opioid epidemic / opioid crisis

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Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

“public outrage”: Nan Goldin, author interview, July 24, 2020. on a par with Sally Mann: See: Thessaly La Force, “Nan Goldin Survived Overdose to Fight the Opioid Epidemic,” New York Times Style Magazine, June 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/t-magazine/a-heroin-chic-photographers-new-project-tackling-the-opioid-epidemic.html; and Janna Malamud Smith, “Art, Drugs and Money: How to View the Complicated Legacy of Arthur M. Sackler,” WBUR Cognoscenti, March 29, 2019, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/03/29/sackler-oxycontin-opioid-crisis-art-janna-malamud-smith. bad-boy hijinks: Mike Quinn, author interview, July 20, 2020. “make Nan stop”: PAIN meeting, author interviews, December 4, 2019.

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., “Association of Medicaid Expansion with Opioid Overdose Mortality in the United States,” JAMA Network (January 10, 2020), https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2758476; and Kendal Orgera and Jennifer Tolbert, “The Opioid Epidemic and Medicaid’s Role in Facilitating Access to Treatment,” KFF, May 24, 2019, https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/the-opioid-epidemic-and-medicaids-role-in-facilitating-access-to-treatment/. last or next to last: “2018 Annual Report,” America’s Health Rankings, United Health Foundation, 2022, https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2018-annual-report/findings-state-rankings. cumbersome access barriers: “Spotlight on Mississippi: Best Practices and Next Steps in the Opioid Epidemic,” American Medical Association, May 2019, https://www.end-opioid-epidemic.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AMA-Paper-Spotlight-on-Mississippi-May-2019_FOR-WEB.pdf.

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Although “taxpayers spend more than $10 billion a year through the Medicare program to support graduate medical training, about two-thirds of training programs do not support training in prescribing buprenorphine,” Sharfstein and Olsen wrote in “Making Amends for the Opioid Epidemic,” JAMA Forum, April 16, 2019. federal funding of syringes: Alex Ruoff, “Record Overdose Deaths Prompt Congress to Reconsider Needle Aid,” Bloomberg Government, July 22, 2021. “the decades of doom”: Dr. Arthur Robin Williams, author interview, October 1, 2021. a handful of walk-in: Suzanne V. Jarvis et al., “Public Intoxication: Sobering Centers as an Alternative to Incarceration, Houston, 2010–2017,” American Journal of Public Health (April 2019). “right now we have”: Greg Williams, author interview, August 2, 2021. Williams outlines his fixes for the opioid crisis in “What Would Dr.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

“The Role of Purdue Pharma”: Memorandum re. Hearing on “The Role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family in the Opioid Epidemic,” Committee on Oversight and Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, Dec. 14, 2020. “deep sadness about the opioid crisis”: “The Role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family in the Opioid Epidemic,” Hearing before the House Oversight And Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dec. 17, 2020. intensified the opioid crisis: “The Opioid Crisis, Already Serious, Has Intensified During Coronavirus Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2020; “ ‘The Drug Became His Friend’: Pandemic Drives Hike in Opioid Deaths,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 2020.

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In fact, more Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses than had died in all of the wars the country had fought since World War II. * * * Mary Jo White sometimes observed that one thing she loved about the law is the way it forces you “to distill things down to their essence.” The opioid epidemic was an enormously complex public health crisis. But, as Paul Hanly questioned Kathe Sackler, he was trying to distill this epic human tragedy down to its root causes. Prior to the introduction of OxyContin, America did not have an opioid crisis. After the introduction of OxyContin, it did. The Sacklers and their company were now defendants in more than twenty-five hundred lawsuits that were being brought by cities, states, counties, Native American tribes, hospitals, school districts, and a host of other litigants.

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Whatever White might say about the law getting to “the essence” of things, when your client is in the hot seat in a deposition, the whole point is to avoid the essence. “Dr. Sackler, does Purdue bear any responsibility for the opioid crisis?” Hanly asked. “Objection!” one of the lawyers interjected. “Objection!” another chimed in. “I don’t believe Purdue has a legal responsibility,” Kathe replied. That’s not what I asked, Hanly pointed out. What I want to know “is whether Purdue’s conduct was a cause of the opioid epidemic.” “Objection!” “I think it’s a very complex set of factors and confluence of different circumstances and societal issues and problems and medical issues and regulatory gaps in different states across the country,” she replied.

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

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

Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger’s 2017 study also backs Monnat’s thesis: “The opioid crisis and depressed labor force participation are now intertwined in many parts of the U.S.,” he said, in the Brookings Institution paper “Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiring into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate,” Sept. 7, 2017, found here: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/where-have-all-the-workers-gone-an-inquiry-into-the-decline-of-the-u-s-labor-force-participation-rate/. Related: Fred Dews, “How the Opioid Epidemic Has Affected the U.S. Labor Force, County-by-County,” Brookings Institution, Sept. 7, 2017.

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financial toll of $1 trillion: As reported in Altarum, “Economic Toll of Opioid Crisis in U.S. Exceeded $1 Trillion Since 2001,” Feb. 13, 2018. “An additional $500 billion is estimated through 2020 if current conditions persist,” the health care firm estimated. The White House Council of Economic Advisers calculated the costs at $504 billion in 2015 alone, according to “Council of Economic Advisers Report: The Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis,” Nov. 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/cea-report-underestimated-cost-opioid-crisis/. only a few voices of dissent: Seddon R. Savage, “Long-Term Opioid Therapy: Assessment of Consequences and Risks,” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, May 1996: 274.

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“really bad for you”: Aubrey Whelan and Don Sapatkin, “Advisers: Trump Won’t Declare Opioid Crisis a National Emergency,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 9, 2017. A few days later, he seemed to change his mind: Brianna Ehley, “Trump Says He Will Declare Opioid Crisis a ‘National Emergency,’” Politico, Aug. 10, 2017. the so-called emergency was retrumpeted: In ninety-day increments, federal agencies could more freely use existing money to mitigate the crisis, and Trump’s aides pledged that eventually Trump would release more money for treatment: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Declares Opioid Crisis a ‘Health Emergency’ But Requests No Funds,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2017.

Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origins of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier

Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

As the case played out in the Abingdon courthouse, witnesses would have testified and internal Purdue documents would have been entered as evidence. Whatever rebuttals defense lawyers offered, a bright light, both shocking and clarifying, would have shone on the actions of Purdue. That light would have illuminated the origins of the opioid epidemic and likely altered its course, sparing thousands of lives that would soon be lost. ELEVEN Empire of Deceit In 2018, an opioid epidemic that began two decades earlier with OxyContin finally seized the nation’s attention. Over 250,000 Americans had died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers. Every day, hospital emergency rooms nationwide treated 1,000 people for abusing or misusing these drugs.

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But counterfeit versions of fentanyl were rapidly driving up the overall numbers of overdose deaths. President Donald J. Trump, pointing to the death toll, officially declared the opioid crisis a national emergency. In early 2018, he announced a plan that included increasing addiction treatment and reducing the medical use of opioids. In that same speech, Trump called for a tougher approach to drug dealers, including using the death penalty. It wasn’t clear how his administration planned to fund its proposals to deal with the opioid crisis, but experts acknowledged that government officials had failed to stem an epidemic when they had had the chance. “We didn’t get ahead of it; nobody got ahead of it,” said Dr.

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Originally published in the United States in hardcover and in significantly different form by Rodale, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meier, Barry, author. Title: Pain killer : an empire of deceit and the origin of America’s opioid epidemic / Barry Meier. Description: 2nd edition. | New York : Random House, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018010496 | ISBN 9780525511106 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780525511090 (ebook) Subjects: | MESH: Opioid-Related Disorders—epidemiology | Socioeconomic Factors | Oxycodone—history | Opioid-Related Disorders—history | Drug Overdose—epidemiology | History, 20th Century | History, 21st Century | United States Classification: LCC HV5822.O99 | NLM WM 286 | DDC 362.29/9—dc23 LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018010496 Ebook ISBN 9780525511090 randomhousebooks.com Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook Cover design: Ben Wiseman Cover images: Tim Hawley/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images (pill), Imagospot/iStock (powder) v5.2 ep Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Prologue: Book of the Dead Chapter One: Pill Hill Chapter Two: The War Against Pain Chapter Three: Secrets of Dendur Chapter Four: A Pot of Gold Chapter Five: Senior Night Chapter Six: Hot Spots Chapter Seven: Kiddie Dope Chapter Eight: Purple Peelers Chapter Nine: The Body Count Chapter Ten: A Reckoning Chapter Eleven: Empire of Deceit Epilogue: The War Against Pain Revisited Acknowledgments Notes and Sources By Barry Meier About the Author PROLOGUE Book of the Dead Within a span of thirty-six hours in Philadelphia, nine bodies had been found just blocks away from one another.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

,” 60 Minutes Overtime, February 24, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-opioid-epidemic-who-is-to-blame-60-minutes/; Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein, 2017, “The drug industry’s triumph over the DEA,” Washington Post, October 15. 34. Peter Andrey Smith, 2019, “How an island in the antipodes became the world’s leading supplier of licit opioids,” Pacific Standard, July 11, updated July 24, https://psmag.com/ideas/opioids-limiting-the-legal-supply-wont-stop-the-overdose-crisis. 35. Katie Thomas and Tiffany Hsu, 2019, “Johnson and Johnson’s brand falters over its role in the opioid crisis,” New York Times, August 27. 36. District of Massachusetts, US Attorney’s Office, Department of Justice, 2019, “Founder and four executives of Insys Therapeutics convicted of racketeering conspiracy,” May 2, https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/founder-and-four-executives-insys-therapeutics-convicted-racketeering-conspiracy. 37.

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Morden, and Ellen Meara, 2019, “Medicaid expansion and prescription trends: Opioids, addiction therapies, and other drugs,” Medical Care, 57(3), 208–12, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375792/; Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Emma Sandoe, 2017, “Did Medicaid expansion cause the opioid epidemic? There is little evidence that it did,” Health Affairs, August 23, https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170823.061640/full. 32. Energy and Commerce Committee, US Congress, 2018, Red flags and warning signs ignored: Opioid distribution and enforcement concerns in West Virginia, December 19, 4, https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Opioid-Distribution-Report-FinalREV.pdf. 33. Brit McCandless Farmer, 2019, “The opioid epidemic: Who is to blame?,” 60 Minutes Overtime, February 24, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-opioid-epidemic-who-is-to-blame-60-minutes/; Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein, 2017, “The drug industry’s triumph over the DEA,” Washington Post, October 15. 34.

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Lauderdale, 2007, “Underperformance in affluence: The remarkable relative decline in U.S. heights in the second half of the 20th century,” Social Science Quarterly, 88, 283–305, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2007.00458.x. Chapter 2: Things Come Apart 1. Brookings Institution, 2017, Policy approaches to the opioid crisis, featuring remarks by Sir Angus Deaton, Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, and Professor Bertha K. Madras: An event from the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, Washington, DC, November 3, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/es_20171103_opioid_crisis_transcript.pdf. 2. Unless otherwise noted, throughout the book, we will refer to white non-Hispanics as “whites,” black non-Hispanics as “blacks,” and Hispanics of all races as “Hispanics.” 3.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A McKinsey lawyer said at a federal court hearing in California that the firm was facing fifty additional lawsuits filed by cities, counties, Native American tribes, union health benefit plans, and schools, among others. McKinsey also set out to mitigate the problems it helped to create. In 2018, Tom Latkovic, a senior partner in Cleveland, co-authored an article titled “Why We Need Bolder Action to Combat the Opioid Epidemic.” Latkovic also co-authored a McKinsey article that offered ten “insights” into the opioid crisis. One warned that opioids are frequently prescribed to patients “with known or potential risk factors for abuse.” McKinsey also supported a nonprofit group, Shatterproof, dedicated to ending the stigma of drug addiction. Its founder, Gary Mendell, whose son killed himself after struggling with addiction, gives emotional speeches, including one at a McKinsey health-care conference, about how the stigma of opioid addiction delayed the quest to defeat the epidemic.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A McKinsey lawyer said: Jeff Overley, “McKinsey Opioid MDL Has a Need for Speed, Judge Say,” Law 360 Legal News, July 29, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2018, Tom Latkovic: Sarun Charumilind et al., “Why We Need Bolder Action to Combat the Opioid Epidemic,” McKinsey & Company, Sept. 6, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “with known or potential risk factors”: Sarun Charumilind, Elena Mendez-Escobar, and Tom Latkovic, “Ten Insights on the US Opioid Crisis from Claims Data Analysis,” McKinsey & Company, June 5, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Gary Mendell: Franklin Crawford, “Man on a Mission,” Cornell Alumni Magazine, Sept.

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The firm wrote, “We have honored that mission by serving our clients effectively and investing in issues deeply relevant to society, such as social determinants of health, rural health, maternal health and behavioral health—including mental health, substance use and the opioid crisis.” * * * — Purdue is not solely to blame for the opioid epidemic. Doctors overprescribed OxyContin, pharmacists collected bonuses for filling prescriptions they shouldn’t have, the FDA and DEA allowed the epidemic to take shape, and lawmakers failed to enact laws to safeguard the public. “We didn’t get ahead of it.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Reducing Deceit through Better Incentives There are many culprits in the opioid epidemic. The federal government not only permitted the prescribing of OxyContin after 1995 but actually subsidized its use through public health insurance programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, that did not restrict utilization. Environmental conditions mattered too. Physical pain, which is disproportionately rural, and low levels of life satisfaction, which are more common in some cities, predict opioid use. However, it is hard not to put much of the blame for the opioid crisis on Purdue Pharma itself and the companies that imitated it, for their misleading campaign of deceit and addiction.

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., “State Legal Restrictions and Prescription-Opioid Use among Disabled Adults.” Lawsuits began: Kornfield et al., “Purdue Pharma Agrees to Plead Guilty to Federal Criminal Charges in Settlement over Opioid Crisis.” In August 2010: Zhu et al., “Initial Opioid Prescriptions among U.S. Commercially Insured Patients, 2012–2017.” fell by 27 percent: Bonnie et al., Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic: Balancing Societal and Individual Benefits and Risks of Prescription Opioid Use. One third of opioid users: Cicero and Ellis, “Abuse-Deterrent Formulations and the Prescription Opioid Abuse Epidemic in the United States.”

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Accessed January 18, 2021. www.oecd.org/health/obesity-update.htm. ———. PISA 2012 Results in Focus: What 15-Year-Olds Know and What They Can Do with What They Know. 2014. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf. “Origins of the Opioid Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew of OxyContin Abuse in 1996 but Covered It Up.” Democracy Now!, June 1, 2018. www.democracynow.org/2018/6/1/origins_of_the_opioid_epidemic_purdue. “Out-Producing the Enemy”: American Production During WWII. New Orleans: The National WWII Museum. www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/mv-education-package.pdf. Overberg, Paul, Jon Kamp, and Daniel Michaels.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

See opiates natural born liars nature, of lying novelty, delusion of obedience experiment, of Milgram opiates and narcotics, in patent medicines opioid crisis pharmaceutical marketing and Victorian Osteen, Joel Parker, George C. Parmeggiani, Luigi. See Marcy, Louis patent medicines dangerous drugs in opiates and narcotics in Penn and Teller magicians perceptual cognition, Shell Game on flaws in persistence of vision pharmaceutical companies placebo effect and pure research absence by pharmaceutical marketing of cocaine direct-to-consumer opioid crisis and to physicians physical perception, Shell Game and physicians opiates and narcotics prescriptions by pharmaceutical marketing to placebo effect anticipatory response Beecher and CNS regulating drugs ineffectiveness and confirmation bias and dental surgery study expectation in pharmaceutical companies and science of in Snake Oil Con specific lies and Trivers on Valium and pollination, in nature Ponzi, Charles Ponzi scheme Poyais MacGregor investment capital from MacGregor land sale of MacGregor made up country of MacGregor paradise claim of MacGregor Paris scam Praise the Lord (PTL) Club, of Bakker Premack, David priming behavioral lies told using proof, in Bait and Switch PTL.

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It seems that to the right crowd (and we’re all the right crowd), hope is a commodity you can sell for almost any price. Next, in chapter five, we’ll look at the expansive history of the selling of Snake Oil, which started as a railroad hustle in the Wild West, launched the craze for so-called patent medicines, and ended in a Victorian opioid epidemic. The newly minted FDA and its subsequent crackdown was intended to protect us but, instead, led us in a blindfolded circle through the “wellness” industry, new-age medicine, and finally right back into the opium den of prescription drugs. Is the story of Snake Oil really about gullibility, or does the strange science of placebos tell us more about the biology of belief than we realize?

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But it didn’t matter that what was in the bottle had nothing to do with what was on the label, or that what was on the label was almost always crazy, patent medicines like Stanley’s Snake Oil were the first really effective experiments in pharmaceutical marketing—a practice that would both be to blame for at least two American opioid epidemics and numerous other mass illnesses, casualties, and deaths; and also be responsible for the wild success of Stanley’s Snake Oil and almost every other ineffective or dangerous pharmaceutical in the last 150 years. While we’re on the subject of ineffective or dangerous products, did Stanley’s Snake Oil work?

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America by Howard G. Buffett

airport security, clean water, collective bargaining, defense in depth, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, immigration reform, linked data, low skilled workers, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

Retrieved January 13, 2018, from https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/cops_and_courts/drug-firms-poured-m-painkillers-into-wv-amid-rise-of/article_99026dad-8ed5-5075-90fa-adb906a36214.html. 9 Whalen, J. (2017, May 31). Ohio Sues Five Drugmakers, Saying They Fueled Opioid Crisis. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-sues-five-drug-firms-saying-they-fueled-opioid-crisis-1496248317. 10 City of Everett. (2017, September 25). City of Everett’s Lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, Everett, WA, official website. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from https://everettwa.gov/1681/Purdue-Lawsuit. 11 Le, P. (2017, March 14).

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A little girl in a supermarket trying to shake her mother awake after she collapses in an aisle. These leaders relayed how the extent of the drug addiction problem, particularly heroin and other opioids, was overwhelming their resources. I attended the conference and heard the concerns among senior law enforcement leaders about what lies ahead in the opioid epidemic. PERF produced a report from the meeting featuring the comments of many attendees. The sheriff of Hennepin County, Minnesota, Richard Stanek, said, “In my county, we had a 39 percent increase in 2016 opioid-related deaths, which generally matches the national trend of opioid deaths being about three times the homicide rate.”

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From my experience in law enforcement, I feel the evidence is so clear that drug use both directly and indirectly is doing serious harm to our country. Framing these legalization campaigns as if we’re just voting to approve a new golf course or a theme park seems wrong and self-defeating. Pill mills and suspicious pharmacies If you think regulating drugs ensures fewer negative impacts, pay attention to the skyrocketing opioid epidemic. Many experts have documented that patients who started with legal, prescribed, regulated opioid painkillers and became addicted, then switched to heroin when their doctors cut them off or they could no longer afford the pills. Some addicts originally were workers injured on the job, victims of auto accidents, or even young athletes with sports injuries who started taking opioid-based pain medication like Vicodin or OxyContin for a legitimate pain condition and end up addicted.7 Regulators, among others, dropped the ball.

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

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

McKesson Corporation, another giant pharmaceutical company: “Combating the Opioid Epidemic: Examining Concerns About Distribution and Diversion,” House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, May 8, 2018. See also Stephanie Armour and Thomas M. Burton, “Opioid Shipments to Small Towns Come Under Spotlight at Hearing,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2018. The government eventually fined McKesson: Erika Fry, “Big McKesson Shareholder, Governance Experts Say the Opioid Crisis Should Have Cost the CEO Some Bonus Pay,” Fortune, July 10, 2017. “The biggest drug dealers wear white lab coats”: Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys, “Drug Dealers Among Us: Look for Those Wearing Lab Coats or Pinstripe Suits,” The Hill, February 6, 2018. 7.

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The Globe described “an epidemic of untapped potential,” which seems about right whether one is talking about black neighborhoods in Boston or rural white communities in Oregon, not to mention Latino parts of Texas or Native American country across the West. Some Americans assume that the grim difficulties affect only those on the bottom rung of the ladder, but that’s incorrect. The economic and social fabric for much of America has been ripped apart, and this is expensive for everyone: the White House estimates that the opioid epidemic costs the United States half a trillion dollars a year—more than $4,000 per American household annually. One mechanism by which pain on the bottom is transmitted throughout the nation is the political system. Some 60 million Americans live in a rural America that is suffering, and the U.S. political architecture gives the frustrations of these rural Americans disproportionate political influence.

