who can make a convincing peer-to-peer case for a different path. In a new power world, this battle of ideas is not a standoff between bureaucrats and terrorists. It is a showdown between Scottish teenagers and Pakistani business students. * * * — The future will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster, and more durably. In a world of fake news, climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxers, and all manner of extremists, the stakes are high.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Doha Development Round, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, value at risk

Blundell-Wignall and Roulet (2012): Adrian Blundell-Wignall and Caroline Roulet, “Business models of banks, leverage and the distance-to-default”, OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, Vol. 2012/2., 2012. Brunnermeier, James, and Landau (2016): Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2016. Caballero, Farhi, and Gourinchas (2016): Ricardo J. Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, “Safe Assets Scarcity and Aggregate Demand”, NBER Working Paper No. 22044 (February 2016). Calomaris (2000): Charles W. Calomaris, “Universal Banking ‘American Style’”, in Charles W.


pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

The society, which continued to meet regularly, and was presided over by Hayek until 1961, enabled extreme market ideologues who might otherwise have felt isolated or alienated to come together and plot change. It was a long-term project, and Hayek warned the others that they should expect a long-term, but winnable, struggle: ‘What to the contemporary observer appears as a battle of conflicting interests decided by the votes of the masses,’ he said, ‘has usually been decided long before in a battle of ideas confined to narrow circles.’7 The Mont Pèlerin Society was the seed that started a network of some 78 institutions. The society forged links with like-minded think tanks, corporations, governments and university economics departments, becoming the intellectual and ideological inspiration for economic fundamentalists around the world.


pages: 444 words: 107,664

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis

A Pattern Language, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, gentrification, place-making, South China Sea, the scientific method, Wunderkammern

Once the temple has disappeared from its original location, its history will terminate in this mausoleum. The prophets of modernism tried to push the future toward a definitive end, seeking a utopian solution to all human strivings. Marx and Engels, for their part, posited history as a dialectic: a battle of ideas in the process of progressive resolution, century by century, iteration by iteration. The Architect’s Dream is the very image of such a process, in which building follows building in a sequence of improvements, from the pharaoh’s authoritarian tomb to the cathedral made by the willing hands of inspired craftsmen.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Attachment to their professional ethics, it is believed, means they will do their best for those they serve, while the profession itself will ensure the professional learning and growth of its members. Seen from the point of view of the professions, the approach can be summed up in the phrase: ‘Give us the money and get out of the way.’ It has many attractions for government too: not much action is required, there is no need to engage in a battle of ideas; it assumes the best of the public service workforce and leaves much of the decision-making to them. It assumes that accountability, data and performance management are not necessary. For these reasons, the approach suits public sector professionals too – pay without accountability has its attractions, needless to say.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

What all have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly—anywhere, anytime. All feature network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. They know how to swarm and disperse, penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. The tactics they use range from battles of ideas to acts of sabotage—and many tactics involve the Internet.19 The “swarming” strategies noted by Arquilla and Ronfeldt rely on many small units like the affinity groups in the Battle of Seattle. Individual members of each group remained dispersed until mobile communications drew them to converge on a specific location from all directions simultaneously, in coordination with other groups.


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

When the liberal left explicitly challenged all of this and advocated the view that people should not be evaluated by their race, sex or sexuality, it held a convincing moral highground over right-wing elements who argued that they should. Liberals, spearheaded by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism and Gay Pride, overwhelmingly won this battle of ideas in the second half of the twentieth century and attained legal equality on the grounds of race, gender and sexuality. So successful were they that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, mainstream conservatives had largely accepted this too. Those socially or religiously conservative elements who still believed that women, black people or gay people should be restricted to certain roles in life or denied equal rights became recognized as holding an extremist, “far-right” position, and could expect reputational damage in a liberal society.


