Berlin Wall

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pages: 564 words: 182,946

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

Walter Ulbricht: Eine deutsche Biografie. Munich, 2003. Fulbrook, Mary. Anatomy of a Dictatorship, Inside the GDR 19491989. Oxford, 1995. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War, A New History. New York, 2005. Gearson, John, and Kori Schake (eds). The Berlin Wall Crisis: Perspectives on Cold War Alliances. Basingstoke & New York, 2002. 484 / THE BERLIN WALL Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushchev and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York, 1988. Grimm, Thomas. Das Politbüro Private Ulbricht, Honecker, Mielke & Co. aus der Sicht ihrer Angestellten. Berlin, 2004. Harrison, Hope M. Driving the Soviets up the Wall.

Plans were drawn up so that any wounded escaper could be transported to hospital by the quickest and shortest route.26 In Peter Fechter, the Berlin Wall had found, not its first, but perhaps its greatest martyr. This was a shame from which the East German regime never quite recovered, despite its best, most cunning propaganda efforts. If the Springer media empire had indeed become involved in helping with the costs of the 28 June tunnel (as well as providing a safe location 322 / THE BERLIN WALL for its entrance), its role was to be trumped a few months later by the American broadcasting giant NBC. The network agreed to actually finance an entire escape tunnel in exchange for the exclusive film rights.

In the immediate aftermath of his speech, he was thrilled with all the applause and the excitement. Then came discussions with his advisers. McGeorge Bundy, for one, threw a douche over the mood when he told Kennedy 340 / THE BERLIN WALL frankly: ‘Mr President, I think you have gone too far.’ Calming down, Kennedy seemed to agree. ‘If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it,’ he ruefully told his military adviser, General McHugh. Later, at the Free University’s Henry Ford Building, symbol of American largess to West Berlin, the President gave another major speech. He stuck to the script.


pages: 669 words: 150,886

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

The Devil was claiming political asylum.³⁴ These witticisms included a high degree of self-deprecation, yet this willingness to see the irony of the situation did something to defuse East Germans’ anger, and reflected a growing identity as long-suffering easterners, but where the barbs were constantly pointed at the regime. ²⁸ Udo Grashoff, ‘In einem Anfall von Depression . . . ’: Selbsttötungen in der DDR (Berlin: Links, 2006), 218–27. ²⁹ Taylor, Berlin Wall, 186–201. ³⁰ Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall (London: Granta, 2003). ³¹ Weber, DDR, 98. ³² Fulbrook, People’s State, 18. ³³ Rita Kuczynski, Mauerblume: Ein Leben auf der Grenze (Munich: Claassen, 1999), 70. ³⁴ Newman, Behind the Berlin Wall, 76. 160 Behind the Berlin Wall Others have compared the numbing process to that of an amputee, as Berliners developed a ‘phantom pain’ and symptoms of ‘hospitalism’.³⁵ One of the rather obvious healing factors was geographic distance from the Wall.

Since perestroika pertained only to developing socialism, the GDR, as a ‘developed socialist society’, saw itself as exempt. Krenz casuistically rejected the ¹⁶ Taylor, Berlin Wall, 392–3. ¹⁷ Jeffrey Gedmin, The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1992), 19. ¹⁸ Wilfried Loth, ‘Die Sowjetunion und das Ende der DDR’, in Jarausch and Sabrow (eds.), Weg, 124. ¹⁹ Hertle, Fall der Mauer, 264. ²⁰ Gedmin, Hidden Hand, 50. ²¹ Taylor, Berlin Wall, 400. 232 Behind the Berlin Wall notion of ‘new thinking’ for implying a ‘community of guilt for the explosive international situation’. It was instead chiefly applicable to the imperialist West.

Graffiti an der Berliner Mauer (Darmstadt: Das Beispiel, 1990), 9 and 37. ⁴⁴ Terry Tillmann, The Writings on the Wall: Peace at the Berlin Wall (Santa Monica, CA: 22/7, 1990), 31. The author was a leader of personal growth seminars, teaching pupils ‘how to remove their personal walls’, 13. ⁴⁵ Ausfelder, Kunst oder Chaos? , 69. ⁴⁶ Leland Rice, Up Against It: Photographs of the Berlin Wall (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 11 and 16. ⁴⁷ Ibid., 8. 272 Behind the Berlin Wall used the Wall as a Cold War political noticeboard, announcing the ‘political declaration of war on military authority’ and the end to ‘kaputt diplomacy’.


pages: 587 words: 119,432

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, hindsight bias, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban decay, éminence grise

., 56 Kochemasov, Vyacheslav, 52, 100–101, 102, 110, 111 Kohl, Helmut, 8, 91, 128, 179 adding territory of GDR to FRG, plan of, 170 and announcement of travel law, reaction to, 122–124 Basic Law, Article 23, allowing new states to join FRG and, 170–171 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 158, 163–164 election 1990 and, 170 on Honecker, and use of force vs. reforms, 22, 178 and post-Cold War Europe, political structure of, 169–171 refugee crisis and, 25, 26–27 and travel law, draft of, and credit and Berlin Wall opening, 98 Kontraste (television program), 57 Krenz, Egon, 26, 164 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 150 and Berlin Wall, opening of, responsibility for, 177, 178 and Berlin Wall opening, inaccurate information to Gorbachev regarding, 160–161 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 159–150, 161 and border shootings, ambiguous orders regarding, 16 closure of Bertele’s office and, 94–95 conciliatory rhetoric of, 89–90 on dependency on Western credit, 90 and emigration, and hole variant, 101–102, 103, 105 fate of, after German reunification, 175 fortieth anniversary of founding of PRC and, 43–44 as general secretary of SED, 88 hard-currency slush fund and, 90 and Honecker, coup against, 52–53, 55, 71, 72, 78, 82, 87–88 Leipzig ring road march and, 52–53, 71–72, 73–74 and Leipzig road ring march (October 9), SED recovery from success of, 81–82 New Forum and, 95 November 4 demonstration (East Berlin) and, 95–96 Politburo resignation plan of, 103, 111 Tiananmen Square massacre and, 43–44 on travel and emigration, 17–18 travel concessions of, 90–92 and travel law, and text on permanent emigration and temporary travel, 111–114 and travel law, draft of, 91–92, 93, 95, 100 and travel law, draft of, and free elections, 98 and travel law, Schabowski’s announcement of, 115 Kristallnacht, 114 Krolikowski, Werner, 103 Krüger, Hans-Joachim, 106–109 Kühirt, Theo, 75–76 Kusnetz, Marc, 116–117, 128–131, 151, 166 Kuwait, 179 Kuzmin, Ivan, 157, 158 Kvitsinsky, Yuli, 163 Labs, Helga, 115 Lamprecht, Jerry, 116, 130, 152 Lange, Bernd-Lutz, 55 Lässig, Jochen, 38, 51, 59 Lautenbach, Robin, 145 Lauter, Gerhard, xxiv, 114, 176, 179 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 156 and travel law, and text on permanent emigration and temporary travel, 107–109 and travel law, draft of, 93–94, 96–103, 105–109 and travel law, instructions for announcement of, 109 Lauter, Hans, 94 Leary, Mike, 40 Legal proceedings/investigations, and crimes/abuse by East German regime, 174–175 Legalization of political opposition, instructions to ignore, 19 Leipzig churches in, 89 (see also specific churches) environmental pollution/urban decay in, 47, 57 Leipzig protests/demonstrations, 32–47 activists vs.