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Some 80 percent of Americans addicted to opioids began with prescription painkillers, not with illegal street drugs. Essentially, pharmaceutical executives acted like Colombian drug lords, with legal approval. Many cities and states, including Baltimore, are now suing Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies to recover some of the costs of treating the opioid epidemic, but no one can ever give Daniel back what he lost. “The biggest drug dealers wear white lab coats or pinstripe suits, not hoodies or the gang garb of street-level dealers,” Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University and Keith Humphreys of Stanford University have noted. The failure to imprison any of the Purdue executives shouldn’t surprise us.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

The results have been devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and countless communities, particularly in small towns and rural areas, have been ravaged. The addiction crisis has taken a financial toll as well. One 2016 study estimated that the opioid epidemic had already cost the US economy almost $80 billion. The most serious consequence of the opioid crisis is an alarming rise in overdose deaths. In 2016, sixty-four thousand Americans were killed by overdoses—triple the number of 2000—with the vast majority of deaths linked to opioid abuse. To put this in perspective, it means more Americans died of overdoses in a single year than during the entirety of the Vietnam War.

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The thick concentration of services has attracted opioid addicts from all over New England, including some who are looking for treatment and others who just want a safer place to shoot up. The city is struggling to keep up with the demand, but recently it opened what the journalist Susan Zalkind, in an article on the “infrastructure of the opioid epidemic,” calls a “no questions asked ‘engagement space’ ” that operates like a library, without requiring names or identification from its patrons. The clinic aims at getting addicts and drug abusers off the streets and into therapeutic programs, as does its neighbor, the Supportive Place for Observation and Treatment (SPOT), which monitors drug users to prevent overdoses and protect them, particularly women, from assault.

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almost $80 billion: Curtis Florence, Chao Zhou, Feijun Luo, and Likang Xu, “The Economic Burden of Prescription Opioid Overdose, Abuse, and Dependence in the United States, 2013,” Medical Care 54, no. 10 (2016): 901–6. linked to opioid abuse: German Lopez, “How to Stop the Deadliest Drug Overdose Crisis in American History,” Vox, August 1, 2017, https://www.vox.com/​science-and-health/​2017/​8/1/​15746780/​opioid-epidemic-end. the entirety of the Vietnam War: Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever,” New York Times, June 5, 2017. the next decade alone: Max Blau, “STAT Forecast: Opioids Could Kill Nearly 500,000 Americans in the Next Decade,” STAT, June 27, 2017, https://www.statnews.com/​2017/​06/​27/​opioid-deaths-forecast.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Instead of looking at how insane it is that we consume the amounts of alcohol we do in this country (the beer industry alone makes up 2 percent of our GDP), we’ve systematically labeled anyone who can’t hang as having the problem and washed our national hands of any responsibility. Alcoholism is a you problem, a them problem, a thing that happens to people with shitty self-control and bad genes. Alcoholism is not a we problem. (In contrast, the opioid epidemic, which claims about half as many American lives as of this writing, is a we problem.) The label alcoholic and the disease alcoholism keep us focused on a construct and distract us from the real problem at hand, which is our cultural and individual relationship with alcohol and addiction. We should be able to ask ourselves these simple questions and answer honestly: Does alcohol negatively impact my life?

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How Language Affects Public Health: Research Shows Word Choices Can Influence Well-being, Treatment,” Nation’s Health, April 2018, http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/48/2/1.1. 802 percent of our GDP: J. Kendall, “Study: U.S. Beer Industry Creates More Than 2 Million Jobs,” Brewbound, May 24, 2017, https://www.brewbound.com/news/study-u-s-beer-industry-creates-2-million-jobs. 80the opioid epidemic, which claims: L. Scholl et al., “Drug and Opioid-Involved Overdose Deaths—United States, 2013–2017,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 67 (2019): 1419–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm675152e1external icon. 81Ninety percent of: M. Esser et al.,“Prevalence of Alcohol Dependence Among US Adult Drinkers, 2009–2011,” Preventing Chronic Disease 11 (2014): 140329, http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd11.140329. 85“I believe the person”: Koch quoted in Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers (New York: Anchor Press, 1974), 231. 85Today around 20 percent: W.

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Let’s Stop Sending Them There,” ACLU Blog, October 17, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/jail-doesnt-help-addicts-lets-stop-sending-them-there; “Incarceration, Substance Abuse, and Addiction,” Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, n.d., https://www.prisonerhealth.org/educational-resources/factsheets-2/incarceration-substance-abuse-and-addiction/. 119medical doctors go to: Jan Hoffman, “Most Doctors Are Ill-Equipped to Deal with the Opioid Epidemic. Few Medical Schools Teach Addiction,” New York Times, September 10, 2018. CHAPTER 7: QUITTING LIKE A WOMAN 121“We know what”: Glennon Doyle-Melton, Love Warrior (New York: Flatiron Books, 2016), 10. 122So I left: Tempest, www.jointempest.com. 129John, a therapist: John Dupuy, Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). 129Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory: Ken Wilber, The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything (Boston: Shambala, 2007). 136People are kicked: W.

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

He grew looser. Funnier. He stopped channeling the style of other talk radio hosts, stopped shouting. His stomach no longer hurt before shows. He stopped writing out scripts to read aloud. Instead, he went into the studio with a loose outline and a guest lined up. He knew what he believed about the opioid epidemic, and he knew what he wanted to say. Behind the mic, the words just came. And there was plenty to talk about. The fact that drug deaths had overtaken traffic fatalities as the leading cause of death in the United States, a trend driven by prescription narcotics overdoses. The new Florida law, signed in June 2010, that barred drug felons from operating pain clinics, required pain clinic doctors to undergo special training and allowed them to dispense only three days’ worth of medication to patients who paid by cash, check, or credit card, instead of insurance.

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I researched and visited most of the sites described in the book. I also read numerous books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as dozens upon dozens of scholarly articles and government reports. I attended the 2013 National RX Drug Abuse Summit in Orlando, Florida, where I met many people on the front lines of the prescription opioid epidemic and heard numerous experts speak. I spent two weeks in West Palm Beach observing the federal trial of Dr. Cynthia Cadet. I also reviewed hundreds of court transcripts, pleadings, and investigative documents. While I did not use a great deal of specific data from the following books and articles, they were key sources nonetheless: •Barry Meier’s books—Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death from 2003 and A World of Hurt: Fixing Pain Medicine’s Biggest Mistake from 2013—and his years of coverage in the New York Times provided a foundational understanding of the resurgence of opioid narcotics.

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•The article “How Florida Brothers’ ‘Pill Mill’ Operation Fueled Painkiller Abuse Epidemic,” by Thomas Francis, published on msnbc.com on May 7, 2012, introduced me to the story of American Pain. •The article “American Pain: The Largest U.S. Pill Mill’s Rise and Fall,” by Felix Gillette, published in Businessweek in June 2012, helped me understand the pharmaceutical opioid manufacturing and sales process. I read numerous academic journal articles about the opioid epidemic. The following were particularly useful to me: •“The Prescription Drug Epidemic in the United States: A Perfect Storm,” by J. C. Maxwell, Drug and Alcohol Review, 2011. •“Black Beauties, Gorilla Pills, Footballs, and Hillbilly Heroin: Some Reflections on Prescription Drug Abuse and Diversion Research Over the Past 40 Years,” by James A.

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

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

But they navigate a delicate balance. If the host dies, that source of livelihood vanishes. This brings me, sadly, to the story of Jeff Pleus. The experience of Jeff, a white college graduate in Binghamton, New York, shows the differences—from cultural diversity to geographic span—between the opioid epidemic and the crack epidemic. But it also shows how much hasn’t changed. Like victims of the crack crisis, including Blossom, Jeff suffered under layer upon layer of shame. This silenced and punished him, while creating new corporate revenue streams. In high school, Jeff got solid grades. Like many of his classmates, he dabbled in drugs, smoked a bit of pot.

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As his dependency grew, so did his shame. Naturally, he followed shame’s central mandate and cloaked his addiction. He had reason to. People with a substance use disorder, after all, were widely deemed losers. And Purdue, the manufacturer of the addictive drug, made sure to reinforce this stigma. Across the country, the opioid epidemic was spreading. It would kill some four hundred thousand in the United States over the following two decades, and the public, from health officials to plaintiff’s attorneys, was starting to raise questions about OxyContin’s role in the crisis. The company’s strategy was to blame the victims. In a 2001 internal email, Richard Sackler, the chairman and former president of the firm, wrote: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible.

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One man suggested “having round the clock militias shooting these assholes.” One woman posting on the group, a sixty-year-old, seemed to fit the bleeding-heart liberal stereotype of the Upper West Side. (To avoid shaming her by name, I’ll call her Roberta.) She served on the board of Community in Crisis, a New Jersey–based nonprofit that fights the opioid epidemic and is dedicated to reducing the taboo around addiction. As she wrote in a Facebook fundraising post, her organization works to remove that stigma, to treat people with addictions simply as worthy human beings who are struggling with a serious medical issue, and to help them. Yet on the Upper West Side Facebook page, where neighbors were discussing how to keep the homeless at bay, she wrote: “Forget pepper spray or mace.

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

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

When former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg created a technology hub with partnerships among universities, businesses, and the local government, scores of other cities—including Chicago—decided to do the same thing. Our idea to sue big pharmaceutical companies for deceptive marketing when no one else was really addressing the opioid epidemic caught on quickly. More than seven hundred other cities are now involved in lawsuits. The Riverwalk project we built on the Chicago River was informed by what we saw happening concurrently on the waterfronts of Paris and Berlin and Dallas and Buenos Aires. This idea of repurposing old industrial waterfronts in cities has since spread across the world.

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* * * A few decades ago, our federal government would have been the primary actor in nearly everything I talk about above. They would have spearheaded the mass transit funding, the help needed for disadvantaged city neighborhoods, the protection of the environment, the task of confronting gun violence, mentoring youth, and the opioid epidemic. That’s no longer the case. These problems, in some combination or another, exist in all of our cities. The solutions—and the hope—reside there, too. I told you earlier about the three sets of lists I kept while I was mayor—one with the daily tasks, one with the weekly ones, and one with my biggest goals.

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“To have business support for this in the state of Ohio was unheard of,” says Whaley. “But our community knew if we are serious about the future, we have to pay serious attention to our future workforce.” The remaking of Dayton is well under way. Whaley has also been a very effective leader when it comes to our nation’s opioid crisis. The federal government has (finally) taken some steps to address the issue, but it is still dragging its feet to a large degree. Whaley studied the issue when she was first elected, in 2014. What she discovered was that the opioid problem had become a full-fledged emergency in her region of Ohio.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

It may come as no surprise that she ruled in the insurance firm’s favor—a decision that held up for two years before the courts intervened, overturning the ruling because of the “appearance of impropriety.” By that time, though, Bowman had left her position to take a job at—you guessed it—United Healthcare. The Opioid Epidemic Regulatory capture can have more sinister consequences. Some of the worst have manifested during the opioid epidemic, which has been spreading rapidly through the US since the early 2000s. The opioid epidemic is the worst overdose epidemic in US history. Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, exceeding the death rate during the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

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Mortality due to opioids is ten per hundred thousand and has reached forty per hundred thousand in West Virginia. The opioid epidemic has a demand side and a supply side. The demand side has been attributed to social and economic conditions in the US and thus cannot be blamed on deficiencies in the health-care system. But the supply side has been strengthened by failures within the health-care system. The evidence suggests that incentives and regulatory capture were aligned to foster overprescription. Both supply and demand matter. The “deaths of despair,” to quote Case and Deaton, existed long before OxyContin, but overprescription certainly made them worse. Even in the midst of the opioid crisis, drug makers were busy lobbying against prescription limits.

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“The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before,” Joseph T. Rannazzisi, head of the DEA’s drug regulation division until 2015, noted in the Wall Street Journal. “I mean, to get Congress to pass a bill to protect their interests in the height of an opioid epidemic just shows me how much influence they have” (Higham and Bernstein, 2017). And once the spread of opioids was underway, it was difficult to reverse. US authorities tried to limit access, but abuse had become so pervasive that restrictions led to widespread substitution of other drugs, such as heroin.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Physicians are the gatekeepers of medication for a reason: They are supposed to protect their patients from the harm that could come from unregulated use of those medications. Physicians, public health officials, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tell us that we are in the midst of an “opioid epidemic,” due to the incredible addictive power of these drugs. Yet when people become addicted to painkillers after suffering a trauma, the best advice they might get from physicians when coping with withdrawal is to go back on it to feel better. Can we really do no better than that? (Rieder 2017) In private communication with me, Travis Rieder noted that the United States has 5 percent of the global population and 80 percent of its opioid use.

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Singleton. 2017. “Real Wages and Hours in the Great Recession: Evidence from Firms and Their Entry-Level Jobs.” CESIFO Working Paper No. 6766. Schmitt, J., and K. Warner. 2010. “Ex-Offenders and the Labor Market.” Journal of Labor and Society 14: 87–109. Schnell, M., and J. Currie. 2017. “Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: Is There a Role for Physician Education?” NBER Working Paper #23645. Schwandt, H. 2016. “Unmet Aspirations as an Explanation for the Age U-Shape in Wellbeing.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 122 (February): 75–87. Schwarz, M. 2016. “The IMF and the Crises in Greece, Spain and Portugal.”

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Pain, Immigration, and Politics Recessions, slow recoveries, and policy mistakes have consequences. Pain is up, depression and stress are up, binge drinking is up, obesity is up, and drug addiction is up. Hopelessness is up; anxiety is up. Deaths of despair—from alcohol and drug poisoning and suicide—are up. America now has a massive opioid crisis, with 72,000 dying of opioid drug overdoses in 2017, up nearly 7 percent from 2016.9 The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from HIV, car crashes, or firearms.10 Low earnings and the loss of high-paying jobs have led to feelings of instability, insecurity, and helplessness, especially for the less educated.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Sam Fleming and Brooke Fox, “US states that voted for Trump most vulnerable to job automation,” Financial Times, January 23, 2019, www.ft.com/content/cbf2a01e-1f41-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87c65. 3. Carol Graham, “Understanding the role of despair in America’s opioid crisis,” Brookings Institution, October 15, 2019, www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-can-policy-address-the-opioid-crisis-and-despair-in-america/. 4. See, for example: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?,” Oxford Martin School Programme on Technology and Employment, Working Paper, September 17, 2013, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf, p. 38. 5.

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Studies, for example, have shown a direct correlation between regions in the United States most vulnerable to job automation and voters who strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.2 Before the coronavirus pandemic upended our lives, there was more focus on another health crisis that has been devastating the United States, and areas that experienced substantial middle class job loss also tended to be on the front lines of the opioid epidemic.3 If the changes we’ve seen so far pale in comparison with what might come, there is a real risk of future social and economic disruption on an unprecedented scale—as well as the rise of even more dangerous political demagogues who will thrive on the fear that is certain to accompany such a rapidly shifting landscape.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

But, the Times wrote, “both experienced drug abusers and novices, including teenagers, soon discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet or crushing one and then snorting the powder or injecting it with a needle produced a high as powerful as heroin.” And so OxyContin began to be implicated in a growing number of overdoses and deaths, concentrated in rural areas down on their luck. These deaths around the turn of the millennium turned out to be early signs of what years later would come to be called a national “opioid epidemic.” As the New Yorker reports, “though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribing—a shift carefully engineered by Purdue.” Eventually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would report that overdose deaths from prescription opioids quadrupled between 1999 and 2014, claiming fourteen thousand lives in that last year.

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Jonathan Levy’s quotes are from his chapter in the Philanthropy in Democratic Societies book mentioned in the text. Walker’s letter, “Toward a New Gospel of Wealth,” can be found at the Ford Foundation website: www.fordfoundation.org/​ideas/​equals-change-blog/​posts/​toward-a-new-gospel-of-wealth (accessed September 2017). The section on the Sacklers, Purdue Pharma, and the opioid epidemic is, unlike most of the book, a work of historical synthesis built entirely on the primary reporting of others. The publications are quoted in the text, but let me record my gratitude for the reporting of, among others, Bruce Weber and Barry Meier at the New York Times, Katherine Eban at Fortune, and David Armstrong for his sustained and heroic work at STAT.

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Still, according to motions filed by the state’s lawyers: Contrary to the picture of helpfulness and cooperation Purdue attempts to paint, Purdue’s employees were actively and secretly trying to prevent West Virginia from imposing any control on the sale of OxyContin. McDowell County, West Virginia, turned out to be “a proverbial canary in a coal mine when it came to the emerging national opioid crisis,” STAT noted. Back in 2001, when officials at the insurer first spoke up, the state as a whole was still at 6 deaths per 100,000 residents from opioid overdoses. McDowell was already at 38 per 100,000, however, and its fate foreshadowed West Virginia’s, which would see its death rate more than triple in the ensuing decade, giving it the country’s highest rate of deaths from overdoses and of painkiller prescriptions in general.

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

This worked well in some of the largest cities, where the reforms stuck, but far less so in many other parts of the country where police, prosecutors, and courts remained underdeveloped and easily susceptible to corruption or coercion by well-financed and heavily armed crime groups, even smaller ones. Starting in 2015 homicide rates began to rise again in Mexico, just as Americans started to become aware of the opioid epidemic in the United States. This was no coincidence. Although the opioid crisis began with the misuse of painkillers, it soon led to an increasing demand for heroin and synthetic opioids. Deaths from heroin overdoses in the United States quadrupled between 2010 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heroin and other opiates had once comprised a fairly small part of the drug trade between Mexico and the United States—so much so that smaller groups with only loose affiliations with the larger transnational crime organizations generally controlled the business.