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

After all, Shamima Begum and others went to fight for the slave-owning, people-beheading caliphate of ISIS, but when their caliphate collapsed it was telling that they sought to be tried under impartial British justice rather than the sharia-infused laws of the Middle East. What is Britain? The Shipping Forecast, while comforting for an island nation, does not tell us of the storms to come in the battle of ideas. Squeamishness over defining the special qualities of our home and hoping that migrants will learn its political culture by osmosis has not worked so far. And it certainly won’t work now in the screaming, segmented and polarised age of social media. We are not even sure what we call our country.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

We cannot possibly gain insight into Artificial Intelligence, and its potential to change our world and our civilisation, unless we understand the centrifugal ideas that dominate it. To decide what to trust and what to reject, we must begin with the foundations of Western philosophical thought, and follow them all the way to today’s ferocious battles of ideas about the mind. Time to board our imaginary time machine, turn its clock back around twenty-five centuries, and take a trip to Athens …. 7 A BLUEPRINT FOR A UNIVERSE Plato was twenty-three years old in 404 BC when Athens lost the long war to Sparta. It was the last chapter of a disastrous struggle for supremacy that had lasted for almost three decades.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Once the fire of revolt breaks out, starving it of fuel takes political, social and economic actions as much as military ones, to start fulfilling citizens’ legitimate expectations for a greater dose of opportunity and dignity. Unfortunately, as Savonarola’s death suggests, such outcomes are elusive. An Islamic Renaissance? Stamping out revolt also takes new ideas—and on this front, the future looks brighter. The contest between moderate and extremist modernities is ultimately a battle of ideas, and while the Islamic State’s recent military successes have often been decisive, in the campaign for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, their gains are far less certain. Ambiguity reigns, especially among young people (upon whose willingness to break things and upset order, extremist movements from Savonarola to the present day heavily depend).


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

No matter that most of these claims were untrue.6 Mitchell began to bombard politicians with emails about the OECD reports, to write scary op-eds in national newspapers with headlines such as “Global Tax Police,” and to insult the OECD publicly. Hostilities had begun in the offshore world’s first big battle of ideas. To understand the intellectual underpinnings of offshore finance, it seems appropriate to start with Mitchell, one of the secrecy jurisdictions’ noisiest and most active defenders. He is a man of striking warmth and great personal charm. In his blog “International Liberty: Restraining Government in America and around the World,” he declares, “I’m a passionate Georgia Bulldog,” in reference to the mascot of the University of Georgia’s gridiron team, “so much so that I would have trouble choosing between a low-rate flat tax for America and a national title for the Dawgs.


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

Had the United States invested a fraction of its military spending in public health capacities, it almost certainly would have avoided tens of thousands of deaths in 2020, as well as economically disastrous lockdowns.95 For this more expansive and humane mindset to prevail, its advocates must win a battle of ideas in their own countries about the proper role of government and the paradoxes of security. They must shift political aims away from domination and toward nurturance. Observing the growth of the US national security state—what he deems the Predator Empire—Ian G. R. Shaw asks, “Do we not see the ascent of control over compassion, security over support, capital over care, and war over welfare?”


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

There is immense knowledge to be gained in space, but there are also deadly hazards to be faced, which we need to control if we are to protect ourselves and all other life on Earth. The value of the challenge itself, stimulating the creative forces of society as a whole and our youth in particular, will also be explored. There is also the question of the influence of an open frontier—or the lack thereof—on human freedom and on the battle of ideas that can sustain it or defeat it. Finally, there is the question of the human future itself: Will we be limited to one world, with limited resources and limited prospects? Or will we become something far grander in space, time, diversity, and ultimate potential? Many years ago, the Russian space visionary Nikolai Kardashev outlined a schema for classifying civilizations.1 According to Kardashev, a Type I civilization was one that had achieved full mastery of all the resources of its planet.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Universal suffrage helped open the door for all sorts of concessions, like hiking taxes on the rich and the creation of a welfare state that provided security for all. A democratic revolution – to reclaim by peaceful means the democratic rights and power annexed by the Establishment – is long overdue. Such a revolution will only succeed by learning from the success of the Establishment. Aggressively fighting the battle of ideas has proven key to its triumph. It has never won the hearts and minds of the British people: as polls consistently show, most people are in favour of higher taxes on the rich and against running public services and utilities for profit, for example, and trust in key institutions is at an extremely low ebb.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

It was by far the nation’s biggest philanthropy; in 1954 it outspent runner-up Rockefeller fourfold and third-place Carnegie ten times over. Most important, Ford’s letter crystallized a fear that had been growing in the minds of many American businesspeople—that they were losing the national battle of ideas. Ford’s Greatest Generation had won the Second World War, and when they came home they had helped create two decades of unprecedented, and widely shared, national prosperity. But they now feared that the institutions that created the country’s intellectual and ideological weather—its universities, its foundations, and its newsrooms—had turned hostile to business and to capitalism.