See also Refugee crisis Bach, Johann Sebastian, 33 Bachmann, Werner, 137 Baker, James, 121 Banaschak, Manfred, 115 Basic Law, 6 Article 23, allowing new states to join FRG, 170–171 document as kind of “placeholder” for West Germany, 170 Bavaria, 105 Beer Hall Putsch, 114 Beil, Gerhard, 115 Berger, Matthias, 32 Berlin design competitions, 2007 and 2010, and memorial to Berlin Wall opening, 184 Berlin (divided) in 1989, 93 (map) legal authority in, xix movement within, 8 subdivision and occupation of, post-World War II, original intention of, 4–6 Berlin Wall chiseling and hammering of, for souvenir pieces, 166 razing of, 172–173 Berlin Wall, construction of, xxi–xxii death strip and, 11 (photo) justification given for, 8 Berlin Wall, opening of, xvii–xxvi, 109, 147–150, 160 (photo) causes of, xx–xxvi, 177–183, 184 causes of, and historical record and interviews, xxiii, xxv–xxvi causes of, evidence for, xxiii, xxv–xxvi causes of, false claims about, xx, 177 causes of, short-and long-term, 179–180 and climbing of, near Brandenburg Gate (November 9), 150–152 and Cold War Europe, post-, political structure of, 169–171, 176–177 and combination of protest and publicity, power of, 181 and dissidents and loyalists, impact of contributions of, 181, 183 and dog runs, breakdown of, 167 East German regime infighting and, 159 East German regime’s continuing effort to maintain control and, 167 fate of individuals involved in, 172–177 the how and why, xx, xxiii individuals involved in, xxiii–xxv memorials dedicated to, 183–184 motivation for rise of peaceful revolution and, xxiv–xxv, xxv–xxvi and nonviolence, adherence to, 180 number of East Germans crossing and, 167 and outsiders, impact of contributions of, 181, 183 response to, by border guards/soldiers, 161, 164 response to, by East German regime, 159–161 response to, by Soviet Union, 156–158, 159–160 response to, by West Germany, 161–162, 163–165 response to, by Western occupying powers, 162–163 significance of small steps and, 181 as symbol of end of Cold War, xxiv–xxv tragic historical associations of date of, 114 triumphalist assumptions about, cost of, xxv willingness of peaceful revolutionaries to trust and, 180–181 See also Border openings Berlin Wall Foundation, 183–184 Berliner Morgenpost, 119 Bertele, Franz, 32–33 closure of office due to refugees, and, 94–95 Bias of hindsight, and causality in history, xxii–xxiii, 177–178 Bickhardt, Stephan, 63 Bild, 115, 116 Birthler, Marianne, xxiv, 86–87, 96, 184 as director of Stasi Archive, 175 Bitterlich, Joachim, 123 Blackwill, Robert, 98 Bloch, Marc, on causality in history, and bias of hindsight, xxii–xxiii, 177–178 Bohley, Bärbel, 9, 62, 92, 95 Border crossings, 13–16 authority at, 136–137 East German regime retaking control at, 156 economic support payment (transit sum) for, 16 opening of, and “let-off-steam solution” (permanent expulsion from East Germany), 141 people gathering and pressuring border officials at, 138–139 shootings at, false rumors of cessation of, 13 typical border workday at, 136 See also Bornholmer Street border crossing; Invaliden Street border crossing; Sonnenallee border crossing Border guards/soldiers, 136–137 ambiguous orders to shoot and, 11–12, 13, 16 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 161, 164 legal proceedings against, after German reunification, 174–175 loss of authority/employment of, after German reunification, 172 at November 4 demonstration (East Berlin), and use of bodily violence, 96 patrol dogs and, 11 reward system and, 12 weapons returned by, after German reunification, 172 weapons used by, xix, 10–11, 12–13 See also Armed forces Border openings, 131–139 announcement of, 145 media coverage of, 127–128 passport control at, 136 use of force at, instructions for, 139–140 See also under specific border crossings Border Regiment 36, 161 Bornholmer Street border crossing, 131–138, 132 (photo), 135 (photo) opening of, 139–144, 145–150, 148–149 (photo) opening of, and number of East Germans crossing, 167 opening of, border guard/soldier response to, 164 passport control at, 136 people gathering and pressuring border officials at, 138 razing of checkpoint at, 172–173, 182 (photo) renamed November 9, 1989 Square, 183 “wild pigs” as nickname for “troublemakers” at, 138 See also Border crossings Brandenburg Gate, xvii, xviii, xix–xx, xix (photo), 160 (photo) climbing of Berlin Wall near (November 9), 150–152 East German regime retaking control near, 155–156 scene near, on November 9, 150–152 Brinkmann, Peter, 115, 116, 118 Broadcasters/broadcast networks, 86.

See Patrol dogs Domaschk, Matthias, 61 Dörre, Toralf, 74 DPA (wire service), 124 Draftees as riot police, 54–55 Dresden, 30, 32, 40, 180 Dual-track decision of 1979, 34 Duisberg, Claus-Jürgen, 102 East Berlin. See Berlin (divided); Berlin Wall; Berlin Wall, construction of; Berlin Wall, opening of East German regime and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 159–161 collapse of, xx, xxv collapse of, and document disappearances, 49 control by, 3–4 crimes by, and investigations/legal proceedings, after reunification, 49, 174–175 and retaking of control, near Brandenburg Gate, 155–156 use of force by, 3–4 See also specific leaders East Germans and border controls, reinstatement of, belief in, 165–166 and Soviet troops, confrontations between, 88 East Germany.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

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

., 20, 96 escapes to West Berlin arming of border guards to prevent, 90 before Berlin Wall construction, 20, 176, 178 Berlin Wall enhancements to prevent, 104 bricking up of windows to prevent, 61, 91 British troops’ assistance in, 234 control zone around Berlin Wall to prevent, 86 desire to leave East Germany and, 205–06 by East German border guards, 59–60, 229 economic decline and increasing rates of, 240–41 espionage charge in, 19–20 fatalities during, 87–92, 293, 299–302 first fatality in, 54 first fatality involving Berlin Wall in, 60 jumping from apartment windows during, 54, 58, 60–61, 91 last escape in, 207–22 last fatalities in, 228 new right to travel ending need for, 222, 241–44, 245 number of, on first day of Berlin Wall, 56 personal memories of, 20, 57–58, 60, 183–86, 207–22 riots and demonstrations after death during, 89, 90 as symbol of resistance, 60–61 trains checked for, 72 tunnel under Berlin Wall in, 175–76, 181, 183–86 underground sewer and canal networks used in, 178 espionage.