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See film industry nail industry, 5, 73, 74, 75, 89, 117–118 Naranjo, Gerardo, 242 Narcos (TV show), 234 NASCAR, 227, 248–249, 250 National Association of Latino Elected Officials, 266 National Basketball Association (NBA), 250, 272 National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), 108 National Development Bank (Nafinsa), 108 National Entrepreneurship Institute (INADEM), 108–109 National Football League (NFL), 246–248, 252, 272 national identity, building, 210, 211, 235 National Park Service, 280–281 National Security Council, 146 natural gas industry and energy reform, 116–117, 121 exports, 6, 117, 271 oil and, 113–114, 114–115, 119, 271 pipelines for, 117, 119–120, 122 prices in, 114, 118, 119, 120, 124 ties in, 6 trade in, 120 naturalized status, issue of, 210–211 Navarro, Adela, 135–136, 139, 140 Navarro, Guillermo, 232 nearshoring, benefit of, in IT sector, 94, 95 Negrete, Layda, 161–162, 243 Nelson, Jonathan, 105–106 Nemak, 57 Netflix, 234, 241 Network for Oral Trials, 161, 163 Nevada Hispanic Legislative Caucus, 265 9/11, 144, 145 Nissan, 56 Nochistlán, Mexico, 188–189, 201, 202 Nortec, 90 North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 170 North American Development Bank, 52 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) controversy over, 52 elements of, 52 expanded relationship under, 59 impact of, 50, 55, 72, 76, 77, 78 López Obrador’s position on, 279 modernizing textbooks and, 212 negotiations leading to, 51–52 renegotiating, 53–54, 60, 270, 271, 272 root of opposition to, 21 Trump’s position on, 3, 21, 53, 269 withdrawal from, complexities and effects of, 53, 60–61, 282 North Korea, 269 Nuño, José Luis, 102 Obama, Barack, 21, 149–150, 166, 195–196, 199, 200 Odell, Ben, 223, 224, 226, 227–228, 249 Office of Management and Budget, 148 offshoring, impact of, 60 O’Grady, Frank, 203–204, 205 O’Grady, Katie, 203–205, 207 oil industry decline in, 115, 129 and energy reform, 114, 115–116, 121 exploration in, 115, 116, 129, 130–131 nationalization of, 115, 130 natural gas and, 113–114, 114–115, 119, 271 organized crime and, 129, 171 prices in, 117, 130 production in, 113, 114, 128–129 supply in, 115, 118, 124, 128, 129 ties in, 6 trade in, 120, 131 Oldenski, Lindsay, 90 Olvera, Enrique, 256, 257, 258, 259, 263–264 Olympics, 47–48 omnibus bill, 148 online services, 101, 102–103 Ooyala, 97, 99 open economy, 18, 63, 66, 77, 78, 196–197 opiates, 178, 179 opinion polls, 3, 21–22, 44, 186, 274, 275–276 opioid crisis, 178 Oracle, 99 organized crime breaking up of, 176–177, 179 citizens responding to, 165–166, 167–169 and corruption, 136, 139, 144, 145, 155–156, 178, 180 documentary film involving, 241 exposing, to the public, 163 growth of, 136–137, 142 homicides attributed to, 19, 31, 136, 138, 139, 142, 150, 165, 166, 168, 172, 177, 180 intelligence on, information lacking in, 175–176 journalists investigating, security issues facing, 135, 136 law enforcement coordination in tackling, 19, 23, 153–154, 155, 156–158 mapping, 170, 172 oil industry and, 129, 171 security cooperation on, 143–147, 149, 150–151, 157–158 strategic operations against, 170, 171, 172–174 Ortiz Mena, Tania, 124 Oxxo, 86, 102–103 Pablos, David, 242 Pantelion, 226, 227 Paris Accords on Climate Change, 123, 125 Pascual, Carlos, 166–167, 168–169, 215 passports, 221, 281 Pastor, Robert, 211–212 Pati’s Mexican Table (TV show), 260 Pemex, 115, 128, 129 PEN International, 213, 214 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 115–116, 174, 177 Pence, Mike, 200 PepsiCo, 95 Pérez, Ashley, 217–219, 221–222 Pérez, Hanna, 217–219, 221–222 Perry, Rick, 131 Pew Center, 194, 207 philanthropy, 14, 21, 80 Pilcher, Jeffrey, 259, 261 Pinzón, Alejandra, 192–194, 194–195, 196, 198, 207 Pioneer Natural Resources, 114–115 pipelines, 119–120, 122, 129, 171 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7, 76, 89 Pittsburgh Glass Works, 76 Plan Colombia, 145 Plantronics, 37–38 Plascencia, Javier, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39–40, 41, 43 Plastics Institute, 96 poetic bridge, 217 polarization, 22, 275–276 political prospects, 276–280 politics, involvement in, 264–268 pop culture, biculturalism and, 218–219 Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 7, 73–75, 77, 89, 90, 118 population shifts/figures, 8, 9, 12–13, 24, 185, 187, 190, 191, 196, 206, 207, 210, 266, 267 portfolio investments, 76 ports, 5 poverty as a driver of immigration, 2, 15, 189, 198 factors leading back to, 64 López Obrador’s position on, 277 persistent, 65, 274 reduction in, 191 Prayers for the Stolen (Clement), 214 Premier Oil, 130 Presumed Guilty (documentary film), 162, 243 Prieto, Rodrigo, 232 procurement rules, 148, 149 production key players in, industries with, 5 offshoring of, 60 rise in, 5, 57–58, 75 shared, 5–6, 18, 23, 29, 51, 52–53, 54–59, 61–62, 72, 74, 75, 89, 90, 270, 282 productivity disparity in, among business size, 65–66 efficiencies impacting, 59 programming, 98, 99 Prosecutor’s Office for Corruption, 164 Puebla, Mexico, 58, 95 Puerto Rico, emigration from, 4, 9 Puig, Claudia, 226, 231 Pujol restaurant, 256–257, 258, 263 Purdue, Sonny, 53 racial tensions, 10, 11 racism, 210 radio, 206, 247 Ramírez, Alejandro, 225, 240–241 Rassini, 55–56, 71 Reagan, Ronald, 51, 265 recession, 79, 187, 195 refugees, 184, 209 regulations, 84 Reid, Harry, 265 religious-based immigration, 208 relocation business, 205 remittances, 16, 188–190, 191–192, 202 renewable resources, 6, 117, 122, 123 See also solar power; wind power repatriating Mexicans.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

The question is why it was close, when the New York Times had forecast Clinton was on the verge of having an “unbreakable lead.” One could argue that a major factor in Clinton’s loss was a public health crisis that particularly affected working-class white men, who voted two to one for Trump. That is, the opioid epidemic. Drug overdoses had become the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty; about two-thirds of those deaths were caused by opioids. The epidemic actually lowered the life expectancy of less-educated white men, and yet it remains largely unaddressed. Over 300,000 Americans died from opioid-related deaths from 1999 to 2015, a rate that reached about 115 opioid deaths a day in 2016.

…

seventeen-year-old Trump supporter: John Fritz, Kevin Johnson, and David Jackson, “Trump defends Kyle Rittenhouse on eve of visit to Kenosha,” USA Today, Aug. 31, 2020. widest margin: Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education,” Pew Research Center, Nov. 9, 2016. “unbreakable lead”: Nate Silver, “The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election,” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016. opioid epidemic: Dean Reynolds, “Overdoses now leading cause of death of Americans under 50,” CBS News, June 6, 2017; Adam Dean and Simeon Kimmel, “Free trade and opioid overdose death in the United States,” SSM Population Health, Aug. 8, 2019. likely to vote for Trump: James S. Goodwin, et al. “Association of Chronic Opioid Use with Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” JAMA Network, June 1, 2018; Wasfy, Jason H., Charles Stewart III, and Vijeta Bhambhani.

…

Now, four years later, as the Trump supporters emerged from the subway—most of them older, working-class people who believed the president’s lies about the stolen election—Pottinger felt that the country had come full circle, and neither party had remedied the social blight of the working class, the loss of jobs to China, the opioid crisis that followed, and the endless, futile foreign wars. The country was even more divided now than it had been then. He got off at Farragut West Station and walked down 17th Street to the White House. There were larger crowds now. He made eye contact with a couple of middle-aged women wearing red, white, and blue.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

Ohio reported heroin deaths had increased approximately 400 percent from 2010 to 2016, before falling to 146 percent of the 2010 heroin death rate in 2019.119 While many rightly blamed greed on the part of pharmaceutical companies, and laziness and corruption on the part of government regulators, the overprescription of opioids was equally due to naïve or unskeptical compassion on the part of doctors and the wider society. Harm reduction advocates didn’t create the opioid epidemic, but they were part of the same movement starting in the 1990s urging the softening of restrictions on drugs, including hard ones. In addition to his funding agreement with Soros, Ethan Nadelmann raised money from other wealthy Americans including Laurance Rockefeller; John Sperling, the creator of the for-profit University of Phoenix; and Peter Lewis, the founder of Progressive Insurance.

…

But they’ve never actually worked outside of a pretty sheltered context.”49 Now, with the rise of remote work and delivery apps, many of us do not even need to go into the office and can live like only the superrich a generation ago could live, with workers delivering groceries, meals, and consumer products to our doorstep. The culture of coddling contributed to the opioid epidemic, some believe. Patients suffering pain felt more confidence demanding opioids while refusing to accept responsibility. Noted one author, “patients were getting used to demanding drugs for treatment. They did not, however, have to accept the idea that they might, say, eat better and exercise more, and that this might help them lose weight and feel better.

…

Thomas Wolf, interview by the author, November 19, 2020. 47. Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 72. 48. Ibid., 93. 49. Ibid., xvi. 50. Ibid., 25. 51. Ibid., 18. 52. “Homeless man talks openly about being addicted to heroin. We have an opioid crisis in America,” interview by Mark Horvath, Invisible People, June 19, 2011, YouTube video, 6:14, www.youtube.com. 53. Timothy Busby, “Opinion: With a New Nuts-to-Bolts Drop-in Center, Dorothy Day House Is Truly Helping the Homeless,” Berkeleyside, November 4, 2019, www.berkeleyside.com. 54.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a committee to end committees. In addition, Kushner’s new outfit would study the government’s internal technology, focus on job creation, encourage and suggest policies about apprenticeships, enlist business in a partnership with government, and help with the opioid epidemic. It was, in other words, business as usual, albeit with a new burst of enthusiasm for the administrative state. But its real import was that it gave Kushner his own internal White House staff, a team of people working not just on Kushner-supported projects—all largely antithetical to Bannon projects—but, more broadly, as Kushner explained to one staffer, “on expanding my footprint.”

…

* * * At lunch on August 8, in the Clubhouse at Bedminster—amid Trumpish chandeliers, golf trophies, and tournament plaques—the president was flanked by Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, and his wife, Melania. Kellyanne Conway was at the lunch; so were Kushner and several others. This was one of the “make-work” events—over lunch, there was a discussion of the opioid crisis, which was then followed by a statement from the president and a brief round of questions from reporters. While reading the statement in a monotone, Trump kept his head down, propping it on his elbows. After taking some humdrum questions about opioids, he was suddenly asked about North Korea, and, quite as though in stop-action animation, he seemed to come alive.

…

., 2, 8, 26–27, 41, 54, 90, 93, 212–13, 222 Nooyi, Indra, 88–89 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 77 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 99 North Korea, 291–93, 297 Nunberg, Sam, 11, 13, 16, 22, 144, 237–38, 248, 282, 291, 300 Nunes, Devin, 170 Obama, Barack, 27, 35–36, 41–45, 54, 61–63, 67, 90, 101, 104, 128, 164, 187, 215, 250, 269, 295 birth certificate and, 62, 295 DOJ and, 94–96, 210, 279 executive orders and, 61 farewell speech, 36 Flynn and, 101 immigration and, 63 Middle East and, 6–7, 42, 183, 190, 225, 227, 231, 263–66 Russia and, 95, 151–54, 156 Trump inauguration and, 43–44 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and, 198 wiretapping and, 157–60 Obamacare repeal and replace, 72, 116–17, 164–67, 170–71, 175, 224, 283, 285, 290 Office of American Innovation, 180–81, 207 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 116, 185, 285 O’Neill, Tip, 167 opioid crisis, 291 O’Reilly, Bill, 195–96, 222 Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 271 Oscar insurance company, 72 Osnos, Evan, 154 Page, Carter, 101 Palestinians, 227, 230–32 Panetta, Leon, 27 Paris Climate Accord, 182, 238–39, 301 PayPal, 21 Pelosi, Nancy, 78 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 77–78, 228 Pence, Karen, 124, 209 Pence, Mike, 92, 95, 106–7, 123–24, 171, 209, 218, 240 Pentagon, 7, 55 Perelman, Ronald, 73, 141 Perlmutter, Ike, 141 Petraeus, David, 263–64 Pierce, Brock, 56–57 Planned Parenthood, 117 Playbook, 171 Podesta, John, 27 Politico, 171 Pompeo, Mike, 49, 51, 157, 306 populists, 6, 24, 31, 100, 113, 118, 142, 174–75, 177, 276, 301 Powell, Dina, 81–82, 145–46, 176–77, 184–88, 190, 192–94, 229, 235–36, 258, 261, 265–67, 276, 279, 285, 296, 306 Preate, Alexandra, 1, 32, 130, 207–8, 238, 249, 275, 278–79, 299 Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act (2010), 24 Price, Tom, 165–66, 171, 291 Priebus, Reince, 77, 86, 144, 146, 150, 166, 171–73, 176, 203, 205, 207, 209, 229, 238, 257, 296, 304 business councils and, 89 campaign and, 9–10, 13, 18, 112–13 chief of staff appointment and, 26, 32–34, 60, 64–65, 67–70, 109–10, 117–24, 243–44, 305 CPAC and, 127, 130–34 Flynn and, 95, 106 inauguration and, 45, 52 Obama wiretapping story and, 159–60 resignation of, 282–85, 307 Russia investigation and, 171, 211–14, 216–17, 232–34, 261–62 Scaramucci and, 270–72, 282–85 Prince, Erik, 265, 267 Private Eye magazine, 74 Producers, The (film), 15–16 Pruitt, Scott, 21 Putin, Vladimir, 7, 8, 24, 37–38, 99–102, 153, 155 Qatar, 230–31 Raffel, Josh, 142, 207, 258–59, 279 Reagan, Ronald, 26, 27, 34, 58, 90, 126–27, 144, 201, 222 Remnick, David, 154 Renaissance Technologies, 58 Republican National Committee (RNC), 10–11, 13, 26, 28, 30, 32–33, 52, 112, 119, 172, 205 Republican National Convention, 21, 26, 28, 253 Republican Party, 2, 18, 30, 40–41, 81, 86, 98, 111–12, 117–21, 128, 161–67, 171–72, 201, 290, 303 fracturing of, 179–80, 253, 283, 306, 309–10 Rhodes, Ben, 41, 154, 159, 185, 215 Rice, Susan, 7, 41, 153 Rometty, Ginni, 88 Rose, Charlie, 309 Rosen, Hillary, 78 Rosenstein, Rod, 212, 214, 216–21, 279 Ross, Wilbur, 78, 133, 229–30 Roth, Steven, 27, 141 Rove, Karl, 57, 238 Rumsfeld, Donald, 27 Russia, 24, 37–39, 92, 151–56, 160, 190–91, 236–46, 273, 303, 307–8 Bannon on, 6–7, 238–40, 278–83 Comey and, 168–70, 210–20, 242, 244–45 Don Jr.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis. Mingo County, West Virginia, was one of the places in America most touched by opioids. A town in Mingo County with a population of 3,200 was shipped about two million opioid pills per year. Mingo County went Republican in 2012, but in 2016 Trump took 19% more votes than did Mitt Romney four years earlier. With one exception, every Ohio county in opioid crisis posted significant gains for Trump in 2016 over Romney in 2012, which helped him to win a state that he had to take to win the election. In Scioto County, Ohio, ground zero of the American opioid epidemic, Trump took a spectacular 33% more votes than Romney had.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

It’s a wonderfully useful set of traits to possess, or at least it once was. But it gets us in trouble now. It means we have a sort of built-in immunity to accurately recognizing and analyzing our modern habits and cravings—our inability to put down the phone and get a good night’s sleep, our opioid epidemic, our shared difficulties and vulnerabilities—and how they define our modern selves. In the 1970s, psychologists began experimenting with the implications of our highly evolved feeling of self-confidence. The psychologist Richard Nesbitt identified, for instance, an “actor-observer asymmetry”: a difference between how we explain our own behavior to ourselves versus how we explain the behavior of other people.

…

This was the first of roughly a dozen conversations I went on to have with people addicted to heroin over the next few weeks, but that first conversation with Patrick thoroughly dented my instincts about the kind of person that gets hooked. It helped, of course, that he reminded me of myself. He was white, male, neutral accent, like me. (And harm-reduction experts have long complained, and rightly, that journalists only recognized the depth of the opioid crisis when it began to kill people that resembled them. I’m caught in The Loop just like anyone.) But beyond that, he also talked about heroin in a way that I’ve come to understand is the most accurate picture of its power: as an irresistible force, like a storm front or a tide. In years of speaking with people in its grip, their feelings and their language on the subject are the same.

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

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

Millard (2015), A History of Self-Harm in Britain: A Genealogy of Cutting and Overdosing, Springer. 46J. Watts (2017), “Why do people self-harm? You asked Google—here’s the answer,” Guardian, 6 September 2017. 47“The family that built an empire of pain,” New Yorker, 30 October 2017. 48“How the opioid epidemic has affected the US labor force, county-by-county,” Brookings, 7 September 2017. 49Quinones (2015). 50See N. D. Schull (2012), Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton University Press. Chapter 5: Knowledge for War 1Around 1 million people died over the course of the Napoleonic Wars, compared to 600,000 in the American Civil War of 1861–5 or around 8 million in the Thirty Years War—Hobsbawm (2010), pp. 92–3. 2Quoted in D.

…

Descartes (1995 [1641]), Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, Cambridge University Press. 6“Trump succeeds where health is failing,” Economist, 21 November 2016. 7A. Case & A. Deaton (2015), “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,” PNAS, 112 (49). 8“Mortality in the United States, 2015,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 267, December 2016; “Life expectancy in US down for second year in a row as opioid crisis deepens,” Guardian, 21 December 2017. 9“A new divide in American death,” Washington Post, 10 April 2016. 10C. Becker et al. (1998), “The Demographic Crisis in the Former Soviet Union,” World Development, Vol. 26, No. 11. 11“Rise in life expectancy has stalled since 2010, research shows,” Guardian, 18 July 2017. 12L.

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

But since finding each other and starting a family, they said (and I observed), they used nothing but weed and tobacco; neither of them ever drank. Illegal drugs, however, were all around the valley—particularly opioids and heroin. The very month I had this visit with the Grubers, 60 Minutes ran a report on how the country’s largest drug distributor, the McKesson Corporation, had fueled the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to massive orders from small pharmacies in the San Luis Valley. “DEA investigators discovered that McKesson was shipping the same quantities of opioid pills to small-town pharmacies in Colorado’s San Luis Valley as it would typically ship to large drugstores next to big city medical centers.”

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See also Costilla County; La Puente; and specific individuals and towns abandoned structures in, 28, 205–6 accessing owners of land in, 131–33 appeal of, 11, 13–14, 24–25, 50, 70, 107, 142–45, 184–86, 195, 253–55 basics of life in, 41 beauty of, 68, 174, 259 counties in, 29 county services strained by, 28–29 county tax sales and, 132–33 Covid-19 and, 217–20, 226, 237–38, 256–57 crime and, 107–8, 168–70, 191–99 Denver Post story on, 55 development and subdivision of, 19, 114–34, 125, 130, 185, 250–53 drought and, 227–28 early infrastructure projects in, 116–17 fences and boundaries and, 247–49 first experiences of, 9–21, 38 geography of, 109, 250 grid of roads in, 15, 40, 122 grid resources near, 252 Harper’s Magazine story on, 144–45 Hispanic history and descendants in, 109–13, 111, 190–91, 246–47 indigenous residents and, 33 jobs and transportation problems, 14 land and mobile home purchased in, 135–44 map of, 10, 35 night sky and, 214, 256 night wanderers and, 215–16 off-grid lifestyle and poverty in, 13–14, 21, 24–25, 28, 40–41, 52, 55, 68–71, 184–87, 197–98, 252, 258–59, 264n opioid crisis and, 57–59 rattlesnakes and, 187–90 reality TV and, 145–47 roads and, 35, 40, 131 size of, 3, 26–27, 35, 144 sky watching in, 101 supernatural and, 232–35 unchanged nature of, 9–11 winter in, 41, 43, 48–50 San Pablo settlement, 110 San Pedro settlement, 110 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 109, 199, 246 Saudi Arabia, 194 Schaefer, Dan, 51–53 schizophrenia, 212 schools, 54, 56, 72–73, 117, 140, 181, 208.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

—Wallace Stevens In this final chapter, we apply many-model thinking to two salient policy issues: the opioid epidemic and economic inequality. We show how by engaging multiple models, we can better reason through these issues and better communicate why both have proven so difficult to solve. We can also see how, particularly in the case of opioids, experts might have used multiple models to anticipate the crisis before it occurred. That said, we do not want to oversell the potential for models to avoid disaster. Our treatment of the opioid epidemic is superficial, meant only as a template for how to apply many models when reasoning through a proposed policy or action.

…

The chapter concludes with a brief comment on the need for humility. Models can make us wiser, but complex systems by definition are difficult to predict and understand. We will make mistakes. And we can learn from those mistakes to become even wiser. Many Models and the Opioid Epidemic To give some sense of the scale of the opioid epidemic in 2015, in the state of Massachusetts over 4% of the population above age 11 had an opioid use disorder according to one estimate. Nationwide, in 2016, doctors wrote more than 200 million prescriptions for opioids, between 10 and 12 million people misused opioids, over 2 million people were classified as having an opioid use disorder, and more than 30,000 people died from opioid-related causes.

…

This structure also means that we can pull the book from our bookshelves or open it in our browsers and find self-contained analyses of linear models, prediction models, network models, contagion models, and models of long-tailed distributions, learning, spatial competition, consumer preferences, path dependence, innovation, and economic growth. Interspersed throughout the chapters are applications of many-model thinking to a variety of problems and issues. The book concludes with two deeper dives into the opioid epidemic and income inequality. 2. Why Model? Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. —Jean Piaget In this chapter, we define types of models. Models are often described as simplifications of the world. They can be, but models can also take the form of analogies or be fictional worlds mined for ideas and insights.

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

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

It give birth to an entire new world-spanning genre: “gangsta” rap, which would echo through the banlieues of Paris and the dusty villages of West Africa; turn Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls into symbols of the inner city’s violence but also its romance, wisdom, and swagger; and vie with rock ’n’ roll for a while before rap (more generally understood) supplanted rock as the music of American youth of all races. The crack epidemic was at least as serious a problem as the 1970s heroin spike, with a death-by-overdose rate reaching almost 2 per 100,000. By the time of the 2016 election, which it did much to decide, the opioid epidemic that had begun with OxyContin was killing not 1.5 or 2 but 20 Americans per 100,000. In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania it was killing almost 40 per 100,000, and in West Virginia it was killing 50. Yet until the Republican candidate began to mention it, the airwaves were nearly silent about it.