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

See the first graph in “Spain’s Reforms Point the Way for Southern Europe,” Economist, June 15, 2017, https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21723446-having-tackled-its-problems-earlier-italy-or-greece-spain-now-seeing-results-spains. For unemployment rates, see “Unemployment by Sex and Age—Annual Average,” Eurostat, http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=une_rt_a&lang=en, accessed September 9, 2017. 11. See Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (New York: Norton, 2016); see also Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk, “What Was Democracy?” Nation, May 13, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-was-democracy/. 12.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

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

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

You can’t feed people on philosophy, so we’d better find some practicalities. Our values need to be baked into national missions, not just to do and achieve things, but to amplify what we are. To signal what we’re trying to achieve so everyone can lend their help. Because what lies ahead is a battle of ideas every bit as big as we’ve seen in the past, but hopefully without such disastrous consequences. No one ever persuades the other side with force, only with shared values. CONCLUSIONS Great thinking still resides in Britain today, and in the next decade it will be highly visible both at home and abroad as other countries watch what we do with our new freedom.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

I meet Wiseman outside Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London, where he is appearing later as part of his Paranormality publicity tour. After he has baffled my demonstrably faulty brain with a coin trick in a nearby greasy spoon, I tell him that I want to write about his fights with Sheldrake, because they seem to represent a fascinating battle of ideas. He greets this suggestion with a contemptuous laugh. ‘I’ve got a few problems with Rupert. If you look at the mainstream body of parapsychology, he’s not very well represented. He’s rarely even discussed. The reason is that there are often errors in his work.’ Wiseman tells me that a German academic named Stefan Schmidt conducted a meta-analysis of Sheldrake-inspired staring studies.


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

It would be an oversimplification to say that all pious people are standing up to yell, “Stop!” They disagree about what to do; but they all agree that you cannot simply treat cloning or gay adoption as nothing more than technical issues or private preferences. Confronted with growing evidence of a global battle of ideas, they are damned if they are going to let others boss them around—and they are forging alliances with all manner of people to make their case. FIRST THINGS AND LAST RITES Four culture wars stand out. The two most obvious are over “life” and “family”—or abortion and gay marriage. The other two wars, over science and the proper dividing line between church and state, have stirred up great debates of yore: biotechnology is rekindling the great nineteenth century debate about evolution, while Islam’s progress in Europe is renewing Enlightenment arguments about religious authority.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

It is doomed to failure.”8 OUT OF CHINA The history of authoritarian development began about a century ago in China with Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and the economist H. D. Fong, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s, and US nation-building efforts in the 1940s, as discussed in Chapter Three. It would be fitting to conclude the story of the battle of ideas in the same place. Chen Guangcheng is a blind, self-taught lawyer from China’s province of Shangdong.9 Shangdong is the same province that the Allies ceded to Japan after World War I, provoking outrage from Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese. In 2006 Chen filed a class-action lawsuit against local officials who had forced women to undergo late-term abortions to comply with China’s one-child policy.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

I have elsewhere described the policies that dominated the development discourse, called the Washington Consensus policies, and shaped the conditions imposed on developing countries.10 This book is about how these same ideas shaped what was viewed as the next step in the tremendously important project of European integration, the sharing of a common currency—and derailed it. Today, the same battle of ideas is being fought in myriad skirmishes. Indeed, in some cases, even the arguments and evidence presented are fundamentally the same. The austerity battle in Europe is akin to that in the United States, where conservatives have attempted to downsize government spending, including for badly needed infrastructure, even while unemployment remains high and resources remain idle.


East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, British Empire, card file, foreign exchange controls, nuremberg principles

“My uncle was very reserved; I could ask any questions, but he expressed no views to me at all. My aunt was the same; she just kept very quiet.” Beigbeder had no recollection of meeting Lauterpacht or Lemkin but knew both by name and repute, even then, and the arguments each was pursuing. Yet he didn’t focus on the battle of ideas that divided the two Lemberg men, the individual and the group. “I was too young and ignorant!” Now, many years later, he recognized its importance and vitality, a starting point for modern international law. Donnedieu and Falco sometimes talked about Lemkin in a lighthearted way. The man had an “obsession” with genocide; that he remembered them saying.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

With the rarest exceptions, the names most widely associated with intellectual anti-Marxism and anti-communism in the last quarter of the century were not new. Even those who denounced ‘the god that failed’ had broken with their respective communist parties before 1970. The systematic attempt of Western Cold Warriors to counter the Soviets’ ‘battle of ideas’ by Congresses of Cultural Freedom did not effectively survive the revelation of CIA financing in 1967. If anything, the retreat from Marxism was generated within the old radical left itself, not least by the clash inherent in the revolutionary versions of Marxism between automatic historical evolution and the role of revolutionary action.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