., 93–104 Bay of Pigs and, 21, 94 Berlin question with Soviets and, 21–23, 93–94, 96, 97 Berlin visit and speeches of, 97–103 Berlin Wall reaction of, 58 Clay as special envoy of, 76, 77, 80 closing of Berlin border and, 42, 58 escape-attempt deaths and, 89, 91 Soviet missiles in Cuba and, 94–96 Soviet relations with, 21–23, 84, 93 standoff over Allied right of access to East Berlin and, 80, 83–84 test ban treaty and, 21, 96–97, 103 Kennedy, Robert, 84, 98 KGB, 12, 19, 47, 115, 158, 177, 203, 233 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42 Allies’ access to Berlin and, 13, 17 American reaction to Soviet missiles of, 94, 95, 96 anti-Stalinist reforms of, 205 decision to build wall made by, 23, 24 desire to avoid conflict with America and, 84 East Germans and, 125 escape attempts and, 89, 90 Kennedy’s meeting about Berlin question with, 21–22 military operations during building of Berlin Wall and, 47 ouster of, 103 relations between Mao Zedong and, 20 Knackstedt, Adolf, 254 childhood life in Berlin of, 11–12, 25 crowds in streets after Wall opening and, 263 on early days of life with Berlin Wall, 54–55 early intelligence on beginning of Berlin Wall from, 28–29, 38–39 escape-attempt deaths and, 90–92 escaped border guard and, 59–60 first spy assignment in Berlin of, 25–27 Kennedy’s visit to West Berlin and, 98 observations on impact of Berlin Wall by, 53 second assignment in Berlin with refugees by, 27–29 US Army training of, 25–26 Knackstedt, Vera, 12, 26–27, 55, 90, 254–55, 263 Kohl, Helmut, 240, 257, 272–73, 283, 284, 289, 293, 295 Konev, Ivan, 47, 81–82, 84 Korean War, 80, 108, 177 Krenz, Egon, 236, 239, 240, 241, 283 Krivosheyev, General, 158–59 Lajoie, Colonel, 158–59, 160 Landau, Jon, 191, 192, 195, 197 Law, Mitt, 249–50, 253 LeMay, Curtis, 10 liaison officers, 133–54, 161 agreements covering, 134–37 Berlin Wall construction surveillance by, 137 East German detention of, 140–41 East German feelings about, 140, 151 geographic areas covered by, 135–36 injuries and fatalities involving, 144 intelligence gathering by, 133–34, 135, 137, 138–39, 145, 147, 152, 153–54 memories of work as, 137, 138, 140–41, 142–43, 144–45, 145–49, 151–53 mission and structure of, 138 relationships between Soviet commanders and, 144–45 surveillance of, 135, 137, 140, 141, 150 tour missions of, 147–49 training of, 139, 148 value of information from, 153–54 vehicle skirmishes involving, 141–44, 150–51 Liebling, Peter, 59 Lightner, E.

“In all the dramatic moments about what was happening that night which we all remember so well, and are still portrayed on countless television programs, it is worthwhile remembering that the small things are those on which so much can turn.” How right this grand old soldier was. APPENDIX Fatalities at the Berlin Wall 1961–1989 This book has been about the ordinary people whose lives were affected by the Berlin Wall. It is only right, therefore, to commemorate those ordinary Berliners who died because of it. Figures vary, but records released by the Berlin Wall Memorial, based on Bernauer Straße, show that at least 140 people were killed or died at the Wall in connection with the East German border regime. This total comprises 101 East Germans who were killed, died by accident, or committed suicide while trying to flee through the border fortifications; 30 people from the east and west without any escape plans and 1 Soviet soldier who were shot or died in an accident; 8 East German border soldiers who were killed by deserters, comrades, a fugitive, an escape helper, or a West Berlin policeman, by accident or intentionally while on duty.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

Bush and, 213, 214 dimensions and consequences of, 20–23, 218–219 end of, 4–5, 7, 9–14, 31, 36, 61, 65–66, 70, 75–79, 213 fall of Berlin Wall and, 5–9, 54, 89 impact of, 20–23, 65 perceived victors of, 204 Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech (1987) and, 2–5, 9–14, 16, 27, 215–216 symbolism of Berlin Wall and, 1, 3, 5–9, 15–16, 89, 171 Cold War, The (Lightbody), 222 Cold War History Project, 223, 226, 230 Cold War International History Project, 225 Cold War Project, The (CNN series), 228 COMECON, 229 Comintern, 21 Committee for Historical Justice (Hungary), 85, 230–231 Common Fate Camp, 97–98 Common Market, 21, 93 communism anticommunists and, 29–31 Berlin Wall and. See Berlin Wall G. W. Bush on, 2, 5 fall of, in Bulgaria, 190–191 fall of, in Czechoslovakia, 28, 114, 128, 135–143, 175–190, 205–206 fall of, in GDR, 163–174, 203–205 fall of, in Hungary, 28, 29–39, 41–42, 46, 61, 66–74, 125, 128, 137, 139–140, 143–145, 206–207, 228–231, 236 fall of, in Poland, 28, 35–36, 43–54, 125, 128–133, 137, 139–140, 205 fall of, in Romania, 105–111, 193–201 fall of, throughout Eastern Europe, 41–42, 48, 54, 62, 173–174, 204 oppression in, 36 Reagan and, 13 as term, 224 See also Politburo Constantinescu, Emil, 201 consumer goods, 171–172, 177, 198–199 containment policy, 5, 61 Cooper, Gary, 79 Cornea, Doina, 197–198 counterculture, 21 Cousteau, Jacques, 95 crash of 2008, 218 cult of personality, 110 Cuthbertson, Ian, 228 Czechoslovakia denouement, 205–206 fall of Berlin Wall and, 8 fall of communism in, 28, 114, 128, 135–143, 175–190, 205–206, 233 Prague Spring (1968), 39, 45 refugees from GDR and, 122–123, 135, 141, 148, 152–153 reopening of border with GDR, 158–159 as totalitarian state, 135–143 Velvet Revolution (Prague; 1989), 170, 173, 175–190, 236 Warsaw Pact invasion of (1968), 105–106, 205 See also Prague Dalai Lama, 135, 206 Danner, Mark, 237 Davis, John, 231 DDR Museum (Berlin), 224 death strip (Berlin Wall), 16–18 democracy in Czechoslovakia, 185, 186, 206 in Eastern Europe, 99 in Hungary, 29–32, 41, 55–58, 110, 230–231 in Poland, 58–61, 79–84, 94, 110, 128–133, 225–226, 229–230 Reagan and, 3 U.S., 29, 30, 41 Democratic Forum, 97–99, 99 détente, 5, 61 Deutsche Bank, 73 Diensthier, Jiri, 233 Diepgen, Eberhard, 13 Dietrich, Marlene, 4 Dinescu, Mircea, 197–198 Dissolution (Maier), 163–164, 230–231, 232, 234, 235 Dresden bank runs in, 165 Freedom Train and, 124, 152–153, 154 refugees from GDR and, 117, 124, 135, 152–153, 160 rise of opposition, 152–153, 158 Dubcek, Alexander, 45, 177, 186–187, 226 Duberstein, Kenneth, 11 Dukakis, Michael, 39–40 East Berlin fall of Berlin Wall, 5–9, 65–76, 88–94, 165–173, 203–204 Jubilee of 1989 and, 115, 147–152 May Day (1989), 65–66, 69–70, 228 refugees from GDR and, 119–120, 160–161 rise of opposition, 158 See also Berlin; German Democratic Republic (GDR) Eastern Europe collapse of communism throughout, 41–42, 48, 54, 62, 173–174, 204 revolutions in, 14, 84, 216 Soviet withdrawal from, 12, 38–39, 91 See also names of specific countries East Germany.

Basic facts about the Wall are drawn from many sources, among them: The Wall, Press and Information, Office of Land Berlin, 2000/2001; Bilanz der Todesopfer, Checkpoint Charlie Museum, 1999; Die Berliner Mauer, Fleming/Koch, 1999; Encyclopedia Britannica, Berlin Wall; a variety of Web sites pertaining to the Berlin Wall. Other useful references include Frederick Taylor’s fine history The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989, 2006; Peter Wyden’s tour de force Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin, 1989, which among other things is the source of the Allensbach data on West German attitudes toward the Wall and reunification; William F. Buckley Jr., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 2004. One of the best travelogues of this genre ever written is Anthony Bailey’s The Edge of the Forest, a reporter-at-large feature published in the June 27, 1983, New Yorker.