…

The Gettysburg Address said it was set up for them.White politicians began to convey that they weren’t oblivious to being spoken of this way. A truculent tone unheard in mainstream political oratory since the 1960s crept back in. When Maine governor Paul LePage tried to explain to a mid-winter town hall meeting in Bridgton who the drug dealers were who were profiting from the opioid crisis that was killing the region’s young people, he said: These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty—these types of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we’ve got to deal with down the road.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Sudden crises can have a profound effect: if you have just one child or grandchild (or your neighbor or friend has just one), and he or she dies or gets wounded in a foreign war, gets knocked into bankruptcy or foreclosure by a major recession, or ends up addicted, jailed, or dead during the opioid epidemic, your perspective on the future can be altered more dramatically than someone whose social web is larger, whose ties to the future expand instead of narrow. Another story from the Times in 2017 featured Roger Winemiller, a farmer who lost two adult children to opioid overdoses within nine months.

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Even the evidence that it sometimes encourages aggression, though, might mean that the drug resembles the Internet in making a small minority more violent but tranquilizing the majority—so that for most people, a stoned society is more likely to be a dreamily contented society than an unstable or angry one, and the spread of pot will make an age of stagnation seem mostly like a chill good time. Then there is the opioid epidemic, which swept across the unhappiest parts of white America without anyone noticing because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble. It’s not that there aren’t bursts of violence associated with the opioid trade, or addicts willing to commit murder for a fix.

…

., vii Days of Rage protests, 129 deBoer, Freddie, 145–46, 149 debt, national, 70 ratio of GDP to, 192, 193 debt, overhang of, 34 decadence, 10 aesthetic definition of, 6–7 author’s definition of, 8–10, 239 Barzun on, 8, 12, 69, 91, 96, 100, 113, 135, 172, 184 birthrate and, see birthrates, decline in convergence of, in West and non-Western world, 165–69, 173 economic, see stagnation, economic as ending in dystopia, 184–85 end of, see decadence, deaths of EU as case study in, 82–86 hope for renewal as possible under, 179 institutions and, 69 Islamic world and, 159 moral definition of, 7 and need for a Messiah, 237–39 opposition to, political and social risks of, 178–80, 182–83 policy limits imposed by, 87 political sclerosis as, see sclerosis, political possible inevitability of, 234–36, 240 repetition as, see repetition seductiveness of, 217 use of term, 6–7 decadence, deaths of, 115, 187–240 catastrophe as, see catastrophe divine intervention scenario for, 239–40 neo-medieval scenario for, 200–203 renaissance scenario for, see renaissance space travel scenario for, 236, 239–40 decadence, sustainable, 115, 117–85, 240 arguments in favor of, 177–85 authoritarian systems in, 137–54; see also pink police state benefits of, 180–82 climate change and, 173–75 comfortable numbness in, 119–36 as contradiction in terms, 179 dystopian elements of, 184–85 management of, 181–83 meritocracy in, 169–73 politics and, 129–36 pornography and, 119–22 prescription drugs and, 126–28 virtual entertainments and, 122–26, 128–29 Deep Throat (film), 119 Defense Department, US, UFO videos released by, 233–34 deficit, investment constrained by, 34 deficit spending, 192–93 DeLong, Brad, 192 Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), 219 democratic norms, 68–69, 78, 163 Democrats, Democratic Party: 1960s–70s reform in, 77 Senate controlled by, 67 demographic change, weight of, 34, 56–58 religious renewal and, 222–23 stagnation and, 57 see also aging populations Deneen, Patrick, 215–17 Deng Xiaoping, 140 depression, among teenagers, 123 deregulation, 24 despair, declining birthrate and, 61–62 developed world: aging populations of, 34, 56–58, 60, 66 limits to growth in, 32–36 shrinking family size in, 59–60 developing world, emergence of decadence in, 165–69, 173 Didion, Joan, 110, 131 Discovery (space shuttle), 37 disease, spread of, 190–91 Disneyland, 37 dissent, marginalization of, 151–52 divine intervention, as scenario for end of decadence, 239–40 divorce rate, 51, 55 Dobson, James, 119, 120 “Dope Show, The” (music video), 140–41 dot-com bubble, 24 Douthat family, 59–60 Dreamland (Quinones), 127 drone warfare, 150 drugs, prescription: antidepressant, 126 increased use of, 126 opioid epidemic and, 126–27 social upheaval repressed by, 126–27 Dune (Herbert), 229 Dunham, Lena, 95 Durant, Will, 189, 202 Dworkin, Andrea, 120 Dylan, Bob, 110 dynamism, 25, 46, 58, 110 dangers of, 179–80 immigration and, 62, 64 nostalgia for, 206 Dyson, Freeman, 6 dystopias, 3, 47–50, 65–66, 94, 95, 122, 128, 144, 155–56, 179 economic catastrophe, 191–95, 200 economic stagnation, see stagnation, economic economy, declining birthrate and, 56–58 economy, US, deceleration of, 24 education: constraints on, 34–35 productivity and, 34–35 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 224 Ehrlich, Paul, 43 Eisenhower-era America, 2 elections, US: of 2008, 67 of 2016, 162, 182 Emanuel, Rahm, 67 Encyclopædia Britannica, 107 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 112–13 energy revolution, 210 Engels, Friedrich, 219 Enlightenment Now (Pinker), 165 entertainment, politics as, 153–54 entrepreneurship, declining rate of, 25–26 environment: constraints imposed by, 35 see also climate change Erdog˘an, Recep Tayyip, 163 Eurafrica, 198–200, 206–10, 218, 228–29 Christianity revitalized by, 207–8 euro, 82 destructive consequences of, 83–85 Europe, 197 aging population of, 198 economic stagnation in, 25 far right in, 85, 155, 162 left’s scenario for renaissance of, 219 mass migration to, 197–99, 200 nationalism in, 85, 172–73, 218 pink police state in, 143–44 populist resurgence in, 85 US economy vs., 166 US governmental system vs., 82, 83 European Union, 172–73, 217, 219 birthrate in, 50 centralization of authority in, 83, 84–85 financial crisis in, 84, 192 Muslim refugees in, 160 possible collapse of, 194 public distrust of government in, 83 sclerosis in, 82–86 unrealistic assumptions of, 82–83 Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Mody), 84 evangelical Protestantism, 53, 101, 119, 222 Everlasting Man, The (Chesterton), 238–39 exhaustion, cultural and intellectual, decadence as, 9 expansionism, 3–4 environmental and social cost of, 5–6 exploration: abandonment of, 5–6 ideology of, 3–4, 231–32 Fake News, 153 families, shrinking of, 58–62 far left, 172, 194 far right, 134, 193, 194, 227 in Europe, 85, 155, 162 fascism, 112, 160, 194 feminism, 47, 51, 53, 54, 90, 97, 108, 120, 121, 156, 227 fiction, literary, declining sales of, 91 Fight Club (film), 113, 185 filibuster, 78 finance industry, see Wall Street financial crisis of 2008, 11, 69, 80, 84, 137, 192 Finland: decline of sexual relations in, 55 declining birthrate in, 52–53 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 97 Flynn effect, 35 Flynt, Larry, 120 food production, climate change and, 195–96 Ford, John, 110 Foreign Policy, 133 Fox News, 77 France, 32 immigrants in, 64 pronatalist policies of, 52 protest movements in, 171, 172 Francis, Pope, 103 Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Wilder), 208 free-market policies, 25 free trade, 24, 28, 29 French Revolution, 206 From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun), 8 frontier: closing of, 5, 135 New, 181 space as, 2, 6, 231–32; see also Apollo moon program Turner on importance of, 3–4 Fukuyama, Francis, 12, 83, 112–13, 115, 135, 159 Fyre Festival, 17–18, 21 Game of Thrones (TV show), 95, 96 Garland, Merrick, 78 gay rights, revolution in, 99 gender, wage gap and, 99 genetic engineering, 11, 43, 211, 229, 230 Germany, 192 immigrants in, 64, 85 Germany, Nazi, 225 Germany, Weimar, 129, 131 Gersen, Jacob, 142 Gharbi, Musa al-, 97 Gibson, Mel, 189–90, 202 gig economy, decline of traditional freelancing in, 27 gilets-jaunes, 171 Gingrich, Newt, 77 globalism, 218 global South: climate change and, 174–75, 202 mass migration from, 208 global warming, see climate change God and Man at Yale (Buckley), 97 Goebbels, Joseph, 132 Gordon, Robert, 12, 33, 34, 35, 40–41, 46 government: informal norms of, 78 policy failures of, 71 public distrust of, 75 public expectation of action by, 74–75 uncontrolled sprawl of, 72, 76 Government’s End (Rauch), 72 Graeber, David, 12, 38, 40, 41 Gramsci, Antonio, vii Grantland, 93–94 Great Awakening, 103, 222, 228 Great Britain: Brexit in, see Brexit US technological mastery vs., 165 Great Depression, 30, 109 Great Filter, 234–36, 240 Great Recession, 11, 23, 27, 69, 114, 124, 193, 194 falling birthrate in, 51 Great Society, 77 Great Stagnation, The (Cowen), 33–34, 45 Greece, 84, 85 in 2008 financial crisis, 192 Green New Deal, 221 Green Revolution, 43, 196 growth, limits on, 32–36, 46 Guardian (Australia), 220 Guinea, 206 Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.), 97 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 47–50, 65 Handmaid’s Tale, The (TV show), 95 Hanson, Robin, 234 Harris, Mark, 93–94 Harris, Sam, 224 Hazony, Yoram, 218, 219 health care reform: interest groups and, 73 Obama and, 68, 69–70, 73–74, 76 Heavens and the Earth, The (McDougall), 2 Herbert, Frank, 229 Heterodox Academy, 97 Hinduism, 225 history: end of, 112–15, 135, 163, 177 return of, 129, 183, 195 viewed as morality play, 157 hive mind, 106–7 Holmes, Elizabeth, 18–19, 22 hookup culture, 121 horoscopes, 225 Houellebecq, Michel, 155–57, 159, 160–61, 172, 226, 227 House of Representatives, US, 68 “How the Wealth Was Won” (2019 paper), 26 Hubbard, L.

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

We sat down in small group meetings and large town halls, spending time with parents, teachers, pastors, small business owners, philanthropists, and community leaders. Everywhere we went, we asked a simple question: How can we help? The answers in some cases confirmed what I suspected were major pain points: the opioid epidemic and rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, to name a few. Other responses took me by surprise. Teachers in Washington State, for example, told me that children were vaping during class. Kids weren’t allowed to chew gum or smoke in class, yet there were no rules prohibiting the use of e-cigarettes in school.

…

It turned out, the schools were waiting for guidance from the local government, which in turn was waiting for the federal government. These conversations played a central role in guiding the agenda I pursued during my time in office and beyond. They moved me to produce the first surgeon general’s report on the addiction crisis and to launch a national campaign to address the opioid epidemic. And it was those teachers, along with parents, scientists, and policymakers, who inspired me to issue in 2016 the first federal report on e-cigarette use by youth. But one recurring topic was different. It wasn’t a frontline complaint. It wasn’t even identified directly as a health ailment.

…

But they also showed that emotional and physical pain are both processed by the brain in very similar ways. The overlap between physical and emotional pain in the brain sheds light on why people may reach for more powerful and dangerous substances—like opioid painkillers and alcohol—when they experience emotional pain from loneliness. With the opioid epidemic, in particular, we have increasingly appreciated the role emotional pain plays in driving use and overuse. Opioid deaths have been labeled deaths of despair for good reason. While we recognize loneliness and other sources of emotional pain as risk factors for misuse and addiction, we don’t make the connection often enough.

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

See Alan B. Krueger, “Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 48, no. 2 (2017): 1–87. 37.Abuse of corporate power, the subject of the next chapter, plays a direct role in the story of the opioid epidemic: the drugs were pushed by Purdue Pharma. See Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2018). It also plays a role in the obesity epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that almost 40 percent of Americans are obese.

…

Twenty years ago, for instance, we didn’t realize the dangers posed by carbon emissions; now we do, and we need regulations to reflect that. Twenty years ago, obesity was not the problem it is today. Now, we need to protect our children from the sweet and salty foods, designed to be addictive, that are contributing to this epidemic. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have the opioid crisis that has in part been manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have a rash of for-profit educational institutions exploiting their students and the government loans for which they qualify.15 The conflict over net neutrality provides a vivid example of the need for regulation and the ways in which corporate interests manipulate the system for their own advantage.

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

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

“I want to see the Interstate Highway Act of this generation,” he said. “The Apollo project for battery technology. “If we don’t have a battery for the twenty-first century,” he added, “everything else is fucking semantics.” He spent his days canvassing the district, talking about the opioid epidemic ravaging the island, transportation infrastructure, and building a sea wall to prepare for another superstorm. He drilled home the fact that his opponent had taken money from the company that makes OxyContin. Later, Max would say that he knew all along that he would win, but he couldn’t have known for sure.

…

He figured this was how America should be solving all its problems—by attacking them from all sides at once, informed by locals on the ground. Max thought America needed what he liked to call a “domestic surge”: a massive investment in government resources to solve problems at home the way the military solved problems abroad. A surge could solve the opioid crisis. A surge could repair American infrastructure. He thought it was bullshit that George W. Bush kept talking about government being the problem at home, but when it came to another country’s challenges, American government was the solution. “We are fucking Americans,” Max liked to say. “And that means we fix stuff

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Americans must understand that the real reason for this make-believe war was to demolish the inner-cities and put minorities in prison for long stretches, while simultaneously diminishing their ability to ever get a decent job once they get out. It looks like they “won” the war. The New Crack The current opioid epidemic in the Appalachian region of the United States is predominantly a white issue, but the use of drugs in poor areas of the country was established as the norm because of the crack epidemic decades earlier. Is the opioid crisis an accident, or could it be the new crack cocaine push to target the poor white communities? It should be obvious by now that nothing like this happens accidentally, and that the intentional push of these drugs, in association with rampant over-prescribing by medical professionals, is by design.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

Volkow, “America’s Addiction to Opioids: Heroin and Prescription Drug Abuse,” paper presented at the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Washington, DC, May 14, 2014, https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/legislative-activities/testimony-to-congress/2016/americas-addiction-to-opioids-heroin-prescription-drug-abuse. 3. Dan Nolan and Chris Amico, “How Bad is the Opioid Epidemic?” Frontline, February 23, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-bad-is- the-opioid-epidemic/. 4. Join Together Staff, “Heroin Use Rises as Prescription Painkillers Become Harder to Abuse,” Drug-Free, June 7, 2012, http://www.drugfree.org/news-service/heroin-use-rises-as-prescription-painkillers-become-harder-to-abuse/. 5. Tracie White, “Surgeries found to increase risk of chronic opioid use,” Stanford Medicine News Center, July 11, 2016, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/07/surgery-found-to-increase-risk-of-chronic-opioid-use.html. 6.

…

He was no doubt wary due to a growing awareness in the medical community that opioid painkillers—as effective and necessary as they sometimes are—have been overprescribed in recent decades, and with grave unintended consequences. The surge in opioid use began in the mid-1990s, when lower prices and aggressive marketing from pharmaceutical companies led to a sharp increase in the prescription and use of these drugs. The results have been nothing less than catastrophic, as the “opioid epidemic,” as it is now known, has ravaged countries around the globe, and in particular the United States, where deaths among heroin and prescription drug abusers top 27,000 a year. There were nearly 19,000 deaths from opioids alone in 2014, a 369% increase from 1999. In the same period, heroin overdoses increased 439%.

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Helicobacter pylori, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Joan Didion, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microaggression, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, phenotype, pre–internet, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk, women in the workforce

Binkley had no doubt: “I would be institutionalized if I had not been a physician and been so persistent.” * * * In For Grace’s survey nearly half the respondents thought doctors were more reluctant to prescribe opioid pain medication to them because of their gender. The opioid epidemic has been hovering in the background of a few of the stories in this book so far. With about 33,000 Americans now dying each year from heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opioid overdoses, there’s no doubt that the opioid epidemic is a public health crisis. It’s also clear that as doctors have become increasingly fearful of prescribing opioids, it has led to a heightened atmosphere of distrust surrounding patients’ reports of pain—both chronic and acute—that especially affects certain patients: women, people of color, people with low incomes.

…

As Maggie and Jackie learned, simply seeking care at an ER for pain without an immediately evident cause can be enough to provoke suspicions that you’re “narco-savvy.” Pain experts caution that concern about the real risks of addiction must be balanced with the recognition that, while opioids are not recommended as a first-line option for chronic pain, they are a lifesaving last resort for some patients. They also point out that, while the roots of the opioid epidemic are complicated, some of the blame lies in medicine’s failure to effectively respond to the chronic pain epidemic. As Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the Stanford Division of Pain Medicine, recently explained to Vox, in the nineties there was growing awareness that pain should be treated, but doctors didn’t have much training on how to do so.

…

In journalist Judy Foreman’s book . . . Judy Foreman, A Nation in Pain: Healing Our Biggest Health Problem (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014). As Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the Stanford Division of Pain Medicine, recently . . . German Lopez, “A Pain Doctor Explains How He Balances His Patients’ Needs with the Opioid Epidemic’s Lessons,” Vox, May 2, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/2/15440000/sean-mackey-opioids-chronic-pain. According to an estimate by the Chronic Pain Research Alliance (CPRA), vulvodynia . . . Chronic Pain Research Alliance, Impact. One of their concerns was that patients . . .

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

See also: https://hbr.org/2018/06/25-years-ago-i-coined-the-phrase-triple-bottom-line-heres-why-im-giving-up-on-it. 26.For more details, please see here: https://volans.com/project/tomorrows-capitalism-inquiry/. 27.Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Penguin Random House, 2018. 28.Hannah Kuchler, “Tech Entrepreneurs Attack Opioid Crisis,” Financial Times, May 27, 2019. 29.Beth Mole, “DEA Tracked Every Opioid Pill Sold in the US. The Data Is Out—And It’s Horrifying,” Arstechnica.com, July 17, 2019. 30.Hannah Kuchler, “J&J: The Next Target of Anger over America’s Opioid Crisis?” Financial Times, September 5, 2019. See also: https://www.ft.com/content/c4eddc22-cd86-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f. 31.Chris McGreal, American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts.

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A few months later, Anand Giridharadas published his provocative book, Winners Take All.27 With a reputation for skewering plutocrats, Giridharadas argues that the wealthy are using philanthropy to pretend they are changing the world, while maintaining the status quo. He gave the example of the Sackler family, whose fortune derives from the same drugs that have caused the US opioid crisis. An estimated two million Americans suffer from what is called opioid use disorder, based on addiction to these powerful painkillers.28 Obsessed with their financial bottom lines, opioid drug makers flooded America with seventy-six billion pills between 2006 and 2012 alone.29 Enough to supply every adult and child in the country with thirty-six opioid pills a year—when a ten-day supply can hook one in five people.

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An estimated two million Americans suffer from what is called opioid use disorder, based on addiction to these powerful painkillers.28 Obsessed with their financial bottom lines, opioid drug makers flooded America with seventy-six billion pills between 2006 and 2012 alone.29 Enough to supply every adult and child in the country with thirty-six opioid pills a year—when a ten-day supply can hook one in five people. Even the fabled Johnson & Johnson, with the “secret sauce” of its ethical “credo,” has been whacked with a $572 million court claim because of its role in causing the opioid crisis.30 Another dark Gray Swan, which a former head of the US Food and Drug Administration has described as “one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine”:31 Really, what were we thinking? Whereas some might argue that it is better for people like the Sacklers to spend at least a modicum of their wealth on good works rather than luxuries, Giridharadas disagrees, emphatically.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Aric Chokey and Skyler Swisher, “5.6 Billion Opioid Pills Flooded the State,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, July 27, 2019, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/florida/fl-ne-opioids-flood-florida-data-20190726-3gltamcwojbltehe45aj73fyoy-story.html.   3.  See Beth Macy’s account of the opioid crisis, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).   4.  Julia Ochoa, “Florida Fails to Open Methadone Clinics in Opioid Crisis,” WJCT News, January 24, 2019, https://news.wjct.org/post/florida-fails-open-methadone-clinics-opioid-crisis. CHAPTER 4: FORTY-ACRE WOOD   1.  Julie Hunter et al., Welcome Home: The Rise of Tent Cities, Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, March 2014, https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/WelcomeHome_TentCities.pdf.   2.  