It should also make a point of passing stringent new laws to prevent parliamentarians abusing their expenses, punishing any corruption severely and thus burnishing its reputation for probity. A proper political contest and an open debate about policies would help create a genuinely European politics for the first time. It could generate a battle of ideas and help stimulate new ones. It could encourage joined-up thinking and explicit political trade-offs. It would allow coalitions that span institutions and national borders to form. It would attract media interest and work against the capture of institutions by insider lobbies. It would engage Europeans more both in the European elections and in the EU political process over the next five years, giving them both a say and a stake in what was decided.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

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

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

Today just under half of ‘Consistent conservatives’ in the US cite Fox as their main source of information about politics.14 Those with consistently liberal views rely on a far wider range of news outlets, including the New York Times, and most trust PBS, NPR and the BBC. But there is a difference between the makers of Fox’s political programmes and the BBC, in that the former believe they are in a battle of ideas while the latter genuinely think they are reporting the truth. Conservative partisans accept the postmodern idea that there is no neutral truth, while the BBC is so keen to respond to criticism of bias, not just because of their public funding, but because they really do believe they are impartial and such a thing as impartiality is achievable.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Although notions of personal probability had been implicit for many years, Ramsey was the first to describe ‘subjective probability’ in a more formal way. 9 Ramsey further proposed that the mathematics which had been used for the analysis of probabilities based on frequencies could be applied to these subjective probabilities. Similar analysis was developed independently by Bruno de Finetti, an Italian statistician who bizarrely linked his academic work on probability to his personal support for fascism. 10 Ramsey and de Finetti won, and Keynes and Knight lost, that historic battle of ideas over the nature of uncertainty. The result was that the concept of radical uncertainty virtually disappeared from the mainstream of economics for more than half a century. 11 The use of subjective probabilities, and the associated mathematics, seemed to turn the mysteries of radical uncertainty into puzzles with calculable solutions.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

In the first decades of the 21st Century, we associate it with warring political tribes, talking over each other on current affairs programmes, neither showing the least interest in ever changing their position, their own behaviour more readily explained by their sense of identity than by any appreciation for argument. But for Mill it was not just about conflict. He despised the ‘blind rage’ with which different schools of philosophical thought went into battle with one another. Opposition was only the opening stage of the battle of ideas. It was also about synthesis. Intellectual progress came from finding that which was true or meaningful in your opponent’s argument and incorporating it into your own. At the heart of that thought was an astonishingly humble realisation: that there could be truth in the words of someone you disagreed with.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

The memes of Islamic fundamentalism and those of Enlightenment liberalism clash with each other in various ways around the world, as do various families of memes within each of these broad traditions. Much of the history of the twentieth century consisted of Marxist memes, fascist memes, and the memes of capitalist democracy slugging it out through our bodies, our voices, and our communication technologies. These historical skirmishes were, in essence, battles of ideas, and the people caught up in them merely vessels through which these ideas fought for supremacy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if they’d been born in a different part of the world, or even just a different part of town, they’d have been fighting for the other side. Thus, it’s almost as if the ideas themselves were fighting each other through whichever humans they happened to infest.


A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

A desire to record and preserve Egypt’s ancient patrimony before it was lost forever became a key motivation for nineteenth-century Egyptologists, starting with Champollion. In his case, a further spur to action may have been the sense of growing British activity in Egypt, as witnessed by the burgeoning number of travellers’ accounts. France may have lost the Battle of the Nile, but it wasn’t about to lose the battle of ideas or of science – not if Champollion had anything to do with it. Rosellini’s patron, Grand Duke Leopoldo II, supported the idea of a Franco-Tuscan joint expedition from the outset. It would bring glory to his dynasty – then vying with the House of Savoy for pre-eminence in Italy – and promised to enrich his Florentine collection with further treasures.