., 219, 238 Geldbach, Anita, 19 Generation Gap, 22 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 229, 231–232, 236 attitudes toward German reunification, 23 nuclear deterrence and, 72, 74–76 refugees from GDR and, 104–105, 115, 123–124 George Bush Library and Museum (College Station, Texas), 211–212 Georgia pro-democracy movements in, 99 See also Soviet Union, former Gerasimov, Gennady, 150 Geremek, Bronislaw, 47, 53, 59–60, 225, 233 German Democratic Republic (GDR) attitudes toward German reunification, 23–28 Berlin Wall. See Berlin Wall closes borders, 142 denouement, 203–204 economic problems of, 114, 117, 125, 133–135, 137, 143, 157, 160–161, 164–165 fall of, 163–174, 203–205 fall of Berlin Wall and, 5–10, 65–76, 88–94 impact of Berlin Wall in, 16–19, 24–26 Jubilee of 1989 and, 66, 115, 135, 147–152 Pan-European Picnic (1989) and, 97–104, 106, 116, 124, 144, 231–232 refugees from, 8–9, 16–17, 24, 27, 66, 97–105, 113–126, 133–135, 142–143, 159–161 reopening of border with Czechoslovakia, 158–159 rise of opposition, 152–161 September 11, 1989 border opening, 113–126 travel laws, 8–9, 98, 101–102, 113, 118, 121, 157, 158–160, 163–170 Germany.


pages: 277 words: 41,815

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Amid scenes of wild partying, the two Berlins came together again. Today, only about 1.5km of the Berlin Wall still stands, while a double row of cobblestones embedded in the pavement traces its course. 3 Mauermuseum Museum Offline map Google map The Cold War years, especially the history and horror of the Berlin Wall, are engagingly, if haphazardly, documented in this privately run tourist magnet. The best bits are about ingenious escapes to the West in hot-air balloons, tunnels, concealed car compartments and even a one-person submarine. (Berlin Wall Museum; www.mauermuseum.de; Friedrichstrasse 43-45; adult/concession €12.50/9.50; 9am-10pm; U-Bahn Kochstrasse) Checkpoint Charlie (Click here) DENNIS JOHNSON/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © 4 Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand Museum Offline map Google map This important exhibit on German Nazi resistance occupies the very rooms where high-ranking officers led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg plotted the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944.

Top Tips › Get a crash course in ‘Berlin-ology’ by hopping on the upper deck of public bus 100 or 200 (€2.30) at Zoologischer Garten or Alexanderplatz and letting the landmarks whoosh by. › For a DIY walk along the path of the Berlin Wall, rent a multimedia Mauer­guide (WallGuide; www.mauerguide.com; per day €10). Available at Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall Memorial and inside the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station. Best Walking & Cycling Tours Berlin Walks ( 301 9194; www.berlinwalks.de) Get under the city’s historical skin with the local expert guides of Berlin’s oldest English-language walking tour company. Berlin on Bike ( 4373 9999; www.berlinonbike.de) Repertory includes a superb Berlin Wall bike tour and intriguing ‘nightseeing’ excursions. Brewer’s Berlin Tours ( 0177-388 1537; www.brewersberlintours.com) Purveyors of the epic all-day Best of Berlin tour (foot massage not included) and shorter free tours.

DAVID PEEVERS/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Berlin Top Sights Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Click here) It’s rather ironic that Berlin’s biggest tourist attraction no longer exists. To get under the skin of the Berlin Wall mystery, build a visit of this indoor-outdoor memorial into your schedule. KARL F. SCHÖFMANN/IMAGEBROKER © Berlin Top Sights East Side Gallery (Click here) On the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, more than a hundred international artists have translated their feelings about the barrier’s collapse into powerful murals. JOHN FREEMAN/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Berlin Top Sights Schloss Charlottenburg (Click here) Prussian royals sure knew how to live it up, as you’ll discover on a tour of the fancifully decorated living quarters of this grand palace attached to lushly landscaped gardens.


pages: 762 words: 206,865

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, index card, Kitchen Debate, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, zero-sum game

General Watson: “Commandant in Berlin,” New York Times, 08/14/1961. There were also times: Gelb, The Berlin Wall, 165. Early that morning, Watson: Gelb, The Berlin Wall, 165; Cate, The Ides of August, 301–302, 275. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McCord: Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 229–230, 232. All eyes had then turned: Letter from Colonel Ernest von Pawel to Catudal, August 3, 1977, in Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 234. The deputy chief: Wyden, Wall, 92, from Pawel interview; Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 229–230, 232–235. “The Soviet 19th Motorized”: Gelb, The Berlin Wall, 160. Adam recalled a more innocent: Interview with Adam Kellett-Long, London, October 15–16, 2008.

The two men talked: JFKL, Dean G. Acheson OH; Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution, 44. The eighty-five-year-old: Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 57. Acheson spent much of the day: JFKL, Dean G. Acheson OH; New York Times, 04/10/1961; Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 58–60. Beyond that, Adenauer: Brinkley, Dean Acheson, 130–131. So Acheson instead focused: Brinkley, Dean Acheson, 129. For the moment, Kennedy: Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 97; Brinkley, Dean Acheson, 129; James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 199, 383–384.

XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962, Doc. 49, Report by Dean Acheson, Washington, June 28, 1961. The problem was that Ulbricht: Gelb, The Berlin Wall, 97. By the time Ulbricht marched in: Gelb, The Berlin Wall, 98. Timed to coincide with Khrushchev’s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLhYIqiJlEA; Neues Deutschland, June 16, 1961; DNSA, Summary of Walter Ulbricht’s Press Conference in East Berlin of June 15, Limited Official Use, Airgram, June 16, 1961, Berlin Crisis, BC02090. It was Ulbricht’s first public mention: Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall, 180. At six o’clock that evening: Curtis Cate, The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis, 1961. New York: M. Evans, 1978, 64–65.


The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

We decided the time had come to lance the blister of West Berlin.3 Nikita Khrushchev, recalling 1961 When flowers bloom on concrete, life has triumphed. Berlin Wall graffiti Greatest artwork of all time. Berlin Wall graffiti What are you staring at? Never seen a wall before? Berlin Wall graffiti < previous page page_6 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_6.html [24/03/2011 13:47:05] next page > page_7 < previous page page_7 next page > Page 7 One Berlin Walls The Monument In a rarely visited corner of northern Berlin, piles of concrete debris fill a vast lot. This is not an unusual sight in what geographers call the "gray zones" of a city, those tracts of land somehow disqualified from more valued uses.