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Then at some point it breaks, and they turn their back on family, children, their hygiene, everything, and end up sleeping in the woods because nothing matters anymore except that twenty-dollar rock.” “THE PAIN THEY ALL SEEM SO SCARED OF” The kind of addiction that Hector and Jake see on a daily basis is a staple of motel living across the country, especially in semirural areas hit hard by the opioid crisis. Florida is particularly implicated in the country’s opioid problems. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, its largely unregulated “pill mills” were the primary supplier of oxycodone products to the East Coast and Great Lakes states.1 “Doctor shoppers” drove down and back up Interstate 75 all the way into New England, picking up and delivering pills on a route known as the “Oxy Express.”

…

For many addicts, the ordeal of withdrawal is the thing they most fear, and dopesickness is the condition that reminds them of that pain. As Hector puts it, “The worst ones have already been through withdrawal, and so they have felt the pain they all seem so scared of.” In any event, the state offers very little help: only twenty-six of Florida’s sixty-seven counties have a methadone clinic. Even as the opioid crisis deepened, the Department of Children and Families issued only two licenses for new clinics over the course of five years.4 The economy of peninsular Florida is driven by tourism but also depends on a steady flow of retirees, so it is inseparable from the business of pain care. Medicare and Medicaid are the lifeblood of a state often known as “heaven’s waiting room.”

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

It is possible to live right next to a bloodbath and yet to be more or less immune from it. Chicago-style murder is not the most dramatic outbreak of violence currently sweeping the US. An even greater toll comes from self-harm. The suicide rate is up sharply this decade, notably in rural areas. More Americans currently shoot themselves than shoot others. The opioid epidemic now rampant across parts of America is taking far more lives than gun violence and shows no sign of stopping. Road deaths are also on the rise. As a result, the US is the first country in the developed world that has seen a decline in life expectancy. More than 100,000 Americans died last year either from an overdose or in a road accident.

…

Trump seems able to do almost nothing to reach out to the millions of Americans who are at risk from everyday violence. Yet he is quite capable of destroying millions himself. The long tail of violence is emblematic of the bind democracy is in: the threats it faces are either too big or too small. What the opioid epidemic and the risk of nuclear war with North Korea have in common is the difficulty democratic politics finds in getting a grip on them. The space between the personal and the apocalyptic, which is where democratic politics traditionally plays out, has become a battleground for rival world views which are informed by personal or apocalyptic expectations of the worst that could happen.

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

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

The impact killed the deer. It broke Todd’s foot, weakened by a previous injury, in three places. And it totaled his car, an uninsured black 1993 Crown Victoria. * * * The first half of 2017 was also nightmarish for Dayton. Montgomery County had for several years been at the forefront of the opioid epidemic, a status the experts attributed to some unhappy confluence of the county’s location at a major highway juncture (being a logistics hub also meant being a trafficking hub) and the depth of the economic collapse in the area (laid-off manufacturing workers not only were depressed but had legitimate injuries that had helped gain them the painkiller prescriptions that pharmaceutical manufacturers had marketed very heavily across southern Ohio).

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Crystal City curiosity D’Ambrosio, Charles D’Aniello, Daniel Darman, Richard Daschle, Tom Data Center Alley data centers: cost of building; energy consumption by; as home of the cloud; Northern Virginia consolidation of; Northern Virginia expanding; power demand for; processing capabilities of; renewable energy for; secrecy of; security for; for security of information; as storehouse of the digital soul; tax exemptions for; Virginia Data Center Leadership Awards; see also Amazon Web Services Dayton, Ohio: Amazon sights on; auto industry collapse in; as auto town; coronavirus pandemic in; Dunbar poem about; innovation in; jail-to-shelter circuit in; Kettering of; Lewisburg Container near; logistics industry in; manufacturing job loss in; migration to and from; opioid epidemic hitting; Patterson, J. H., of; Pollard singing about; Pratt Industries near; Project Big Daddy near; as Silicon Valley of its time; slogans; St. Vincent de Paul Gateway Shelter for Women and Families in; Trump and Clinton, H., comparison in; Trump protests in; Trump 2016 presidential campaign in; turnaround in; see also Swallows, Todd death: Baltimore homicide; from coronavirus pandemic; from delivery van accident; from drug overdose; of Floyd; from forklift accidents; of Gray; from heart attacks; by police; from sortation center collapse; of Sparrows Point; from suicide; from tractor accident; from vacant home collapse Dees, Wendy Demmler, Jay Democratic Party demolition: in Baltimore; of Sparrows Point Denver, Colorado Department of General Services (DGS) Dharmic Engineers: agent of; creation of; meetings of Diapers.com Dieter, Dawn Diggs, Louis dignity Dillon, C.

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., transformation following election of Obetz, Ohio Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Rhodes fatality reported to; Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Rhodes investigation by; Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Shoemaker fatality investigation by; citation manipulation by; forklift hazard warning from; Kilp of Odeh, Khuloud Office Depot office of economic development Office of Management and Budget office supplies: coolofficesupplies.com selling; El Paso Independent School District buying; El Paso Office Products selling; Faber-Castell selling; Pencil Cup Office Products selling; procurement as counterpart to; RFPs for; trade show; Tucker fighting Amazon over Ohio: Amazon employee injuries in; Amazon interest in; Amazon new warehouse plan in; Amazon warehouse approval in; Amazon warehouse openings in; Dublin; Etna; food-stamp recipients in; Hilliard; JobsOhio; Little Cities of Black Diamonds in; mall closures in; Monroe; New Albany; Obetz; sales tax assessment in; state representative race in; tax credits in; tax exemptions in; see also Columbus, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Nelsonville, Ohio Ohio Development Services Agency Olah, David Olszewski, Johnny, Jr. opioid epidemic: in Dayton, Ohio; Sappington witness to Orban, Stephen Orszag, Peter OSHA, see Occupational Safety and Health Administration Package Rescue PACs, see political action committees Parikh, Manish Parks, Florence Parrish, Charlie patriotic philanthropy Patterson, Jennifer Patterson, John H.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

From 1999 through 2017, almost 218,000 people have died in the United States from opioid overdoses, with almost 50,000 dying in 2017 alone—about a third higher than the number of people who died in automobile accidents in the same year.93 People talk endlessly about the effect of money in politics. There’s no clearer example—both about the corrupting effect and its dramatic consequences—than the opioid crisis. Our government bent its standards and allowed a completely predictable epidemic to arise because of the enormous amount of money that was made available to the key actors in this tragedy.94 Standing behind the opioid crisis is a single firm, Purdue Pharma. Standing behind that firm is an extraordinarily wealthy family, the Sacklers.95 Most of the money the Sacklers have collected is from the profits on OxyContin.

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On the general problem of influence with pharmaceuticals, see Lawrence Lessig, America, Compromised (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), ch. 4; Beth Mole, “Big Pharma Shells Out $20B Each Year to Schmooze Docs, $6B on Drug Ads,” Ars Technica, January 11, 2019, available at link #53. 94.See Chris McGreal, “FDA’s Opioids Adviser Accuses Agency of Having ‘Direct’ Link to Crisis,” Guardian, January 24, 2019, available at link #54. 95.Or at least the part of the Sackler family associated with two of the three original Sackler brothers; Arthur Sackler was not involved in the company when it developed and pushed its opioid, OxyContin. 96.At least in the sense of institutional corruption that I describe in America, Compromised. 97.Except as indicated, the facts in this section are drawn from the extraordinary article by Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” New Yorker, October 30, 2017, available at link #55. 98.Ethan Barton, “American Cartel: Here Are the Politicians That Took Opioid Tycoons’ ‘Dirty, Bloody Money,’” Daily Caller, March 14, 2018, available at link #56. 99.Chris McGreal, “How Big Pharma’s Money—and Its Politicians—Feed the US Opioid Crisis,” Guardian, October 19, 2017, available at link #57. 100.For the founding rule on recusal statutes, see Nevada Commission on Ethics v. Carrigan 564 U.S. 117, 122-25 (2011). 101.Nara Pavão, “Corruption as the Only Option: The Limits to Electoral Accountability,” Journal of Politics 80 (July 2018): 996–1010, available at link #58. 102.Dennis F.

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See advertising; broadcasting; Internet; newspapers Michigan gerrymandering reform, 232–237 Microsoft, 112, [119n113], 291n95, 293n113 money in politics 2016 presidential race, 140 2018 House and Senate contributions, 140 advertisers and information, 91–93, 98–99, 101, 105–107, 120–123, 200–201 campaign contribution regulation, 61, 140–141, 146, 147 campaign donations as favors, 57–62, 224–225 corporation spending, 58, 146 dark money, [59n120], 140, 279n120 democracy coupons, 142–146, 151, 166–167, 296n6 Equal Protection Clause requiring reform, [61n123], 280n123 fining officials who obstruct, 167 First Amendment and, 47–48 fixing campaign contributions, 140–151, 299n18 fundraising and political polarization, 28 gerrymandering reform, 234 incentives to states to increase voting, 166–167 lobbyists, 57–61, 65, 223, 224, 229 more money, more access, [59n118], 278n118 more money, more influence, 57–58, 59, 150 OpenSecrets.org, 140 opioid crisis, 46–48 paying people to learn politics, 200 polarization profitable, 80, 88, 93–98, 107–109 policy results affected, [60n122], 62, 279n122 progress stymied by, 65–66 public vs. private campaign funding, 56–61, 62–63, 65, [146n10], 297n10 representatives’ pay, 228 roll call votes tracking, 27, 272n64 selling Senate seats, 31–32 soft money receipts graph, 148 speech credits, 144–145, 151, 166–167 swing states receiving, 41 vouchers for campaign contributions, 142–146, 151, 166–167, 296n6 Mongolian deliberative poll, 175–177 National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), 161–162, 303n31 New Jersey gerrymandering reform, 241–246 Newberry v.

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

But lifestyle is inadequate, in my mind, to explain the vast epidemic of so-called “deaths of despair”—suicides, drug overdoses, and deaths from alcoholic liver disease—plaguing the United States right now. Beginning around 2000, epidemiologists noticed an uptick in these particular types of deaths, but the magnitude of the problem was not fully clarified until recent years. While drug overdoses in the setting of the opioid epidemic have driven some of the increase, the last time suicide levels reached as high as they are now was in 1938, during the Great Depression. The last time deaths from alcoholic liver disease reached this level was in 1910. Overdose deaths have never even been close to this high. And while the increase in deaths of despair was first reported among white men, recent research shows similar trends among Hispanic and Black men, and women as well.

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CHAPTER 11: MOVING TOGETHER 1 Beginning around 2000, epidemiologists: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2017): 397–476, https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/mortality-and-morbidity-in-the-21st-century. 2 While drug overdoses in the setting of the opioid epidemic: United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee Republicans, “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair,” September 5, 2019, accessed June 16, 2022, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019/9/long-term-trends-in-deaths-of-despair. 3 Loneliness has a powerful effect: John T.

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

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

Middle-class American adults are dying from indirect or even direct self-harm, as they—literally—somatize the insult of their meritocratically justified exclusion. The billboards along I-94 East from Detroit to St. Clair Shores prominently include advertisements for Narcan, a medicine used to “stop opioid overdose,” and Macomb County, where St. Clair Shores lies, recorded seven times as many drug-related deaths in 2016 as in 1999. The opioid epidemic extends far beyond St. Clair Shores. Suicides, overdoses, and alcohol abuse (having increased between three and five times faster among less educated than among more educated adults) now kill Americans at rates roughly equivalent to the AIDS epidemic and account for rising mortality overall. In these and myriad other ways, the idleness that the meritocracy trap imposes on an economically superfluous middle class has exacted over a million “deaths of despair” over the past decade.

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Clinton’s professionalism plugged into one side of the politics, while Trump’s unprofessionalism plugged into the other. The outward anger that elected Trump unsurprisingly also tracked the inward anger behind rising middle-class mortality. Trump recorded many of his biggest advances over Mitt Romney’s vote shares from 2012 in counties worst hit by the opioid epidemic. St. Clair Shores, which in 1960 delivered Kennedy an optimistic 25 percentage point landslide, gave Trump an angry 10 percentage point victory in 2016. Finally, Trumpism—and Trump’s own rise—exposes the incumbent elite’s meritocratic contempt for ordinary citizens and its own disenchanted weakness.

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., “Towards a Marshall Plan for America,” Center for American Progress, May 16, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2017/05/16/432499/toward-marshall-plan-america/. outside of (and even in opposition to) work: See Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 19–20; Williams, White Working Class, 16–17, 20, 31, 37. worst hit by the opioid epidemic: See Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan, 2018), 263–66. 25 percentage point landslide: See Board of County Canvassers, Canvass of Votes Cast at the General Election Held on Tuesday, the 8th Day of November, A.D. 1960, November 8, 1960, accessed July 24, 2018, http://clerk.macombgov.org/sites/default/files/content/government/clerk/pdfs/electionresults/1960-11-08-GENERAL-ELECTION.pdf.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

That line of thinking ignores that each of these issues has a crushing impact on our economy in addition to its human toll. Our revenue-maximizing cost-driven health-care system has led to the United States spending double that of comparable nations while facing lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates. The cost of the opioid epidemic has been estimated at more than $78 billion every year, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and families ruined, some of whom I met on the trail every day. Mental health issues at work alone put a $550 billion drag on the economy. Not having a middle class will be devastating for our economy over time, as businesses catering to these consumers shut their doors as their customer base erodes.

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Bobby Kennedy famously echoed Robert F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Suicides, drug overdoses Sherry L. Murphy et al., “Deaths: Final Data for 2018,” National Vital Statistics Reports 69, no. 13 (Jan. 2021). The cost of the opioid epidemic Curtis Florence et al., “The Economic Burden of Prescription Opioid Overdose, Abuse, and Dependence in the United States, 2013,” Medical Care 54, no. 10 (2016): 901–6. Mental health issues at work “Report: State of the American Workplace,” Gallup, Sept. 22, 2014. And climate change, by the year Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A.

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

And I don’t know about you all, but where my heart is at is making some history for the Thirty-Sixth District,” she tells the crowd. She doesn’t immediately mention her identities. Rather, she rattles off goals relevant to Democrats in the audience, such as fighting for health care for all, combating the opioid epidemic that has ravaged Pennsylvania, and investing in infrastructure. Only then does Benham mention she is autistic. “I’m going to be the first out LGBTQ woman in the state legislature in Pennsylvania,” she says to applause. “I’m also going to be the first openly autistic woman elected to a state legislature anywhere in this country.”

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Weeks after the 2018 midterm elections, I joked with one of my Lyft drivers that I was the only political reporter who was not there to cover the election. And I certainly wasn’t there to write one of those god-awful “Trump Country” profiles about “forgotten voters” in Appalachia. National political reporters who cover West Virginia usually write about the decline of the coal industry, the gripping poverty, or the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the state (at one point leading to 41.5 deaths per 100,000 people). These were usually the rationales given for why the state had shifted from voting for Democrats in the twentieth century to voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016. Hence I was puzzled when I was interviewing someone at the University of Alabama about its autism students’ program, and Megan Davis, the director of UA-ACTS, mentioned they had modeled their program after Marshall University’s in West Virginia.

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

As with Brexit, the storyline also works for the right-wing populists themselves because it lends a ‘we are defending the powerless’ David-and-Goliath nobility to their cause. Countless observers point to work by Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton to stake their claim. These researchers discovered a steady increase in non-Hispanic white suicide rates linked to an opioid epidemic among working-class white Americans.107 Other authors favoured J. D. Vance’s autobiographical and evocative Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in backwoods poverty in Appalachia. Some tramped the byways of rustbelt Ohio or reported from struggling post-industrial towns to suggest that economic misery explained Trump’s success.

…

The manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, Billy Beane, in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball showed that large-scale datasets could reveal truths that scouts acting on gut instinct failed to see.5 On-base percentage mattered more than how athletic a batter looked or how many big hits he had. The scouts, like all of us, think in terms of vivid images, which lead us to make what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky term ‘fast-thinking’ decisions.6 These can be misleading. In approaching populism, many have been seduced by stories of ‘left-behind’ working-class whites, the opioid crisis and rusting factories, so we’ve had numerous media ‘safaris’ into Trumpland which tend to simply confirm reporters’ biases.7 Journalists have been mesmerized by election maps. Looking at fine-grained surveys of individual voters produces a different picture, in which values count far more than economics or geography.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

The United States faces serious economic challenges, including managing the effects of advancing technology, declining workforce participation rates, towns and communities that have been left behind by globalization, failing schools, tempered dynamism and energy, and relatively slow productivity growth. America faces serious social challenges as well, including decaying social capital, increasing socioeconomic fragmentation, “deaths of despair,” the opioid crisis, and a very troubling increase in suicides. But despite these very real challenges, the national conversation about the American Dream is so detached from the underlying reality that it has become incorrect. We are confusing pockets of real struggle in American life with the broader canvas of the American experience.

…

Congress started by Senator Mike Lee and led by social scientist Scott Winship—and my AEI colleagues Charles Murray, Tim Carney, Ryan Streeter, and Yuval Levin are just a few of many analysts and authors who are rightly concerned about the state of American associational life, the institutions of civil society, and the extent of socioeconomic segregation and fragmentation. The opioid crisis and “deaths of despair”—a phrase coined in the important work of economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton—have been much discussed, and their rise has been deeply alarming. The broader conversation about our cultural and social challenges can often be squishy, and one is reasonably left to wonder whether the troubles that many point out are really all that bad.

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

Cat Ferguson, “Searching for Help,” Verge, September 7, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google-search-scam-florida-treatment-centers. 48. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future (New York: Norton 2017). 49. David Dayen, “Google Is So Big, It Is Now Shaping Policy to Combat the Opioid Epidemic: And It’s Screwing It Up,” Intercept, October 17, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/10/17/google-search-drug-use-opioid-epidemic/. 50. Ferguson, “Searching for Help”; Dayen, “Google Is So Big.” 51. 2017 Fla. Laws 173 (codified at Fla. Stat. §§ 397.55, 501.605, 501.606, 817.0345). 52. Ryan Singel, “Feds Pop Google for $500M for Canadian Pill Ads,” Wired, August 24, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/google-drug-fine/. 53.

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

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

AIDS deaths worldwide in 2020: Juan Ambrosioni, José Blanco, and Juliana Reyes-Ureña, “Overview of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Adults Living with HIV,” Lancet 8, no. 5 (May 1, 2021): E294–E305. the opioid addiction crisis: Zachary Siegel, “The Coronavirus Is Blowing Up Our Best Response to the Opioid Crisis,” New Republic, July 29, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/158645/coronavirus-blowing-best-response-opioid-crisis. “infections and the outbreak itself”: Lauren Jackson, “A Conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci,” New York Times, April 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-fauci.html. hospitalization rates correspondingly rose: Alexis C.

…

a total of $84 million: Dee Carden and Christina Carrega, “West Virginia Lands $37M Settlement Against Pharmaceutical Distributor for ‘Massive’ Pill Dumping,” ABC News, May 2, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/US/west-virginia-lands-37m-settlement-pharmaceutical-distributor-massive/story?id=62781219. death rate to new highs: Nabarun Dasgupta et al., “Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 2 (2018): 182–86. led to an overdose: Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, “McKinsey Proposed Paying Pharmacy Companies Rebates for OxyContin Overdoses,” New York Times, November 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/business/mckinsey-purdue-oxycontin-opioids.html.

…

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nationalism National Junior College Athletic Association Wrestling Championships National Park Service Native Americans nativism Nature Nazi Germany Nebraska necropolitics neoliberalism New Deal New Democrats New Jersey “new Jim Crow” New Orleans New Republic Newsom, Gavin New York City New York City Council New Yorker New York Police Department (NYPD) 85 New York Post New York State New York State Senate New York Times Magazine Nguyen, Kimarlee Nixon, Jay norovirus Norplant North Carolina Nott, Josiah Clark nursing homes Oakland Obama, Barack Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Ohio OKCupid Olivarius, Kathryn Onassis, Aristotle Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy On the Origin of Species (Darwin) opioid crisis organized abandonment othering overdoses ownership mentality Oxfam International OxyContin (oxycodone) Palestinians Parasite (film) parasites, defined Paris Paris Is Burning (film) Pasteur, Louis Patel, Rupa Pathogen Research Database Patient 31 Patient O (“outside”) patient zero “Patient Zero”.