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

See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 4. See Harold James, Europe Reborn, A History 1914–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 231–33. 5. Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 6. Judt, Postwar, 338. 7. Computed from Ibid., 340. 8. “Transport > Road > Motor Vehicles per 1000 People: Countries Compared,” NationMaster (website), accessed August 06, 2018, http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Road/Motor-vehicles-per-1000-people. 9.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

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

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

“The Line Forms Here for Air Routes,” Business Week, November 6, 1978, 66. 67. Derthick and Quirk, Politics of Deregulation, 129. 68. McKinnon had worked as a page for Rayburn decades earlier; Rayburn died in 1961. This account is based on newspaper reports and on footage of the final meeting included in The Commanding Heights, PBS, “Episode One: The Battle of Ideas.” See Stuart Auerbach, “46-Year-Old CAB Goes out of Existence,” Washington Post, January 1, 1985; and Irvin Molotsky, “C.A.B. Dies After 46 Years,” New York Times, January 1, 1985. 69. Dorothy Robyn, Braking the Special Interests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17. 70. Quoted in Michael J.


pages: 605 words: 169,366

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

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

Time and again, Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies pushed for a more aggressive policy toward dictatorial foes, challenging the realist consensus that had ruled during the 1970s. Time and again, the neoconservatives won out: The United States had more power to confront evil than the realists supposed, and standing up for democracy gave America the high ground in the battle of ideas between dictatorship and freedom. By backing democracy in the Philippines, and later in South Korea and Taiwan, Wolfowitz and his allies put the United States on the right side of history—a contrast with Kissinger’s backing of Iran’s corrupt shah, which had put the United States on the losing side of a revolution.


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

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

With the help of her new friend in the White House, Pandith joined the U.S. government. Over the next two decades, she served in various roles in both Republican and Democratic administrations, eventually being appointed the first-ever U.S. special representative to Muslim communities. In this position, established to engage in the post-9/11 “battle of ideas,” Pandith traveled to eighty countries and met with thousands of young, disaffected Muslims in places ranging from the slums of Düsseldorf to the mosques of Mali. She foresaw a crisis of identity that would soon sweep the Middle East, culminating in the rise of ISIS. But she also saw something else.


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

. … From posts’ perspectives, there are six main areas of action for the USG as it seeks to limit Chavez’s influence: •Know the enemy: We have to better understand how Chavez thinks and what he intends; •Directly engage: We must reassert our presence in the region, and engage broadly, especially with the “non-elites”; •Change the political landscape: We should offer a vision of hope and back it up with adequately-funded programs; •Enhance military relationships: We should continue to strengthen ties to those military leaders in the region who share our concern over Chavez; •Play to our strength: We must emphasize that democracy, and a free trade approach that includes corporate social responsibility, provides lasting solutions; •Get the message out: Public diplomacy is key; this is a battle of ideas and visions. Septel provides detailed suggestions. [07ASUNCION396] A second follow-up cable goes further into the specifics of how to keep Venezuela from deepening its relations with the countries of South America’s southern cone. The cable discusses pressuring governments belonging to the regional trade organization Mercosur in an effort to block Venezuela’s entry into the group: 9.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

In San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin and London we have the opposite need: not to hear, yet again, the classic Western case for free speech, and the familiar disagreements about subjects like hate speech, but to listen, perhaps for the first time, to Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Burmese perspectives on the subject. Next to a willingness to listen and not just to preach, there need to be platforms on which the exchange of information and the battle of ideas can take place. We must also provide adequate translation to overcome the linguistic frontiers that persist on the internet, even as it erodes—though it does not demolish—political frontiers. Both of these things freespeechdebate.com attempts to offer, as do websites like TED, with its impressive array of volunteer translators.


Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy, Scott Brick

anti-communist, battle of ideas, disinformation, diversified portfolio, false flag, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information retrieval, operational security, union organizing, urban renewal

And a dangerous one, more dangerous than this academician realized. How alike they were, the KGB Chairman realized. This one, comfortably sipping his brown Starka, believed absolutely in an ideology that could not be proven. And he desired the death of a man who also believed things that could not be proved. What a curious state of affairs. A battle of ideas, both sets of which feared the other. Feared? What did Karol fear? Not death, certainly. His letter to Warsaw proclaimed that without words. Indeed, he cried aloud for death. He sought martyrship. Why would a man seek that? the Chairman wondered briefly. To use his life or death as a weapon against his enemy.


pages: 773 words: 214,465

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

battle of ideas, clean water, dematerialisation, disinformation, invisible hand, mass immigration, megastructure, quantum entanglement

The multiple interstices propagated through quantum fields with the tenacity and fragile beauty of a nebula, an edifice forever shifting in tandem with the whims of its creators. It was no longer machine or even artificial life; it had become alive. What it might evolve into was the subject of considerable and obsessive internal debate. The factions were not openly at war over ANA’s ultimate configuration, but it was a vicious battle of ideas. Gore had not been entirely truthful when he had claimed to be a Conservative. He did support the idea of maintaining the status quo, but only because he felt the other, more extreme factions were being far too hasty in offering their solutions. Apart from the Dividers, of course, who wanted ANA to fission into as many parts as there were factions, allowing each to go its own way.