< previous page page_ix file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_ix.html [24/03/2011 13:46:55] next page > page_v < previous page page_v next page > Page v Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Berlin Walls 7 2 Old Berlin 41 3 Metropolis 83 4 Nazi Berlin 127 5 Divided Berlin 175 6 Capital of the New Germany 217 Chronology of Berlin's History 237 Notes 247 Bibliography 257 Index 261 < previous page page_v file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_v.html [24/03/2011 13:46:56] next page > page_vii < previous page page_vii next page > Page vii Illustrations Central Berlin in the 1990s Facing page 1 1 Pieces of Wall, Brehmestrasse, Berlin-Pankow, 1991 8 2 Vendor selling pieces of Berlin Wall 9 3 Berlin's districts 14 4 Berlin Wall being built 17 5 Postcard: "Greetings from Berlin" 20 6 Allied sectors of Berlin 21 7 Crosses at the Wall near the Reichstag 24 8 Memorial to slain border guards, East Berlin 25 9 Berlin Wall, 1983 26 10 Wall graffiti 27 11 East Side Gallery 36 12 Scaffolding and canvas facade on site of royal palace, 1993 42 13 Nikolai Quarter 45 14 Berlin, 1737 49 15 Royal palace 50 16 Marx-Engels-Platz and Palace of the Republic 58 17 Brandenburg Gate, 1898 72 18 Brandenburg Gate, 1959 77 19 Brandenburg Gate, November 1989 78 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_vii.html (1 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:57] page_vii 20 Reichstag, circa 1901 87 21 Reichstag, after 1945 90 22 Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 93 23 Aerial view of central Berlin, 1939 97 24 Eighteenth-century houses in Potsdam 99 < previous page page_vii file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_vii.html (2 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:57] next page > page_viii < previous page page_viii next page > Page viii 25 Turn-of-the-century apartment buildings, Nürnberger Platz, Berlin-Wilmersdorf 102 26 Britz Horseshoe Estate 104 27 Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz 113 28 Potsdamer Platz, circa 1930 117 29 Potsdamer Platz, 1972 121 30 Potsdamer Platz and Columbus Haus, circa 1933 123 31 New Reich chancellery 130 32 Removal of chancellery bunker, 1987 131 33 Site of Hitler's bunker, 1995 134 34 Model of "Germania" 136 35 Model of the Great Hall 137 36 Olympic Stadium 143 37 Reich aviation ministry 147 38 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and vicinity, circa 1935 155 39 "Topography of Terror" exhibition 161 40 "Topography of Terror" exhibition 161 41 Ruins in Ifflandstrasse, 1949 176 42 Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and Europa Center 181 43 Karl-Marx-Allee, the former Stalinallee 184 44 Detail of building on former Stalinallee 184 45 Strausberger Platz and former Stalinallee 185 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_viii.html (1 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:58] page_viii 46 Hansa Quarter 189 47 Marzahn 191 48 Soviet war memorial, Berlin-Treptow 195 49 Lenin monument 196 50 Victory Column 200 51 Ernst Thälmann monument 202 52 Marx-Engels-Forum 205 53 The Neue Wache 219 54 Enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz's Pietà in the Neue Wache 223 55 Model of Axel Schultes's plan for the Spree Arc government quarter 228 < previous page page_viii file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_viii.html (2 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:58] next page > page_x < previous page page_x next page > Page x < previous page page_x file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_x.html [24/03/2011 13:46:58] next page > page_1 < previous page page_1 next page > Page 1 Introduction Berlin is a haunted city.

< previous page page_ix file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_ix.html [24/03/2011 13:46:55] next page > page_v < previous page page_v next page > Page v Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Berlin Walls 7 2 Old Berlin 41 3 Metropolis 83 4 Nazi Berlin 127 5 Divided Berlin 175 6 Capital of the New Germany 217 Chronology of Berlin's History 237 Notes 247 Bibliography 257 Index 261 < previous page page_v file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_v.html [24/03/2011 13:46:56] next page > page_vii < previous page page_vii next page > Page vii Illustrations Central Berlin in the 1990s Facing page 1 1 Pieces of Wall, Brehmestrasse, Berlin-Pankow, 1991 8 2 Vendor selling pieces of Berlin Wall 9 3 Berlin's districts 14 4 Berlin Wall being built 17 5 Postcard: "Greetings from Berlin" 20 6 Allied sectors of Berlin 21 7 Crosses at the Wall near the Reichstag 24 8 Memorial to slain border guards, East Berlin 25 9 Berlin Wall, 1983 26 10 Wall graffiti 27 11 East Side Gallery 36 12 Scaffolding and canvas facade on site of royal palace, 1993 42 13 Nikolai Quarter 45 14 Berlin, 1737 49 15 Royal palace 50 16 Marx-Engels-Platz and Palace of the Republic 58 17 Brandenburg Gate, 1898 72 18 Brandenburg Gate, 1959 77 19 Brandenburg Gate, November 1989 78 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_vii.html (1 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:57] page_vii 20 Reichstag, circa 1901 87 21 Reichstag, after 1945 90 22 Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 93 23 Aerial view of central Berlin, 1939 97 24 Eighteenth-century houses in Potsdam 99 < previous page page_vii file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_vii.html (2 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:57] next page > page_viii < previous page page_viii next page > Page viii 25 Turn-of-the-century apartment buildings, Nürnberger Platz, Berlin-Wilmersdorf 102 26 Britz Horseshoe Estate 104 27 Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz 113 28 Potsdamer Platz, circa 1930 117 29 Potsdamer Platz, 1972 121 30 Potsdamer Platz and Columbus Haus, circa 1933 123 31 New Reich chancellery 130 32 Removal of chancellery bunker, 1987 131 33 Site of Hitler's bunker, 1995 134 34 Model of "Germania" 136 35 Model of the Great Hall 137 36 Olympic Stadium 143 37 Reich aviation ministry 147 38 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and vicinity, circa 1935 155 39 "Topography of Terror" exhibition 161 40 "Topography of Terror" exhibition 161 41 Ruins in Ifflandstrasse, 1949 176 42 Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and Europa Center 181 43 Karl-Marx-Allee, the former Stalinallee 184 44 Detail of building on former Stalinallee 184 45 Strausberger Platz and former Stalinallee 185 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_viii.html (1 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:58] page_viii 46 Hansa Quarter 189 47 Marzahn 191 48 Soviet war memorial, Berlin-Treptow 195 49 Lenin monument 196 50 Victory Column 200 51 Ernst Thälmann monument 202 52 Marx-Engels-Forum 205 53 The Neue Wache 219 54 Enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz's Pietà in the Neue Wache 223 55 Model of Axel Schultes's plan for the Spree Arc government quarter 228 < previous page page_viii file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_viii.html (2 of 2) [24/03/2011 13:46:58] next page > page_x < previous page page_x next page > Page x < previous page page_x file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_x.html [24/03/2011 13:46:58] next page > page_1 < previous page page_1 next page > Page 1 Introduction Berlin is a haunted city.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

This would have led to a brain drain perhaps not quite as drastic, but in the long run just as devastating to the GDR’s strangulated economy. It is a fact that the Berlin Wall that was about to be built would go on to bring misery to countless individuals. It would separate families and friends. It would lock people in and it would lock people out. But all sides – Adenauer and Ulbricht, Kennedy and Khrushchev – understood that the path towards it had been set in motion a decade earlier. 5. Brick by Brick (1961–1965) Nobody has any intention of building a wall! The Berlin Wall House of Ministries, East Berlin, 15 June 1961. ‘First Secretary, does the formation of a neutral Berlin, in your opinion, mean that there will be a border at the Brandenburg Gate?’

The West German people showed concern but no powerful civil unrest emerged, while the East German population remained largely quiet in the weeks and months that followed. As cruel as it had seemed on a human level, from a political point of view, the Berlin Wall served to calm the situation in Berlin. Nobody said it but Adenauer, Ulbricht, Kennedy and Khrushchev all knew it. While the situation in the divided city remained tense, in the rest of East Germany things settled down almost immediately. For all the aggravation and anger that the renewed acceleration of Ulbricht’s ‘building socialism’ programme had caused, it had now simply become a fact of life. The Berlin Wall no longer allowed people to move to the West. This meant that the middle classes and skilled workers had to find a way to live with the situation while the rest of society stopped worrying about the lack of doctors, dentists, scientists and builders.