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

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

McDonald’s CEO Stephen Easterbrook, fired in 2019 for having an inappropriate relationship with an employee, received a severance package of nearly $42 million—more than double the $15.9 million he made in 2018. In 2019, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma sought bankruptcy protection from lawsuits seeking to hold it accountable for its role in the nation’s opioid epidemic. Yet in the preceding year, the company paid its CEO, Craig Landau, $9 million and board chairman, Steve Miller, nearly $4 million, and five other board members a combined $3.7 million. In 2018, the stock market posted its worst annual performance since the financial crisis. The median shareholder return for the largest five hundred corporations was a negative 5.8 percent.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

Most of the answers we have gotten have not come from government. They’ve come from the broad American public who has access to the data.” The opioid crisis was a case in point. The data scientists in the Department of Health and Human Services had opened up the Medicaid and Medicare data, which held information about prescription drugs. Journalists at ProPublica had combed through it and discovered odd concentrations of opioid prescriptions. “We would never have figured out that there was an opioid crisis without the data,” said DJ. The big pools of raw facts accumulated by the federal government are windows into American life.

Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

It will take a long period of less profligate policy choices and benign economic conditions to restore America’s macroeconomic firepower to levels that could help end another emergency. Right now, even a modest recession could leave Washington without much fiscal leeway to respond to a financial crisis, or for that matter to upgrade infrastructure, tackle the opioid epidemic, address climate change, stabilize Social Security, or provide permanent tax relief for hardworking families. America was grappling with rising income inequality, middle-class insecurity, and other economic challenges well before the crisis of 2008, but the crisis made them worse, and unsustainable budget deficits could hobble our ability to deal with them.

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

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

Keisling, “Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ out of ‘Fire Department,’” Governing, July 1, 2015. 53. Most poisonings are from drugs or alcohol: National Safety Council 2016, pp. 160–61. 54. Opioid epidemic: National Safety Council, “Prescription Drug Abuse Epidemic; Painkillers Driving Addiction,” 2016, http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/prescription-painkiller-epidemic.aspx. 55. Opioid epidemic and its treatment: Satel 2017. 56. Opioid overdoses perhaps peaking: Hedegaard, Chen, & Warner 2015. 57. Age and cohort effects in drug overdoses: National Safety Council 2016; see Kolosh 2014 for graphs. 58.

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Overdoses of both the legal and illegal opioids have become a major menace, killing more than 40,000 a year and lifting “poison” into the largest category of accidental death, exceeding even traffic accidents.54 Drug overdoses clearly are a different kind of phenomenon from car crashes, falls, fires, drownings, and gassings. People don’t get addicted to carbon monoxide, or crave taller and taller ladders, so the kinds of mechanical safeguards that worked so well for environmental hazards will not be enough to end the opioid epidemic. Politicians and public health officials are coming to grips with the enormity of the problem, and countermeasures are being implemented: monitoring prescriptions, encouraging the use of safer analgesics, shaming or punishing pharma companies that recklessly promote the drugs, making the antidote naloxone more available, and treating addicts with opiate antagonists and cognitive behavior therapy.55 A sign that the measures might be effective is that the number of overdoses of prescription opioids (though not of illicit heroin and fentanyl) peaked in 2010 and may be starting to come down.56 Also noteworthy is that opioid overdoses are largely an epidemic of the druggy Baby Boomer cohort reaching middle age.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Janet Currie, also at Princeton University, has, together with other researchers, shown that public policy can make a difference to health- and mortality-related inequalities.28 Effectively, an American from a disadvantaged background would be healthier if he or she moved to France at birth (or before!). In coming years health-care inequality in the United States may get worse. One particularly troubling development is the opioid crisis, which is claiming tens of thousands of lives and is estimated by the Council of Economic Advisers to have cost 3 percent of US GDP in 2015 alone.29 Another more detailed example of health-care inequality is in dental care. Mary Otto’s book Teeth shows the startling differences in dental health across social classes and reports that they spring from differences in education, diet, and upbringing.

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Second, and more important, Detroit was a city deprived of intangible infrastructure, and it was obvious that the elements of intangible infrastructure—such as the prospect of a university in Detroit, better schooling, more attention to both physical and mental health, reskilling of workers displaced by technology, and more apt local institutions—were exactly the factors needed to get the city thriving again. A similar example that reinforces this is the locally focused network of drug courts across the United States, which have an impressive track record of rehabilitating victims of America’s opioid crisis.38 For Katherine Chidley, the lesson of Detroit is to resist being drawn to the conference rooms of the IMF and the groupthink of policy making and to spend some time with the people who voted for her, listening to the gritty details of the economic problems they face. In recent weeks she has learned a lot.

…

Khatya Chhor, “French Students Most Affected by Social Inequality, OECD Finds,” France 24, December 14, 2016, https://www.france24.com/en/20161207-french-students-most-affected-socioeconomic-disadvantages-oecd-pisa-study. 27. Data collected at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Data & Statistics, https://www.cdc.gov/datastatistics/index.html. 28. Currie, Schwandt, and Thuilliez, “When Social Policy Saves Lives.” 29. Council of Economic Advisers, “The Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis,” November 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/The%20Underestimated%20Cost%20of%20the%20Opioid%20Crisis.pdf. 30. Add Health: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, UNC Carolina Population Center, http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth. 31.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT One RTP official named Thitisan Utthanaphon: Jonathan Head, “Joe Ferrari: The High-Rolling Life of Thailand’s Controversial Ex–Police Chief,” BBC, Sept. 6, 2021, bbc.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT highest “alfresco” dining in the world: Sirocco website, lebua.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The American opioid crisis: Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, “Addressing the Opioid Crisis,” U.S. State Department, state.gov. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 28: TUNAFISH “No level of blockchain analysis”: Forfeiture Complaint, United States of America v. Alexandre Cazes, Justice Department, July 19, 2017, justice.gov.

…

* * * · · · Jen Sanchez was no more experienced in dark web investigations than the Thais; she had never used Tor, never visited the Silk Road. But as she began to get a sense of the full extent of the massive commerce in hard drugs AlphaBay now facilitated on a daily basis, she became incensed. The American opioid crisis was, by that time, in full swing; forty-two thousand Americans had died of opiate overdoses in 2016, more than in any year on record. That surge in fatalities was due in part to an influx of fentanyl, an opium derivative as much as a hundred times stronger than morphine. And here this twenty-five-year-old French Canadian was running a massive open-air heroin and fentanyl bazaar in public view?

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

In the last decade, America’s share of people in full-time jobs has dropped to European levels, which used to be written off as a sclerotic consequence of the continent’s over-regulated labour markets. Now the US rate is bang on the European average. In some respects it is worse. There is now a higher share of French males in full-time jobs than Americans – a statistic that reflects poorly on America, rather than well on France.19 America’s opioid epidemic is another warning light. Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, said that when societies hit a civilisational break the suicide rate soars. Deaths from drug overdoses have tripled since 2000: America’s opioid-heroin epidemic now rivals HIV-Aids at its peak. Some of the deaths are accidental.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, impulse control, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, zero-sum game

We talked about how his reputation as a faded reality star and failed businessman would doom his run. “Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man? What has he even accomplished on his own?” I asked. “Well,” Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, “he has had five bankruptcies.” When Donald started addressing the opioid crisis and using my father’s history with alcoholism to burnish his anti-addiction bona fides to seem more sympathetic, both of us were angry. “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes,” Maryanne said, “and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.” We thought the blatant racism on display during Donald’s announcement speech would be a deal breaker, but we were disabused of that idea when Jerry Falwell, Jr., and other white evangelicals started endorsing him.

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., 61–63, 65–67, 76 McCarthy, Joseph, 100 McCarthy, Kevin, 12 McConnell, Mitch, 12, 200 McCray, Antron, 204 media, 11, 114, 133–34, 138, 141, 195–98, 200, 203 Meese, Ed, 134 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 133, 184 Mexican border, 195, 201, 207 Midland Associates, 98, 169–71 mirroring, 23 Mitchell-Lama Housing Program, 89 Mitnick, Jack, 143, 193 Mob, the, 35, 133 Montauk Airport, 73 Mother Jones, 185 Mount Holyoke College, 50 Mulvaney, Mick, 108 Murdoch, Rupert, 101 Muslim travel ban, 15 National Guard, 53, 54–55, 65, 84 New York City, 208 economy in 1970s, 89 Fred Trump’s Manhattan aspirations, 89, 102–3 press in, 114, 131, 141, 195, 197 see also Brooklyn New York Military Academy (NYMA), 47, 49–50, 52–53, 56, 63, 64, 71, 74–75, 95, 96, 97, 132 New York Post, 149, 198 New York Times, 9, 107, 165, 176, 204 exposé on Trump family finances in, 185–91, 193–94 Nolan, James, 72 Nugent, Ted, 8 Obama administration, 209 Omni, 109–10 opioid crisis, 9 Palin, Sarah, 8 parenting and child development, 23 attachment in, 23, 25 Parsons, Louella, 61 Pataki, George, 166 Peale, Norman Vincent, 37–38, 40–41, 42, 92 Pence, Mike, 3, 4 Penthouse, 110 Peter Luger Steak House, 161–62 Piedmont Airlines, 67 Pierce, Charles P., 14 pilots, 58, 59, 61 Freddy’s career, 52, 53, 56, 57–59, 60–68, 78, 84, 88 Politico, 189 Pompeo, Mike, 12 Power of Positive Thinking, The (Peale), 37 presidential election of 2016, 14–15, 204 Putin, Vladimir, 8, 101, 200 Queens Hospital Center, 121 racism, 9, 15, 200, 204 housing discrimination lawsuit, 90, 100–101 Random House, 147, 151–52 Reagan, Ronald, 134 Republican National Convention, 10 Republican Party, 11–12, 109, 200, 203 Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), 51–52, 53, 66 Richardson, Kevin, 204 Rivers, Joan, 166 Rodman, Dennis, 189 Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, 101 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 32 Russia, 8 Ryan, Paul, 3 Salaam, Yusef, 204 Salvation Army, 121 Santana, Raymond, 204 Schron, Ruby, 192 Schumer, Chuck, 3 Schwartz, Tony, 146 Serwer, Adam, 200 Shapiro, Joe, 72 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 14 Shore Haven, 25, 28, 34, 54, 171 Sigma Alpha Mu, 51, 52, 53 Slatington Flying Club, 51 Sly Fox Inn, 158 sociopathy, 24, 26, 43 Spanish flu epidemic, 29, 30, 36 Steeplechase Park, 67–68, 72–76, 78–79, 87, 88, 89, 102, 141 Sunnyside Towers, 94, 97, 98, 103, 169 Sunshine, Louise, 114 Surviving at the Top (Trump), 132, 136, 146 Swifton Gardens, 91 Taj Mahal, 132, 135, 136, 149 Tosti, Matthew, 85–86, 104–5, 127 Trans World Airlines (TWA), 58, 59, 61, 65–68, 78, 84, 88 Trump, Barron, 184 Trump, Blaine, 110, 122, 148, 162, 164 Trump, Donald: Access Hollywood tape of, 10 The Apprentice, 11, 182, 196 The Art of the Comeback, 145–49, 151–52, 162–63 The Art of the Deal, 94–95, 146 authoritarian rulers and, 101 bankruptcies of, 9, 11, 132, 136, 143, 197 banks and investors and, 11, 124, 132, 134–38, 140, 142, 148, 184, 196–97 baseball playing of, 97 birth of, 33 Brooklyn as viewed by, 89–90 casinos of, 35, 132, 134–36, 142, 151, 201 The Celebrity Apprentice, 166 chiefs of staff of, 108 childhood of, 7, 11, 24–28, 42–46, 47–51, 101–2, 198, 202 childhood home of, see House, the COVID-19 crisis and, 13–14, 201–2, 204, 207–10 cruelty of, 15, 45, 75, 200, 201, 207 debts of, 134–36 early forays into Manhattan market, 102–3 ego of, 17, 136, 138, 198, 201 elected president, 14–15, 204 empathy lacking in, 209–10 extravagant lifestyle and spending of, 98, 107, 136, 137, 142, 191 father and, 11, 25–27, 42, 43, 47–50, 52–53, 63, 72, 83–84, 100, 102–3, 108, 114, 115, 132, 133–35, 137–38, 140–42, 144, 157–58, 188, 195, 202, 203, 204, 211 father’s estate sold by, 192–93, 196 father’s loans to, 107, 190, 197 father’s promotion to president of Trump Management, 88–90, 200 father’s role in real estate ventures of, 84, 91, 102–3, 107, 133, 134, 140–42, 191, 196–97 father’s will alteration attempted by, 143–44, 190, 193 father treated with contempt by, 157 on fishing outing, 64 at Fordham University, 71, 72, 74 Freddy and, 7, 45–46, 47, 48, 52, 63–65, 72, 75, 84–85, 98–99, 102, 201, 209 Freddy’s death and, 121–25, 127 gift-giving of, 106, 109 golf club of, 115, 181 golfing of, 154 housing discrimination lawsuit against, 90, 100–101 immigration and, 30 impeachment of, 205 income of, 91, 107, 190 Ivana’s divorce from, 137, 138 Ivana’s marriage to, 98, 111 Ivana’s prenuptial agreement with, 107 knowledge claims of, 133, 202–3 Linda and, 65, 148 lying of, 11–12, 14, 15, 40, 90, 103, 141, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205 Mar-a-Lago estate of, 134, 137, 148–51, 153, 154, 160 Mary enlisted as ghostwriter for book of, 145–49, 151–52, 162–63 Mary given gifts by, 106, 109 Mary story invented by, 163 Maryanne and, 60 media and, 11, 114, 133–34, 138, 141, 195–98, 200, 203 Mexican border and, 195, 201, 207 at military academy, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 56, 63, 64, 71, 74–75, 95, 96, 97, 132 money-oriented worldview of, 15–16, 38 mother and, 24, 25, 44, 45, 48–50 mother’s mugging and, 131–32 Muslim ban of, 15 narcissism of, 12, 198 pathologies of, 11–13, 200 powerful men and, 34, 101, 200 presidential campaign of, 9–11, 203, 204 presidential campaign announced by, 8–9, 11 press briefings of, 203 racism of, 9, 15, 300, 204 real estate career of, 1, 8–9, 11, 35, 84, 90–91, 102–3, 107, 111, 114–15, 133–38, 140–43, 192, 196–99, 201 as reality television star, 8, 11, 182, 196 Robert and, 6–7, 44–45 at school, 43–44, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 56, 58, 63, 64, 71, 74–75, 95, 96, 97, 132 self-esteem of, 44 self-promotion and self-aggrandizement of, 90–91, 103, 137, 198 as shielded from reality, 13, 16, 199 “strategies” of, 17, 203–4 Surviving at the Top, 132, 136, 146 taxes and, 34 at University of Pennsylvania, 72, 74, 75, 83 White House dinner for family of, 1–8, 45 at Trump Management, 71–72, 83, 84, 88, 112, 155 as Trump Management president, 88–90, 200 Trump, Donald “Donny,” Jr., 4, 6, 7, 122, 169 Trump, Elizabeth (sister of Donald), see Grau, Elizabeth Trump Trump, Elizabeth (sister of Fred), 29, 193 Trump, Elizabeth Christ (mother of Fred), 28, 29, 31, 34, 41, 89, 126 E.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

In an era when whole cities like Flint, Michigan, have had their water poisoned; when gas companies tell you that fracking is safe, never mind the earthquakes and flammable tap water; when Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly against attempts to ban its herbicide Roundup despite it having been credibly linked with cancer; and when Big Pharma peddled the drugs that set off the opioid crisis, it is entirely rational to be skeptical toward monopolistic power. Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, not only is caught up in the opioid lawsuits but also has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements in recent years over alleged harm caused by several of its prescription medications and even its ubiquitous talcum powder (found to have contained asbestos).

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Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly … linked with cancer: Zach Boren and Arthur Neslen, “How Lobbyists for Monsanto Led a ‘Grassroots Farmers’ Movement Against an EU Glyphosate Ban,” Unearthed, October 17, 2018; “IARC Monograph on Glyphosate,” WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer; “Roundup Weedkiller ‘Probably’ Causes Cancer, Says WHO Study,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015. Johnson & Johnson: Edward Helmore, “Lawsuits, Payouts, Opioids Crisis: What Happened to Johnson & Johnson?,” The Guardian, October 18, 2019. rare cases of heart inflammation: “Myocarditis and Pericarditis After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 27, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html.

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Klein MSCHF MSNBC Muirhead, Russell Mulllins, Garth multiplayer gaming multiple personality disorder Murdoch, Iris Musk, Elon Muslims Mussolini, Benito MyPillow Nakba naming systems Naomi: author’s feelings about name; in Old Testament NASA Nation, The National Health Service (NHS) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases nationalism, inclusive National Security Agency Native Americans; see also Indigenous people Natural Causes (Ehrenreich) Nazi Germany; Austria annexed by; autistic people in; children as viewed in; class solidarity replaced with racial solidarity in; colonialism and; disabled people in; Gemüt concept in; health culture in; Hitler in; IBM and; lands and people conquered by; Paris’s liberation from; vaccine programs in; Volk collective in Nazi Germany, Jews in; anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and; Covid mandate analogies to; “eternal Jew” caricature and; Kristallnacht and; Nuremberg Laws and; yellow stars worn by; see also Holocaust Nazis, neo- neoliberalism Nestlé Netflix neurodiversity Neurotribes (Silberman) New Deal New Democratic Party (NDP); Avi Lewis as candidate of Newman, Kevin New Republic, The Newsmax New Statesman, The New York City New Yorker, The New York Post New York Times, The Next Revolution, The Nicholas II Nike 9/11 attacks 1984 (Orwell) NoiseCat, Julian Brave No Logo (Klein) Northern Ireland Northrup, Christiane NPR Nunes, Rodrigo Obama, Barack Obama, Michelle O’Brien, Kate Occupy Wall Street (OWS) oil Old Testament; Naomi in oligarchy One Day at a Time On Property (Walcott) Operation Shylock (Roth) opioid crisis Orbán, Viktor Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) Orwell, George O’Shea, Brian othering Ottawa Otto, Mike Ottoman Empire Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective) Outrages (Wolf) Oxford Union Paglia, Camille Pakistan Palestinians “Pandemic Is a Portal, The” (Roy) pandemics; Covid, see Covid pandemic Paradise Lost (Milton) Parasite Parks, Rosa Parler Patel, Raj patents Patreon Patriot Act patriotism pattern recognition PayPal PBS Peck, Raoul pedophilia Peele, Jordan Pegasus Pelosi, Nancy and Paul Pennycook, Gordon People’s Party Peters, Tom Pew Research Pfizer pharmaceutical companies; Pfizer; see also Covid vaccines; vaccines Philippines Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) Pim, Bedford Pinochet, Augusto pipikism Plandemic plutocracy Poe, Edgar Allan pogroms police murders of Black people Poor People’s Campaign populism Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) Potter, David poverty powell, john a.

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

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

If the cause was anxiety over school shootings, the increases would have begun in the late 1990s and accelerated in the mid-2000s, when several high-profile school shootings occurred, but instead depression was steady during this time and did not rise until after 2012 (see Figure 6.34 on depressive symptoms). If the cause were worries about the environment, depression would have gone up starting in the early 1990s, when attention to that issue was at all-time highs (see the Gen X chapter), but it did not. The rise of the opioid epidemic fits based on timing, but it primarily impacted older people, not teens, and only in some areas of the U.S., while the rise in depression appeared across all regions. Negative feelings around Trump’s presidency also fails the timing test, as the rise in depression begins four years before he was elected (though this could explain some of the continuing rise after 2017).