Cuba Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, cuban missile crisis, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Kickstarter, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, urban planning

Museo de Batalla de Ideas MUSEUM (Av 6, btwn Calles 11 12; admission CUC$2, camera CUC$5; 9am-5pm Tue-Sat, 9am-1pm Sun) The newest of Cárdenas’ three museums offers a well-designed and organized overview of the history of US-Cuban relations, replete with sophisticated graphics. Inspired by the case of Elián González, a boy from Cardeńas whose mother, stepfather and 11 others drowned attempting to enter the US by boat in 1999, the museum is the solid form of Castro’s resulting batalla de ideas (battle of ideas) with the US government. The museum’s collection has grown ever since, with the displays’ theme naturally centering round the eight months during which Cuba and the US debated the custody of Elián – but it extends also to displays on the quality of the Cuban education system and a courtyard containing busts of anti-imperialists who died for the revolutionary cause.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Licklider ate it all up, with gusto. Indeed, Norbert Wiener's Tuesday-night supper seminar was the high point of his week in those postwar years. Lick and the rest of the Psycho-Acoustics Lab contingent would hang around long after the plates were cleared away, jumping from table to table and happily fighting the battle of ideas with forty or fifty of their contemporaries from all over Cambridge. They would keep it up as they drove back to Harvard, arguing the fine points with one another in the car. And when he finally got back home to Louise, Lick would stilJ be floating high, his blue eyes bright with intellectual intoxication.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

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

He had been traumatized by watching the death of his brother during the Battle of Britain and rebuilt his life as a Sussex farmer. A staunch individualist, he had been entranced by Hayek’s book and managed to meet his hero after the war. Hayek told Fisher not to try to become a politician but instead to try to win the battle of ideas by forming some kind of institute or organization to fight the rotting influence of the State. It was a message Fisher never forgot. Luckily for him, the State stepped in to help him spread it. In 1952 his herd of cattle contracted foot and mouth disease and had to be destroyed. Fisher used his compensation money to visit the United States.25 There he not only picked up the latest free-market thinking but visited a huge experimental ‘broiler chicken’ farm at Cornell University, where 15,000 birds were being raised under one roof.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

‘In a true state, there is no landed property, no industry, no material thing, which as a crude element of this kind could make a bargain with the state; in it there are only spiritual forces, and only in their state forms of resurrection in their political rebirth, are these natural forces entitled to a voice in the state … The state’, he went on, ‘pervades the whole of nature with spiritual nerves’, and at every point, what was to be apparent was ‘not matter, but form … not the unfree object’ but the ‘free human being’.92 Young Hegelianism had grown out of the battle of ideas following the publication of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus in 1835. By 1842, Karl’s republicanism was one variant of a common position shared by the Bauer brothers, Ruge and Feuerbach. As the Rheinische Zeitung articles testify, it was a political position remote from the arguments of Hegel himself.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

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

But Lenin was able to mount an opportunistic campaign to seize power by taking advantage of an organized party, a disorganized state, and a feeble civil society. These, Gramsci believed, were exceptional and peculiarly “eastern” conditions, quite different from the complex civil societies and structures of Western states, where the only course was first to fight the battle of ideas. “The war of position in politics,” he insisted, “is the concept of hegemony.” This was, according to one authority, “a capsule description of his entire strategic argument.”20 Gramsci never got the chance to complete his analysis, let alone put it into practice. Nonetheless, there was a tension at its heart that flowed from his core Marxism.


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

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

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt announced he would allow challengers to run against him, but his government would still control which parties could participate. Bush made personnel moves intended to advance his democracy agenda. He enlisted Karen Hughes to come back from Texas and serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, asking her to take over the government’s moribund campaign to promote American values overseas and wage the battle of ideas with Islamic extremists. And he sent Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, to be president of the World Bank, where he could promote democracy along with development. The elevation of Rice and the return of Hughes reflected an effort by Bush to cast off some of the unilateralist cowboy image.