The heightened tension among the political elite combined with the patchy nature of the first-generation Berlin Wall led to a deadly situation. East Germans minded to leave were to be deterred by border guards and their bullets. The next few years, before the divide in Berlin became a sophisticated and almost impregnable border, would be the bloodiest. The Long Shadow of the Wall East Berlin, 17 August 1962. The atmosphere in the city had been tense for months. Hardly a week had gone by without bloodshed along the Berlin Wall. In total, twenty-three people had lost their lives trying to cross over the inner-German border since it was closed a year earlier.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Return to beginning of chapter REUNIFICATION Hearts and minds in Eastern Europe had long been restless for change, but German reunification came as a surprise to the world and ushered in a new and exciting era. The so-called Wende (turning point, ie the fall of communism) came about as a gradual development that ended in a big bang – the collapse of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 (for a more detailed account of events, see the boxed text). * * * WHAT’S IN A DATE? The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, so when it came time to pick a date for a public holiday to mark German reunification it seemed only natural that would be it. Unfortunately, the same date had also played key roles in the fate of German history on two prior, less joyful, occasions.

Return to beginning of chapter NEIGHBOURHOODS * * * ITINERARY BUILDER HOW TO USE THIS TABLE HISTORIC MITTE REICHSTAG & GOVERNMENT QUARTER BRANDENBURGER TOR & AROUND ALONG UNTER DEN LINDEN GENDARMENMARKT & AROUND MUSEUMSINSEL A MILE OF HISTORICAL MILESTONES MITTE – ALEXANDERPLATZ AREA BACK TO THE ROOTS MITTE – SCHEUNENVIERTEL JEWISH BERLIN POTSDAMER PLATZ & TIERGARTEN POTSDAMER PLATZ KULTURFORUM TIERGARTEN DIPLOMATENVIERTEL AMBASSADORIAL AMBLE CHARLOTTENBURG & NORTHERN WILMERSDORF SCHLOSS CHARLOTTENBURG AROUND SCHLOSS CHARLOTTENBURG KURFÜRSTENDAMM & AROUND WESTERN CHARLOTTENBURG CHARLOTTENBURG LOOP SCHÖNEBERG KREUZBERG RADICAL KREUZBERG FRIEDRICHSHAIN A SOCIALIST SAUNTER ALONG KARL-MARX-ALLEE PRENZLAUER BERG PRENZLAUER BERG WESTERN SUBURBS DAHLEM & AROUND WANNSEE SPANDAU SOUTHERN SUBURBS NEUKÖLLN TREPTOW KÖPENICK EASTERN SUBURBS LICHTENBERG MARZAHN NORTHERN SUBURBS MOABIT PANKOW WEDDING * * * * * * top picks East Side Gallery Open-air gallery on the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. Gendarmenmarkt Architecture in harmony on Berlin’s most beautiful square. Holocaust Memorial Accessible yet disorienting football-field-sized labyrinth of grey concrete stelae. Jüdisches Museum A chronicle of trials and triumphs in German Jewish history. Pergamon Museum Pirate’s chest of treasure from ancient civilisations. Reichstag Dome Bird’s-eye Berlin from atop Norman Foster’s masterpiece. Schloss Charlottenburg Prussian palace dripping with precious art and artefacts. Sony Center Eye-popping ‘tented’ complex on the site of the former Berlin Wall. Unter den Linden Phalanx of blockbuster sights peels away the many layers of Berlin history

Answer: former US president Ronald Reagan, during a speech in 1987, with the Brandenburger Tor trapped behind the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Two years later, the Wall was history and the famous gate went from symbol of division to symbol of a reunited Germany. Since then, Pariser Platz, the former wasteland east of the gate, has resumed its historic role as the capital’s ‘reception room’ and is framed by embassies, banks and hotels. BRANDENBURGER TOR Map Pariser Platz; admission free; 24hr; Unter den Linden, 100, TXL So where were you when the Berlin Wall fell? For tens of thousands the answer is ‘at the Brandenburg Gate’. Who can forget the images of the happy throngs sitting atop the hated Wall, sharing champagne and shaking hands with border guards and partying like it was 1999 and not 10 years earlier


pages: 220 words: 88,994

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

But even that was not the whole of the story. The Berlin Wall was not just a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain, it was its most potent symbol. Almost its soul. Its fall was to bring in its wake the end of the Cold War, the collapse like dominoes of Moscow’s satellite dictatorships in Eastern Europe and finally the implosion of the Soviet Union itself. The year of miracles, 1989, would give the world a new chance, which surely only fools would throw away. 2 The Street of Shame The long and winding road that led me to Checkpoint Charlie on the night the Berlin Wall came down began improbably enough thirteen years earlier on the outskirts of Paris where I was trying to hitch a lift to the Côte d’Azur.

1989 The Berlin Wall My Part in Its Downfall PETER MILLAR Contents Title page Acknowledgements Foreword 1. Oh, What a Night! 2. The Street of Shame 3. A Place of My Own 4. Going Underground 5. Swords to Ploughshares 6. Spooks 7. Roads to Moscow 8. Back to Blighty, Back to Berlin 9. The Unhappy Birthday Party 10. 9/11/1989: All Fall Down 11. The Domino Effect 12. Brave New World Plates About the Author Copyright Acknowledgements I have to thank my wife Jackie, who lived through so many of these experiences with me, and put up with my, often prolonged, absence during so many more of them.

And finally I must acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to my late mother who throughout that hectic period never failed to cut out her son’s clippings from whichever newspaper I was working for at the time, and to preserve them in a scrapbook for me. Her efforts have made the burden on my memory so much lighter. Foreword One thing needs saying before anything else, at least for those unfamiliar with the autobiographical works of Spike Milligan: I make no claim whatsoever to having been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall any more than any other of the millions of people who experienced life behind it and the tremendous exhilaration of seeing its ugly scar removed from the face of a much-loved city. And a tumour excised from the heart of Europe. From 1981 until 1989 – and beyond – I was an eyewitness, albeit a highly involved one, to the events that shook the communist Soviet empire to its foundations, eventually toppling it, bringing down the Iron Curtain and leaving the way open for a fresh start in a new century.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

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

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

According to New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, the fall of the Berlin Wall signified a “glorious victory for the West and the burial of Communism.”12 Reporting from the scene, Times correspondent Serge Schmemann wrote that events there seemed “to sweep away much of the common wisdom and presumptions of the postwar world.” Whatever might happen next, the one sure thing was that “something essential had changed [and] that things would not be the same again.”13 According to the New Republic, “excitement bordering on ecstasy” constituted the only allowable response to the breaching of the Berlin Wall. “There are few times in history when you can say confidently that evil is losing ground to good,” TNR’s editors wrote.

That Trump himself did not offer anything remotely like a reasoned alternative made his elevation to the presidency all the more remarkable. He was a protest candidate elected by a protest vote. In that regard, the 2016 presidential election marked a historical turning point comparable in significance to the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter century earlier. The Age of Illusions seeks to understand what occurred between those two milestones. The quotation from the writer James Baldwin that introduces this book aptly expresses its overarching theme: promises made, but not kept; expectations raised, but unfulfilled; outraged citizens left with no place to stand. 1 AL, FRED, AND HOMER’S AMERICA—AND MINE Donald Trump was born in June 1946, the son of a wealthy New York real estate developer.