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Virginia, 40, 42 Lukianoff, Greg, 218, 385 Lyon, Phyllis, 215 M Mahaffey, Shar’Ron, 119 Maher, Bill, 360 Mandel, Lily, 437, 438 M&M’s, 509–10 Manilow, Barry, 48 Mannheim, Karl, 5 Manning, Jason, 430 marijuana, 64–65, 96–101, 100, 313–14, 313, 374 marriage, 13, 90, 137, 237, 279, 279, 280, 376, 376, 461 age of, 5, 50, 51, 52, 166, 167, 278, 278, 288, 290 Boomers and, 52, 55, 94, 96 delaying, 278–80 depression and, 339, 340 divorce and, see divorce Gen X and, 165, 166, 168–69 Gen Z and, 375–78 happiness and, 137, 339–40 interracial, 40, 41, 42 living together instead of, 167–68, 168, 290 rates of, 52, 52, 54 remarriage, 55 same-sex, 2, 6, 13, 28, 48, 121, 213–17, 216 sex before, 79, 89–91, 90, 288, 292, 295, 296 Silents and, 50–56, 69–70, 94 Martin, Del, 215 Martin, James, 298 Martin, Trayvon, 315, 388, 389, 500 Martinez, Shannon Foley, 164 Mason-Hyde, Audrey, 351 McConnell, Michael, 47–48, 214 McCrea, Nicole, 181 McWhorter, John, 207 medicine, trust in, 201–3, 202 mental health issues, 23, 67, 129–30, 129, 130, 141, 183, 194, 328, 329, 332, 333, 333, 335, 335, 461 anxiety, 70, 71, 393, 403, 405, 412, 447–50, 447, 448, 460–61, 460, 473, 508 Boomers and, 127–38, 144, 145, 193–95, 328–29 college education and, 143–44, 144, 334 COVID-19 pandemic and, 446–50, 459–61 depression, see depression in Gen X, 193–95 in Gen Z, 392–416, 478 in girls, 414–16 Greatests and, 67, 68 in liberals, 438–39 Millennials and, 324–42 in Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, 404–5, 406 PTSD, 68–69 self-harm, 398, 398, 401, 403, 415, 418, 459 sex and, 371 Silents and, 67–71, 129–31, 144 suicide, see suicide work and, 472–73 Merola, Julia, 387 #MeToo movement, 118, 428 Miami Herald, 111 middle class, 12, 141, 184 Millennial Makeover (Winograd and Hais), 302 Millennials, 2, 231–344 Black, 270–71, 298 children and, 233, 260, 264, 273, 281–88, 476–77 college loan debt of, 265, 273–75, 333 as digital natives, 232, 254–56 education of, 256–59, 271–72 expectations of, 275–76, 334–36 famous, 235–36 Generation Y label for, 247, 345 Hispanic, 270–71 home ownership by, 265–66, 275, 505–6 housing costs and, 268–69 iGen label for, 2, 345 income of, 140, 259–77, 333–34, 456 individualism of, 301, 312–13, 339 mental health of, 324–42 narcissism in, 248–54 “OK, Boomer” insult of, 3, 23, 29, 80, 260, 311–12, 515 perceptions of poverty among, 140, 267–77, 333–34 political involvement of, 232, 302–14 political polarization and, 336–39 popular first names of, 234 population in 2020, 234 racial consciousness in, 315–24 relationship commitments and, 278–80 religion and, 295–302, 339–40 self-confidence in, 231–32, 236–48 sexual activity and, 288–95 slow-life strategy and, 233, 266, 278, 284, 285, 290, 375 socializing of, 340–42 work and, 247, 467–69 Xennials, 24, 150 Zoomers label for, 2, 345 Millennials Rising (Howe and Strauss), 295, 302 misinformation, 496, 497 Mitchell, George, 62 Moll, Heather, 13 Monitoring the Future, 439 Moore, Michael, 140–41 movies, 185, 189 MTV, 208 murders, 186–88, 187, 188, 418 Murphy, Dannie Lynn, 480–81 Murrar, Sohad, 501 Murray, Patty, 118 Murray, Stephanie, 481 music, 184–86, 208 digital, 254–55 N Napster, 155, 254–55 narcissism, 175, 243, 248–54, 326 Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), 250, 252, 253, 253 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), 245 National Health Interview Survey, 448, 459–60 National Organization for Women (NOW), 42, 109 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 374, 396 NAXALT fallacy, 24 negative filtering, 424 negativity, 422, 437, 438 pessimism, 418–24, 420, 450 on social media, 495–97 Nelson, Rob, 211 New England Journal of Medicine, 91 New Rules (Yankelovich), 172 news media, 423, 488 trust in, 200–201, 201 Newsom, Gavin, 214 New York Post, 341 New York Times, 42, 109, 111, 113–14, 169, 177, 186, 218, 220, 241, 343, 463, 482 New York University (NYU), 500, 501 Nike, 511–12 9/11, see September 11 terrorist attacks Nine Ladies (Moll), 13 Nixon, Richard, 54 nonbinary people, 3, 349, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 362, 365, 367, 474, 475, 476, 486 North Sentinel Island, 1, 4, 6 NPR, 435 nuclear war, 5, 150, 483 O Obama, Barack, 99, 100, 102, 107, 120, 122, 205, 309, 332, 336, 435, 441, 485, 498–99 Obergefell, Jim, 213–14 Obergefell v. Hodges, 214, 215 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (AOC), 256, 275, 306, 307 Occupy Wall Street, 228, 229, 256 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 45–46 Office Space, 469 Ohanian, Alexis, Sr., 452 Ohanian, Alexis Olympia, Jr., 452 opioid epidemic, 134, 330, 403 O’Rourke, P. J., 78 Ortiz, Alejandro Agustin, 383 Osaka, Naomi, 392 Ossoff, Jon, 306, 307 overweight and obesity, 416, 417, 418, 458–59, 458 P Page, Elliot, 358, 362 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 265, 268 Parkland shooting, 435–36 patriotism, 19, 65, 422 Patterson, Bruce Woods, 72 Pelosi, Nancy, 53 Pennebaker, James, 238 People, 84 People for Equality, Acceptance, Cooperation, & Empathy (PEACE), 437 pessimism, 418–24, 420, 450 Peters, Lucia, 325 Petersen, Anne Helen, 334, 341 pets, 482, 510 Pew Research Center, 261, 276, 301, 312, 321, 346, 401, 435, 438, 477 Philadelphia, 281 phrases in books, see words and phrases in American books phubbing, 293 Pinder, Duwain, 500 Poitier, Sidney, 41–42 Polars, 2, 451–61 Alpha label for, 2, 451 childhood injuries and, 454–55, 459 COVID-19 pandemic and, 451, 452, 455, 457–61 famous, 453–54 name of, 451 multiracial people in, 452 popular first names of, 453 population in 2020, 453 screen media and, 456–59 police, attitudes toward, 389–90, 391 political ideologies age and, 62–63, 124–27, 308, 310, 484–87 of Boomers, 124–27 businesses and, 510–12, 511 education level and, 434, 491–92 free speech and, 379, 382, 383, 384 individualism and collectivism and, 11, 84 party affiliations and, 65–66 religion and, 504 social media use and, 444, 444 transgender identification and, 360, 361 unhappiness and life dissatisfaction and, 439, 440, 441 workplace and, 470–72 see also conservatives; liberals political involvement, 303, 303, 469 Boomers and, 119–20 Gen X and, 208–12 Gen Z and, 435–38 high school seniors and, 120, 121 Millennials and, 232, 302–14 voter turnout, 120, 208–12, 209, 210, 225, 304–5, 304, 436–38, 436, 486 political leadership, 305–6 Blacks and, 102–3, 104, 107 Boomers and, 120–23, 140, 223–24 Gen X and, 222–25 Gen Z and, 435 governors, 60, 60, 122, 122, 224, 225, 305 senators, 60, 61, 122–23, 123, 223, 223, 224, 305, 306 Silents and, 59–62, 122 U.S. representatives, 60, 123, 223–24, 224, 305–6, 305, 430 women and, 111–12, 112, 118 political parties college education and, 311 ideologies and, 65–66 progressive views and, 487–90, 488 see also Democrats; Republicans political polarization, 30, 229, 308–11, 337, 346, 437, 451, 471, 491–96 COVID-19 pandemic and, 493–94 Gen Z and, 430–35 Millennials and, 336–39 pornography, 293, 369, 371 positives, discounting, 424 poverty, 105, 105, 264, 264, 455, 456 Blacks and, 105–6, 105 Millennials and, 140, 267–77 presidential elections of 2016, 138, 141, 143, 310, 332, 432, 437 of 2020, 70, 432, 436, 493 pregnancy abortion and, 91, 92, 231, 286, 313, 313, 314, 314, 437, 480 birth control and, 79, 92, 231, 286, 480 reproductive technology and, 13, 91, 480 unmarried, 90–91 press, trust in, 200–201, 201 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 13 Problem with Everything, The (Daum), 165 Program for International Student Assessment, 407 pronouns, 350, 353–54, 361, 362, 475–76 Prozac Nation (Wurtzel), 160, 192 Psychology Today, 137 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 68–69 Purdy, Sam, 465–66 Q Quindlen, Anna, 113 R race, see Blacks rap and hip-hop, 185–86, 208, 209 Raspberry, William, 186 Reagan, Ronald, 200, 220, 221, 432, 485, 490 real estate, see housing Recession, Great, see Great Recession recycling programs, 212 religion, 297, 298, 300, 502, 503 free speech and, 381, 382 future of, 502–4 Millennials and, 295–302 reminiscence bump, 78 Reno, Janet, 114 reproductive technology, 13, 91, 480 Republicans, 11, 65, 66, 66, 216, 221, 221, 222, 305, 308, 311, 312, 484–87, 491 Boomer, 124–27 Gen X, 220–21 Millennial, 307 police as viewed by, 390, 391 progressive views among, 487–90, 488 racial issues as viewed by, 318–20, 318, 319, 320, 390–92, 391, 488, 489 Trump and, 307, 307, 431, 431 retirement, 482 Rhetoric for Radicals (Del Gandio), 437 Robertson, Derek, 306 Rodger, Elliot, 290 Rodrigo, Olivia, 396 Rodriguez, Polly, 471 Roe v.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Other users post emojis of pills or hypodermic needles. Trees or leaves or the phrase “cutting grass” typically signify marijuana transactions. Some of these are jokes, and some are actual horticultural payments, of course. Either way, it’s a little shocking to see the volume of transactions as the country struggles with an opioid crisis.13 Illegal drugs are popular. They’ve always been popular. Most people would argue that illegal drug use is not good, at least not for society as a whole—so when tech is being used to facilitate and distribute them, tech is being used in a way that’s counterproductive for cultural good. Yet this is the logical outcome when tech is produced according to libertarian values with a willful disregard for application.

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., 92–93 New Communalism movement, 5 Newman, Barry, 152 Newspapers, 152 New York Times, 152 NeXt cube, 5 NICAR conference, 196 Nineteenth Amendment, 78 Northpointe, 155–156 Norvig, Peter, 93, 118 Nutter, Michael, 53 NVIDIA, 140–141 Obama Administration, 147, 194 Object, 97 O’Neil, Cathy, 94 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, 65 oN-Line System (NLS), 25 OpenBazaar, 159 Operating systems, 24–25 Opioid crisis, 158–160 O’Reilly, Tim, 81 OSX, 25 Otto, 142 Overview Project, 52 Page, Carl Victor, Sr., 72–73 Page, Larry, 72–73, 131, 151 PageRank, 72, 151–152 Palantir, 83 Panama Papers, 196 Pandas library, 97 Paperclip theory, 89–90 Papert, Seymour, 72, 73 Pasquale, Frank, 115 Pattis, Richard, 129 PayPal, 83, 159 Pearson, 53–54 Penn and Teller, 70 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), 52, 53–54 Pereira, Fernando, 118 Personal computer revolution, 5, 24 Philadelphia School District, 53–60, 65–66 Physicians, sexual abuse by, 42–43 PillyPod, 173 Pinker, Stephen, 90 Pinkerton, Emma, 164 Pizzafy, 165, 168–174 Policing quantitative methods to enhance, 155 racial disparities found by Stanford Open Policing Project, 43 speeding, 43 PolitiFact, 45–46 Popular vs. good, 149–152, 160 Poverty and differential pricing, 116 Prater, Vernon, 155 Predictive analytics, 33 Price discrimination, 46 Price optimization, 114–115 Privacy, right to, 68, 195 Programmers accountability for, 154 bias, 155–158 competence, developing, 169–170, 174 drug use, 158–159 ethical training, 145 income, 170–171 safety, attitudes toward, 73–74 social conventions, 74–75 Programming.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Mr Hammergren, who has been in charge since 2001 and also chairman since 2002, has received some $692 million from the company in the past 10 years, including his share stake and bonuses. His package for 2017 was $20 million which was less than the $23 million in the previous year. But shareholders – including some of America’s biggest pension funds – are concerned about the company’s role in the current opioid crisis that is gripping the country, and its financial exposure over lapses in its distribution chain. The company agreed to a settlement of $150 million with several US states for not keeping a firm enough grip on its drugs distribution. It is not clear whether Mr Hammergren will get his $20 million as the investor vote against it is only advisory.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

INTRODUCTION TERMS OF SERVICE At 109 Lincoln Street in Rutland, Vermont, stands a dilapidated yellow clapboard building. Rutland was incorporated in the late nineteenth century, flush with money from the marble quarries just outside town. But the past few decades haven’t been kind to the city, notable these days as much for its opioid epidemic (the subject of several New York Times stories), as for the nearby mountains, which still draw leaf peepers in the fall and skiers in the winter. To one side of 109 Lincoln is an empty parking lot. Across the street stands the former Lincoln Elementary School, which now houses Rutland Area Christian School, private and interdenominational, serving pre-K through grade twelve.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

But those reductions mostly reflected the elderly and those caring for dependents stepping back—outcomes to cheer, in other words. Okay, so maybe people would continue to work. But wouldn’t people waste the money? What if they squandered it all on alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, thus reducing its intended antipoverty effect? It sounds like something the United States, in the grip of an opioid epidemic, would worry about. The concern turns out to be cross-cultural. In Nicaragua, a senior government official worried that with funds going out from a transfer program, “husbands were waiting for wives to return in order to take the money and spend it on alcohol.” Again, there turns out to be plenty of evidence to the contrary.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

In 2018, household mortgage, student, auto, and credit card debt increased for the fifth year in a row, yet the majority of Americans don’t have enough money in the bank to cover one month of household expenses.58 Despite low official unemployment, one in five children live in families eking out an existence on an income below $25,750, which is the federal poverty line for a family of four.59 These economic divides drive a broad crisis of faith in the status quo—a legitimacy crisis that germinated in the aftermath of the 2008–10 financial crisis and its resolution skewed in favor of elites. Increasingly, American society is plagued by a widespread sense of alienation and despair evident in myriad ways: the nationwide opioid epidemic, rising rates of suicide, and historically low levels of trust in the US government. According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trust, only 18 percent of Americans say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” (3 percent) or “most of the time” (15 percent).60 The Rand Corporation’s recent report Truth Decay found that popular distrust and wariness had spread far beyond people’s feelings about the government.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

Even as the British pressed the emperor to let ships in to sell watches, clocks, and weapons, opium addiction had become a massive social problem. By the early nineteenth century, one out of every ten Chinese was addicted. (By contrast, about 3 percent of Americans misused or were addicted to hard drugs such as prescription opioids, cocaine, and heroin at the height of public concern over the opioid crisis and the “war on drugs” in the United States.) The Chinese official charged with eliminating the opium trade appealed directly to one of King George’s successors, Queen Victoria. “Where is your conscience?” Lin Zexu asked in an impassioned official letter. The products China exported to Great Britain—tea, silk, handicrafts—were all beneficial, he declared.

…

., 129 Morgenthau, Robert, 185 Moses, Gerhard, 192 Muslims, 60, 98 Nanjing, 142 Nanjing Road, 251 Nanyang Cotton Mill, 233 Napoleon, 10 Nationalists, 96, 97 Nazi Germany, 145–49, 151, 158, 160, 168, 170, 171, 197, 198 Austria invaded by, 145–48, 171 French surrender to, 172 Gestapo of, 168–69, 171 Holocaust, 4, 196–97; see also Jewish refugees Japan and, 168, 171 Jewish refugees from, see Jewish refugees Kristallnacht in, 160, 164 Poland invaded by, 172, 196 Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, 151 Shanghai Jews and, 171 SS of, in Shanghai, 189–90 Nebuchadnezzar, King, 4, 5 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 289 New China News Agency, 259 New Deal, 228 New Territories, 127, 226, 236, 238–40, 246, 258, 262, 265–67, 269, 279, 283 New York, New York, 85, 121 Lower East Side, 58, 93 New Yorker, xii, 107, 130–32, 181, 294 New York Times, 97, 123 New Zealand, 159 Nixon, Richard, xx, 260, 261 North-China Herald, 49–50 North China News, 131 nuclear power, 261–62, 267–68 Daya Bay plant, 268, 276–78, 281, 284 Three Mile Island accident, 268 Observer, xii, 102–4 Ohel Leah Synagogue, 160 opioid crisis, 18 opium, 17, 18, 40–41, 45–46, 134 legalization of, 37–38, 39, 45 opium trade, 17–20, 27–28, 30, 36–41, 45–47, 99, 297 efforts to limit or ban, 41 end of, 45–46, 112 prices in, 38–39, 40 Sassoon family in, 28, 36–41, 45–47, 104, 122, 291, 297 Opium Wars, xxii, xxv, 19, 36, 37, 52, 66, 67, 137, 258, 295 Ottoman Turkish Empire, 5, 7, 15, 69 Ovadia, Lucien, 206, 214–15, 218, 247–48, 296 Palestine, 92, 150, 159, 226 Zionism and, see Zionism Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Lord, 10 Pan Guang, 278 Paris, 85 Patten, Christopher, 278–79 Patterson, J.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Beth Braverman, “The 10 Most Dangerous Jobs in America,” CNBC, December 28, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-according-to-bls-data.html. 10. Dennis Thompson, “More Than 1 in 3 Americans Prescribed Opioids in 2015,” CNBC, August 1, 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-one-third-americans-prescribed-opioids-in-2015/. 11. “Opioid Crisis Statistics,” Department of Health and Human Services, February 12, 2021, https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis-statistics/index.html. 12. “How Opioid Addiction Occurs,” Mayo Clinic, February 16, 2018, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/prescription-drug-abuse/in-depth/how-opioid-addiction-occurs/art-20360372/. 13. William M.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

And in San Francisco, urban and suburban homes started off at around $150 per square foot in 1997, but by 2015 urban homes were valued at almost $700 per square foot, as opposed to less than $500 per square foot in the suburbs.10 Once areas of safety and serenity, the suburbs today are being hit with rising crime rates as their economies falter and populations shift. The TV series Breaking Bad made suburban meth dens as iconic as the urban street corners where drug dealers plied their trade in The Wire. The recent opioid epidemic has deep roots in the suburbs. Furthermore, the violent crime rate—which has been declining across the United States—fell three times faster in America’s primary cities than it did in their suburbs between 1990 and 2008. Murders actually rose by 16.9 percent in the suburbs between 2001 and 2010, while falling by 16.7 percent in cities.11 And the suburbs have been the sites of many, if not most, of America’s mass shootings, from Columbine to Sandy Hook.

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

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

Spaulding and George Simpson (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 346. “Unlike in Europe, where cities and towns existed long before industrialization”: Andrew Sullivan, “Americans Invented Modern Life. Now We’re Using Opioids to Escape It,” New York, Intelligencer, February 20, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html?gtm=bottom. “What our data show”: Case and Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity.” gives voice to their perceptions: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), Kindle, location 139. The famous Elephant Graph, drawn by economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/pdf/WPS6719.pdf.