The decade of greed was ending in a year of miracles. With startling suddenness, on the night of November 9, 1989, the prevailing zeitgeist gave way to another completely different one. Much as the stock market collapse of October 29, 1929, rang down the curtain on one period of history and inaugurated another, so, too, did the opening of the Berlin Wall. After the Crash, Americans kept drinking bathtub gin and listening to hot jazz, but the “Roaring Twenties” were over. Similarly, ending the division between East and West Berlin did nothing to diminish the avarice exemplified by the likes of Donald Trump. Yet attitudes and behavior hitherto treated as endemic now seemed merely incidental.


pages: 559 words: 178,279

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

They condemned the corrosive influence of American popular culture seeping across the border from West Berlin. For eight more years, disaffected East Germans still had an escape route via West Berlin, until the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 to stop them. Meanwhile, the East German police state tightened its grip. The people would not risk rising up once more against their Communist masters for another 36 years – not until the mass demonstrations of 1989 that began in Leipzig and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As part of his National Service, George Flint was dispatched to Berlin to be a driver for BRIXMIS – the British Mission in the Soviet Zone. This gave him, at just 19, an extraordinary close-up view of the troubles of East Germany that led to the uprising.

Even in areas where the politicians were against him, among ordinary people he was very much admired. And, of course, Mobutu followed the popular mood in the country by naming him a national hero in 1966. Wung’a Lomami Onadikondo They say that he was unpredictable. That means he was not submissive. ‘If one went, one couldn’t return’ The Berlin Wall (1961) THE BERLIN WALL epitomised the Cold War division of Europe. When it was breached in November 1989, Soviet control in Eastern Europe collapsed virtually overnight. But the simmering tensions that led to its construction had brewed more slowly. From the outset, when East Germany was first established as a separate socialist state by Stalin in 1949, its 900-mile border with West Germany was a problem.

This is the only way I can assess it. ‘They are not so different from us’ The Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Reunification (1989–90) IN THE AUTUMN of 1989 the East German authorities were facing mounting civil unrest and insistent calls for the lifting of controls on emigration to the West. Over the summer, tens of thousands of East German holiday-makers took advantage of Hungary’s decision to dismantle its border fence with Austria and poured into Western Europe. It was the largest exodus of East Germans westwards since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, and it set in motion a dramatic chain of events that no one was expecting, not in Moscow nor East Berlin nor indeed in the Western world.


pages: 444 words: 107,664

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

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

Wilson, Anthony. 24 Hour Party People. Channel 4 Books, 2002. Wilson, Hugh, and Lewis Womersley. Hulme 5 Redevelopment: Report on Design. City of Manchester, 1965. THE BERLIN WALL Beevor, Anthony. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. Penguin, 2002. “The Berlin Wall: The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!!” http://berlin-wall.org/. Bernauerstraße Wall Museum. http://www.berlinermauerdokumentationszentrum.de/eng/index_dokz.html. Buckley, William. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Wiley, 2004. Calvin University German Propaganda Archive. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/wall.htm. City Guide to the Wall. http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/wanderungen/en/strecke4.shtml.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice. The Futurists. It sounds like a band from Manchester, doesn’t it? The Berlin Wall In Which History Comes to an End HISTORY FOR SALE A young boy sells pieces of the Berlin Wall, Potsdam Square, Berlin, 10 March 1990. THE END OF HISTORY The Parthenon is dissolving into the atmosphere, but preparations have been made for the conclusion of its story. Bernard Tschumi’s new museum at the foot of the Acropolis contains an empty space the same size as the temple, ready to receive its remains should it ever become necessary to transfer them indoors.

Democratic capitalism defeated autocratic communism, bringing the last great ideological conflict to a close once and for all. But unlike the Hulme Crescents, the Berlin Wall, whose spectacular destruction marked Fukuyama’s “end of history,” was not obliterated. Indeed, as hated as it had been, the Wall soon took on something of the preciousness of the marble of the Parthenon, which dissolves and crumbles even as it is gathered. The strange afterlife of the Berlin Wall is the history of the end of history. ONCE UPON A TIME, an obscure woman stood on an obscure street in an obscure corner of Berlin. In front of her, section after section of concrete slab stretched away in a space devoid of buildings and people.


pages: 559 words: 164,795

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

The idea of the Wall as ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier’ – among its other meanings and uses – is bracingly discussed by historian and long-term Berlin habitué Neal Ascherson (before and after the Wall) in ‘The Media Did It’, London Review of Books, 21 June 2007. 3. Her story can be read here on this Berlin Wall memorial website: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/1961-299.html. 4. Elke Rosin’s story, ibid. 5. Olga Segler’s story on the Berlin Wall memorial website: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/1961-299.html. 6. Günter Litfin’s story, ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Udo Düllick’s story on the Berlin Wall memorial website: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/1961-299.html. 9. As quoted in Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation by John Borneman (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 10.

This, and other haunting stories, can be read at the Berlin Wall memorial website: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/1968-316.html. 13. Cited in a monograph written at a time when the Wall still seemed permanent: ‘Disquiet on the Western Front: Observations on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Berlin Wall’ by John C. Palenberg, The Fletcher Forum, vol. 5, no. 2, Summer 1981. 14. Schmidt, ‘The Architecture and Message of the “Wall”’. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Cited ibid. (originally from an article in Der Spiegel in 1981). 18. This, and other stories, can be read at the Berlin Wall memorial site: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/1981-326.html. 19.

The spy tunnel’s technology. 47. Bravo magazine. 48. The 1953 Berlin uprising. 49. East Berlin protestors confront a Soviet tank. 50. Ulbricht’s East Berlin apartment blocks. 51. A West Berlin apartment block. 52. The communist children’s show Unser Sandmännchen. 53. The construction of the Berlin Wall begins. 54. The Berlin Wall. 55. Divided Berlin was healed. Picture Credits The majority of the photographs come from private collections. Others are from: 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 31, 42, 45, 50, 53, 54, Alamy; 2, 5, 8, 12, 17, 23, 36, 41, Getty; 4, 9, 18, 38, 46, 48, AKG; 25, 33, 37, 51, 52, Topfoto; 1, Bridgeman; 43, National Archives.


pages: 370 words: 107,791

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sexual politics, side project

Ostpunks, or Eastern punks, ran or worked at most of the places I hung out; they had set up nearly all the first bars and clubs in the East and established in the process the ethos of the fledgling new society being built almost from scratch after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This kaleidoscopic world I had fallen in love with was their world, their creation. At the time I had no idea I would eventually become a writer. But to an American reflexively skeptical toward the Reagan mythology surrounding the end of the Cold War, the story of East German punk seemed unbelievably important—perhaps more important than even the participants themselves realized. Here were the people who had actually fought and sacrificed to bring down the Berlin Wall. My initial belief in the importance of this story was reinforced after I returned to the U.S. and recognized an ominous echo in developments in my own country: mass surveillance on a scale the Stasi could only have dreamed about, the widespread use of insidiously pliable charges like “failure to comply with a lawful order” to make arbitrary arrests, the struggle of protest movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and #NoDAPL in the face of a complacent or even hostile society.