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

Serota would find it very hard to generate a sense of shame, and the UK rich could not even be bribed: tax reliefs produced only marginal increases in giving. Besides, some money was tainted. Among the most generous donors to the arts had been the Sackler family, their name adorning the Serpentine Gallery and other good causes. However, after much litigation relating to the role of the family’s pharmaceutical companies in the US’s opioid epidemic, the Sackler name became almost as toxic as their medicine. As the climate emergency regained its hold on public and political consciousness in 2018 and 2019, Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance spearheaded the campaign against fossil-fuel use and greenwashing by resigning from the Royal Shakespeare Company in protest at BP’s sponsorship.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

At its depths, more than twelve million Americans were “underwater,” meaning their homes were worth less than the balances remaining on their mortgages. Some estimates put the number north of fifteen million. The collapse pounded Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where an anything-goes building boom gave way to an economic malaise prolonged by hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the opioid epidemic. In Audubon Place, my subdivision of starter homes, close to a third of the 109 houses were foreclosed. One of them twice. Among underwater homeowners, I was fortunate. The house was modest and so was the mortgage. I was in the early stages of my career, with greater earnings potential ahead.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Prior to joining the Times in 1989, he worked for The Wall Street Journal and New York Newsday. He is also the author of Pain Killer and Missing Man. Meier lives in New York City. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Barry Meier PAIN KILLER: AN EMPIRE OF DECEIT AND THE ORIGIN OF AMERICA’S OPIOID EPIDEMIC MISSING MAN: THE AMERICAN SPY WHO VANISHED IN IRAN Copyright SPOOKED. Copyright © 2021 by Barry Meier. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

As restrictions on regulations have loosened, the casualties have soared: gun homicides rose 43 percent between 2014 and 2016, the most recent statistic available.34 When I wake up to stories of slaughter, it is with increased alarm—because the gun deaths speak to a more frightening problem, a lack of oversight that is literally murderous. It is mirrored in the opioid epidemic, which has also grabbed disproportionate hold of Missouri and has devastated communities.35 It’s the sense of having a government that seems to welcome death; a government that has abdicated even the pretense of working for its citizens or caring if they live or die. * * * I live in Missouri, a state plunged into darkness: dark money, dead bodies, disappearing information, and disputed votes.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", big-box store, Donald Davies, Drosophila, epigenetics, hydroponic farming, Internet Archive, means of production, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

For everyone, not just football players, the number of people taking opioids for chronic pain who end up becoming addicted averages slightly more than one in ten people, a 2015 research review indicates. More than eleven million Americans are misusing pain relievers, which gives some context for the scope of today’s opioid epidemic. On the other hand, this research is showing that the majority of people are able to use opioids as prescribed medicine without losing control, which is a compelling circumstance for thinking about drug treatment strategies. Who is this much larger group of people who can avoid addiction?

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, professors of technology and history who cowrote the book The Innovation Delusion, told me that innovation today has become shorthand for digital as the default solution. “We treat innovation as an end in itself because it’s assumed to be good,” Vinsel said. But crack cocaine was an innovation, as was OxyContin, which led to the opioid epidemic. “Osama bin Laden was an entrepreneur, and al-Qaeda was an organizational innovation,” Russell echoed, but when it came to digital technology, the myth of innovation just got supercharged. When we focused exclusively on inventions, we missed the problems that new gadgets and ideas invariably caused.

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The plant was not indigenous to these countries—it probably originated in western Asia and was likely brought to India and China by Arab traders. But the British opium trade fueled mass adoption, leading to a damaging opioid crisis. When the Chinese emperor attempted to outlaw it, the British used it as an excuse for the First Opium War. The subsequent Treaty of Nanking forced open the Chinese market to foreign imports at punitive conditions. Things got worse. The war, the opioid crisis, the competition of foreign industry, and the loss of silver all resulted in aggressive increases in domestic taxation which put further pressure on the Chinese population.

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

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

An alarming 11.8 percent of musicians reported entertaining “thoughts that you would be better off dead or hurting yourself in some way” in at least several days in the last two weeks, compared with 3.4 percent for the general population.*1 In 2017, 72,306 Americans died of drug overdoses according to the Centers for Disease Control, up 14 percent from the preceding year. The opioid epidemic, in the form of heroin, struck musicians long before it spread to the general public. As in many cases, problems in American society began earlier and are amplified in the music industry. Rise Up: Family Backgrounds of Top Musicians Historically, music has provided an avenue for upward mobility for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a means to effect cultural influence.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, “That's What PBMs Do” (Washington, DC: PCMA, March 14, 2016). 76. http://prospect.org/article/hidden-monopolies-raise-drug-prices. 77. https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/big-3-distributors. 78. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/growing-share-of-big-three-drug-wholesalers-gets-attention. 79. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/11/06/states-focus-on-incentives-of-wholesalers-and-pharmacies-in-drug-price-fixing-probe/#3dd205ba402b. 80. https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates. 81. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/18/1725603/-The-Corporations-That-Created-The-Opioid-Epidemic-Continue-To-Evade-Responsibility. 82. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/02/abcd-food-giants-dominate-trade. 83. https://www.avclub.com/the-writers-guild-is-not-happy-about-the-disney-fox-dea-1821301494. 84. htt/medium.com/@PeterGonzalezNY/how-technology-is-transforming-the-title-insurance-market-739e23b0503. 85. https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html#10b59ec45266. 86. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07401.pdf. 87. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/opinion/the-title-insurance-scam.html. 88.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Another 84 million people in the United States have prediabetes, a condition that if not treated leads to type-2 diabetes. Technically, 25 percent of them will have diabetes in five years. Seventy percent of them will get diabetes eventually. Which means we’re sitting on a time bomb of trouble, financially. In just five years, we should have 50 million people with diabetes. It’s going to make the opioid epidemic look puny. Prediabetes is like the methane stored in the permafrost. If we keep polluting our bodies with carbon, prediabetes will turn to diabetes ahead of schedule. The real reason that health insurance premiums are skyrocketing is quite simple. The number of sick people is increasing. Human movement has fundamentally shifted from one carbon source to another: We used to flex our muscles and burn calories to get from one place to another.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The categories considered essential (by the author) are the following, with their CPIH code in parenthesis: Food and non-alcoholic beverages (01), clothing and footwear (03), housing and utilities (04), furniture, household equipment (05), health (06), transport (07), communication (08), and education (10). Source: Office of National Statistics. As life in the West involves more of a struggle to meet basic needs, it is not surprising that many indicators of well-being have been worsening, perhaps most shockingly the decline in life expectancy in the US. This has been mostly due to the ongoing opioid epidemic, itself a very avoidable consequence of the country’s profit-driven healthcare system, but improvements in US life expectancy have been lagging many of its Western peers since the 1980s (Figure 3.7). Life expectancy in the UK has also stagnated in recent years, with some suggestions that Tory-imposed austerity is at least partly to blame due to cuts on healthcare services (ironically, mostly for older adults who tend to overwhelmingly vote Tory).24 In a nutshell, if you are a young professional in the Western and especially the Anglo-Saxon world without the benefits of a trust fund or a generous grandfather’s loan to kick start your real estate ambitions, you have a right to be angry.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

By 2015 the share of the top 1 percent in the recovery was down to 52 percent. Gary Burtless, “Income Growth Has Been Negligible But (Surprise!) Inequality Has Narrowed Since 2007,” Brookings, July 22, 2016. 18. Politico staff, “President Obama on Inequality (Transcript),” Politico, December 4, 2013. 19. G. Beauchamp and L. Nelson, “The Opioid Epidemic: A Brief History,” June 2017, PainandPSA.org. 20. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Vital Signs: Overdoses of Prescription Opioid Pain Relievers—United States, 1999–2008,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 60 (2011): 1487–1492. 21. A. Case and A. Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (2015), 15078–15083. 22.

…

See National Economic Council (NEC) neoliberalism, 10, 396–97 Netherlands, 167, 193, 421 New Century Financial, 144 New Deal, 279, 280, 372 New Democracy, 323–24, 425, 429, 435, 516 9/11 terrorist attacks, 28, 115–16 Nissan, 558 Nixon, Richard, 11, 30–31, 44, 92 Norilsk, 223 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 123, 158, 457, 571, 591, 592–93 Northern Rock, 145–46, 541 Noyer, Christian, 406 NSA, 484, 499 Nuland, Victoria, 497 Obama, Barack, 18, 35, 265, 267, 446, 565 bank CEOs meet with, 296 on bank nationalization, 293–94 Brexit and, 551 Hamilton Project appearance of, 25, 26–27 on decay of American dream, 456 economic team of, 200–201 election of, 200, 277 Eurogroup-Syriza debt restructuring confrontation and, 523–24 eurozone crisis and, 384, 412–13, 433, 434 fiscal responsibility and, 351–52 G20 Cannes meeting and, 412–13 G20 London summit and, 268, 271 reelection of, 445 on Trump election, 576 Obama administration budget compromise with Republicans, 390–92 China containment strategy of, 486–89 contingency plans for bond market panic, 284–85 debate bank nationalization, 294–95 eurozone crisis, 2010–12 and, 335–36, 338–39, 344–45, 365, 384–85, 394, 404–5, 412–13, 433–35, 440–41, 523-24 fiscal responsibility and, 350–53 home-owner relief, failure to provide, 281, 321 partisan hostility to, 278 Russian “reset” and, 488 stimulus package, passage of, 277–79, 280–82, 289–90 Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act Occupy Wall Street, 394–95, 459 oil and commodity price collapse of 2008, 222–23 of 2014, 503–4, 601 OMT. See Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) 1Malaysia Development Bank (1MDB), 259–60 O’Neill, Paul, 36 opioid epidemic, deaths from, 457 Orban, Viktor, 492 originate-to-distribute mortgage lending system, 48 Orszag, Peter, 25, 26, 29, 30, 35, 200, 284, 290, 352, 461, 464 Osborne, George, 348–49, 350, 405, 550 Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), 441, 442 Pàf, 535–36 Palin, Sarah, 3, 175, 368 Panasonic, 159 Pandit, Vikram, 197, 198 Papademos, Lucas, 410, 425 Papandreou, George, 325, 409–10 Papoulias, Karolos, 340, 409 PASOK, 323–24, 330, 357, 376, 409, 428, 435, 516 passporting agreements, 548–49, 558 Paul, Ron, 217 Paulson, Hank, 41, 137, 138, 162, 573, 609 Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout and, 172–73 Lehman collapse and, 176, 177 TARP and, 180–81, 183, 195, 196, 197 Paulson, John, 379 PDCF.

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

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

But the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer—if it can be called that—because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels that, for blacks, society simply accepts as normal.

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

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

The orthopedist’s lack of compassion was palpable: in all the months after the surgery, he never contacted me once to see how I was getting along. The physical therapist not only had the medical knowledge and experience to match my condition, but she really cared about me. It’s no wonder that we have an opioid epidemic when it’s a lot quicker and easier for doctors to prescribe narcotics than to listen to and understand patients. Almost anyone with chronic medical conditions has been “roughed up” like I was—it happens all too frequently. I’m fortunate to be inside the medical system, but, as you have seen, the problem is so pervasive that even insider knowledge isn’t necessarily enough to guarantee good care.

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

The president’s wife, in a voice-over, speaking in her carefully enunciated, accented English, introduced the themes she would focus on as First Lady. For seventeen months the White House had been uncertain about what Melania Trump’s message or purpose should be. So here it was: she would advance the interests of children, alert people to the dangers of social media, and help bring attention to the opioid epidemic. The First Lady’s initiative was called, oddly emphasizing her constricted English, “Be Best.” A week later, Melania entered Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House was almost wholly unprepared for this event. No one seemed to have a plan for how to announce or characterize her hospitalization; no one appeared to know how to deal with the natural questions that might arise for what was described as a “benign kidney condition,” a designation that satisfied no one.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Think of medical progress, and how society exacerbates the breakthrough problem here. It is subject to the Idea Paradox. Easier-to-treat conditions, obvious compounds and drugs, clear public policy health wins: they've been taken. What's left are more complex and intractable diseases like Alzheimer's, or new public health crises like the opioid epidemic or small particulate pollution. But societal context doesn't help. A combination of perverse incentives, flawed models and burdensome (but in many cases irreplaceable) bureaucracy creates friction. Incentives for drug discovery are skewed: companies are disincentivised from targeting conditions that will, thanks to their intervention, quickly clear up.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Americans without a college degree tended to be concentrated in rural areas, traditional Black communities, and urban areas that had lost the previous mainstays of their economies, where the tax base and house values plummeted and educational, health, and other basic services were degraded. The North East of England had a parallel experience when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and the major industries closed. Just as I had seen drugs and alcohol consume Britain and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States was engulfed by the opioid crisis after mass closures hit the U.S. coal, steel, and manufacturing sectors. As the basic welfare provisions and safety net—initially enshrined in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to reconstruct the U.S. after the Great Depression of the 1930s—were steadily chipped away, colleagues at the Brookings Institution and leading American economists catalogued the “deaths of despair” from the loss of personal identity tied to meaningful jobs and the death toll from poor access to basic medical care.

…

/Russia) and, 235–36 Reagan-Gorbachev summit (1988), 85–87, 90, 197, 227, 235 Trump and, 197, 198–99, 227, 235 See also specific agreements Obama, Barack economic policies and, 154 Hill and, 3, 8, 193 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and, 139–40 Nobel Peace Prize, 216 Trump and, 178, 181, 198–99, 249 UK/Buckingham Palace and, 214 Obama, Michelle, 2 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) creation, 143, 302 Office of the Parliamentarian, 259 Ofqual (UK), 298–99 oil embargo (1970s), 20 Olusoga, David, 308 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), 20 Open Society Foundation (OSF), 246–47 opioid crisis, 157 opportunities creating, 357–61 disadvantaged students and, 136–37, 161–64 following World War II, 148–49 Hill and (summary), 12, 148, 353, 355 infrastructure of opportunity, 11–12, 13, 36, 46, 55, 59, 97, 120, 123, 136, 148, 151, 166, 176, 302, 305, 309, 311, 316, 320, 323, 325, 328, 332, 334, 337, 339, 340, 347, 348, 350, 357 students from richest families and, 166 summary on, 136–37 time/generation and, 148 work needs and, 11–12 See also equality of opportunity; specific individuals opportunity/place (summary) as antidote to populism, 350–51 building on local assets, 342–44 development plan for rural America, 338, 339–40 importance, 328 leaving/brain drain and, 330–31, 354 private/individual aid and, 340–42, 347–50 relocating/health care and, 333 relocation support, 332–33 safety networks and, 336–37 starting from scratch and, 330–33 tourists/museums, 346–47 transportation, 344–46 See also equality of opportunity; specific places/individuals Orbán, Viktor meetings with Trump, 219–20, 228, 250 political campaign and, 248 Soros and, 248, 250 Trump envious of, 220, 221 Trump/White House “first” visit and, 246 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 20 Orwell, George, 26, 69, 250 O’Sullivan, Meghan, 130 Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Putnam), 150–51 Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 213 Oxbridge, 58, 63, 66–67, 75, 89, 103, 320 Oxbridge and feeling “out of my league,” 66–67 Oxford Hill feeling “out of my league,” 66 student statistics, 66 P Packer, Asa, 346 pandemics influenza pandemic (1918), 173, 264 See also COVID-19 pandemic Pape, Robert, 292 Paris Climate Agreement/Accord, 177, 216 Parnas/Fruman attacking Yovanovitch, 239–40 as businessmen working in Ukraine, 239 Giuliani and, 239 Trump/manipulating Trump, 239, 240, 242, 250 wanting “dirt” on Joe/Hunter Biden, 239 Parnas, Lev.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

The tech incubator Y Combinator had recently committed to running a UBI experiment in California to understand how it worked. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes endorsed UBI in a book. Terrence Davenport, though, was not a fan. He was nearly exasperated at what he saw as the ignorance inherent in the idea. “Do you know about the opioid crisis in this country?” he said. “Do you know that poor people in my community don’t know how to budget?” He told me that he felt Silicon Valley was a place full of “the leaders of our country” who don’t know anything about it. At the time, the other most prevalent idea for ensuring Americans better income came from Donald Trump, who had campaigned for the presidency on an “America First” ideology, which implied that sending immigrants home would help Americans get jobs.

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

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

See globalized neoliberalism neo-populism Neptune Spear, Operation New Deal New Hampshire primary New Orleans, Battle of New Republic new world order Bill Clinton and Buchanan and Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. and globalization and Wilson and New York Daily News New York Times Niebuhr, Reinhold Nixon, Richard Nobel Peace Prize Noriega, Manuel North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea Novak, Robert nuclear arms Iran and North Korea and Nuremberg tribunal Obama, Barack accomplishments of Afghanistan and bin Laden and economy and election of 2008 and freedom and Hillary Clinton and Iraq and Nobel Prize and primaries of 2016 and ranking of RMA and Trump and Obamacare Obergefell v. Hodges Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Occupy Movement opioid crisis Oslo Peace Accords Paine, Thomas Pakistan Panama Paris Accord on climate change Partisan Review Pataki, George patriarchy Paul, Rand Pax Americana globalized capitalism and policing of peace dividend peace-through-dominion Pearl Harbor attacks pensions People Perot, H. Ross Perry, Rick Persian Gulf War (1990–91) Philippines Poland Politico Polk, James poor populism post–Cold War (Emerald City) consensus Bill Clinton and Buchanan and Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. and climate change and dawn of as elite-managed democracy failure of failure of, and American condition in 2016 failure of, and elections of 1992 freedom and Fukuyama’s “end of history” and globalization and Hillary Clinton and militarism and military service and normalization of war and Obama and Perot and presidential power and primaries of 2016 and reframing conversation on Trump of 2000 and Trump’s election as rejection of Powell, Colin power elite Presbyterians preschool, universal presidential supremacy unitary executive and preventive war Princeton University privacy Progressive movement progressives Project for a New American Century Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg) Puritanism Putin, Vladimir race and racism Bill Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama and Trump and Rather, Dan Reagan, Ronald Farewell Address Gorbachev and “Star Wars” and Rector, Ricky Ray Reed, Donna Reform Party religion Republican Party Bush Jr. and McCain and primaries of 2016 Trump and retirement savings Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) Rice, Condoleezza Rio Pact (1947) Roe v.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

To turn this group of skeptics into supporters, the Trump team created Project Alamo in Parscale’s hometown of San Antonio to consolidate fund-raising, messaging, and targeting, especially on Facebook. They communicated to these voters repeatedly with messages on topics that the data said were likely to be important to them, like the opioid epidemic and the Affordable Care Act. The Republican team described what their data operation revealed as the election approached. Ten days before the election, they estimated that they were down two points to Clinton in key battleground states. But they had identified 7 percent of the population that was still undecided about whether it would vote.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For instance, in 2019 the military wing of the militant Palestinian group Hamas developed a campaign to raise money from anonymous donors using Bitcoin. The US government has also identified Bitcoin as a financing channel that facilitates the cross-border trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids that have fueled the devastating opioid crisis in the United States. In parallel with the decline in Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange and its rising status as a speculative asset, the share of Bitcoin transactions accounted for by illegal activities has fallen over time. One set of researchers estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Bitcoin transactions in 2012, measured by both volume and value, were accounted for by illegal transactions.

…

See also “Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman Testifies before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,” US Department of Justice, November 18, 2013, https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/acting-assistant-attorney-general-mythili-raman-testifies-senate-committee-homeland. On the linking of Bitcoin with the opioid crisis in the United States, see “Advisory to Financial Institutions on Illicit Financial Schemes and Methods Related to the Trafficking of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids,” White House, August 21, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Fentanyl-Advisory-Money-Tab-D.pdf. The research cited here appears in Foley, Karlsen, and Putnins (2019).

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Somehow we have to add the equivalent of another British economy next year, on top of what we are already doing, and then add even more than that the following year, and so on. Where can this quantity of growth possibly be found? The pressures become enormous. It’s what is driving the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid crisis in the United States; the beef companies that are burning down the Amazon; the arms companies that lobby against gun control; the oil companies that bankroll climate denialism; and the retail firms that are invading our lives with ever-more sophisticated advertising techniques to get us to buy things we don’t actually want.

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

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

But white elite guilt could also not countenance that their own were part of this nationalist movement; it had to be the other whites, the poor ones, those going through some terrible crisis, and so the economic deprivation reasoning again won. Adam Serwer of the Atlantic calls this ‘the Calamity Thesis’, the belief that ‘Trump’s election was the direct result of some great, unacknowledged social catastrophe – the opioid crisis, free trade, a decline in white Americans’ life expectancy – heretofore ignored by cloistered elites in their coastal bubbles.’ ‘The irony’, he points out, is that ‘the Calamity Thesis is by far the preferred white-elite explanation for Trumpism, and is frequently invoked in arguments among elites as a way of accusing other elites of being out of touch.’

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

The shop owner lives by the conceit that the customer is always right; the physician trains to acquire a critical understanding of a patient’s needs. Giving in to a patient’s request is appropriate only when it coincides with his professional judgment. The erasure of this distinction has arguably enabled and accelerated the opioid crisis, with doctors behaving like vendors, rushing to meet an existing demand rather than evaluating its appropriateness and sometimes frustrating it. “You’re in pain? Here’s some Percocet.” “You’re feeling dysphoric? Here’s a script for testosterone. Here’s a letter for surgery.” It isn’t hard to see parallels between the medical professionals in both instances: much like physical pain, gender dysphoria leans heavily on a patient’s claim about herself.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target