Burning Down The Haus Official youth culture in East Germany: a Free German Youth rally Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency Introduction By the late 1970s the Berlin Wall—actually two walls with a notorious death strip between them—had been up for little more than fifteen years, but it had already become a fact of life. A generation had grown up with it; its history and the details of its construction barely mattered anymore—it was a booby-trapped concrete reality, the physical embodiment of a division of the world that felt as if it could go on forever. The young on either side accepted the Berlin Wall as permanent—it had always been there and probably always would be. Every aspect of life on the east side of the Wall was hyper-politicized, and nothing more so than popular culture.

The dictatorship was so paranoid about former Eastern punks in West Berlin that the Stasi had continued to secretly monitor the group of Weimar punks who’d been jailed in 1983 for spray-painting graffiti—solidarity, strike back, active resistance—even after they were expatriated following their release from prison; this had led to one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Onisseit and his older brother, Jürgen—who, unbeknownst to Thomas and his friends, had gotten them sent to the slammer back in 1983 by snitching to the Stasi—along with a small group of former Weimar punks, had decided at the end of 1986 to paint a white stripe along the entire length of the West side of the Berlin Wall. It could take weeks to complete, but they felt compelled to do it. The Weimar punks hated the way the barrier had become a canvas for self-promotion.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

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

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

The most dramatic chapter of the Age of Transformation was about to be written. 6 EUROPE, 1989 THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS The single most dramatic event of the Age of Transformation was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The wall had divided Europe. It had separated the communist world from the capitalist world, and the Soviet bloc from the democratic world. The sight of thousands of East Germans streaming through the wall and into West Berlin on that November night was the sign that the cold war was over. A single global economic and political system was being formed—a “new world order,” as President George H. W. Bush called it. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a victory for the Western powers and for individual freedom.

Americans, in particular, have tended to regard the defining moments of recent history as the end of the cold war and the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. One of the best recent histories of U.S. foreign policy is subtitled “From 11/9 to 9/11”—the two dates in question marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attack on the United States.12 But the collapse of the Soviet system and 9/11 were part of an even bigger story—the creation of a globalized world economic and political system. The two key events framing that story were the opening of China in 1978 and the 2008 crash. I have divided this thirty-year epoch into two distinct periods.

In Latin America, economic reformers were often at pains to distinguish their modest market-based measures from the “neo-liberalism” of Reagan and Thatcher,25 neither of whom were particularly popular figures south of the Rio Grande after the Falklands War and Reagan’s support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. By contrast, Reagan and Thatcher were popular heroes in much of Central and Eastern Europe, a fact that caused a certain amount of pain and confusion to their left-wing and liberal opponents back home. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union took place after Reagan left office. Yet these events cast a retrospective glow of vindication over his presidency. Reagan was able to argue with some justice in his memoirs, published in 1990, that the previous decade had witnessed a “stunning renaissance of democracy and economic freedom”26 around the world.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

We called it progress, or rather Progress – belief in which is the closest thing the modern West has to a religion. In 1989 its schism was healed. By unifying its booming western wing with the shrivelled post-Stalinist eastern one, there was no longer any quarrel between the present and the present. Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay, ‘The End of History?’. ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War . . . but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,’ he wrote.1 Though I did not subscribe to Fukuyama’s view of the ideal society I shared his relief.

I had been invited to attend a conference on the ‘polycentric world order’, which is Russian for ‘post-American world’. The conference was hosted by the Primakov Institute, named after the man who had been Russia’s foreign minister and prime minister during the 1990s. Yevgeny Primakov was displaced as prime minister in 1999 by Vladimir Putin. While my friends and I had danced on the rubble of the Berlin Wall, a brooding Putin had watched his world crumbling from 130 miles away, at his KGB office in Dresden, a city in what was still East Germany. Later he would describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the ‘greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’. It was Primakov who championed the term multipolarity in what at the time seemed like a vain bid to dampen America’s oceanic post-Cold War triumphalism.

The institute had sent me its invitation several months earlier and I had promptly forgotten about it. On 9 November, the morning after the US presidential election, as I tried to make sense of the dawning new reality I recalled that invitation. By eerie coincidence, it was twenty-seven years to the day since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The worm had turned. America had just elected a president who was a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. While Putin was surveying his wrecked world in 1989, and we were racing down the Autobahn, Donald Trump was launching a board game. It was called Trump: The Game. With its fake paper money and property-based rules, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Monopoly – except that the number six on the dice was replaced with the letter T.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Škoda still benefits from low Eastern European wages, which allow cars to be produced relatively cheaply, but it now also benefits from the technologies, management know-how and cheap international finance available to the Volkswagen Group. Škoda’s experience neatly encapsulates the difficulties in making sense of international trade and investment since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Škoda exports from its Mladá Boleslav assembly plant in the Czech Republic to customers all over the world. It offers competition to other car manufacturers which, in earlier decades, did not have to cope with the cheaper labour available on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. It provides employment for Czech workers and tax revenues for the Czech government. It also provides employment in its dealerships across the world. Škoda’s profits now go to the shareholders of Volkswagen AG who, in turn, are based in Frankfurt, London, New York and countless other locations.

They still tend to think in the old domestic mindsets. They are slaves to national economic data that, for the most part, include only the most recent domestic economic developments. They are slaves to a world that, in effect, crumbled as Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the global economy at the beginning of the 1980s and as the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989. During the 1980s, as cumbersome mainframe computers were replaced by PCs, economists began to calibrate statistically the ways in which economies operated. With reams of annual, quarterly, monthly, daily and even intra-day data at their disposal and with significant advances in computing power, they were able to build economic models linked to past reality (and, as the models became more complex, to ‘expected’ future reality).

This vast improvement in productivity is, of course, good news both for the passengers and the environment. The calculation, however, reflects only technology improvement. In a world of scarce resources, what matters is not so much the improvement in technology but on how many occasions that technology is replicated. Before the arrival of Deng Xiaoping and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, technology replication was limited. Too many countries were shut off from new technologies and, even where they had access, they channelled those technologies into military, rather than civilian, ventures. No longer is this the case. More and more countries are using technology replication to improve the lives of their citizens.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

See also ‘Ambassador Winston Lord’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, 28 April 1998, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Lord,%20Winston.pdf. 32. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 608; Chen Jian, ‘Tiananmen and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s Path toward 1989 and Beyond’, in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009), 111–12. 33. Liang Zhang et al., eds, The Tiananmen Papers (New York, 2002), 143. 34. Mikhail Gorbachev, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 15 (Moscow, 2010), 261. 35. Zhang Ganghua and Li Peng, Li Peng liu si ri ji zhen xiang: Fu lu Li Peng liu si ri ji yuan wen (Hong Kong, 2010). 36.

., and Donald Brean, ‘Global Summitry: Its Meaning and Scope’, Global Summitry 1, no. 1 (2015), 1–26 Bange, Oliver, ‘The GDR in the Era of Détente: Conflicting Perceptions and Strategies’, in Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds, Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965–1985 (Copenhagen, 2010), 57–78 Bange, Oliver, ‘The Stasi Confronts Western Strategies for Transformation 1966–1975’, in Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach, eds, Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918–1989 (Stanford, CA, 2013), 170–208 Bock, Siegfried, and Karl Seidel, ‘Die Außenbeziehungen der DDR in der Periode der Konsolidierung (1955–1972/73)’, in Siegfried Bock, Ingrid Muth, and Hermann Schwiesau, eds, DDR-Außenpolitik im Rückspiegel: Diplomaten im Gespräch (Münster, 2004), 53–68 Bozo, Frédéric, ‘Détente versus Alliance: France, the United States and the Politics of the Harmel Report (1964–1968)’, Contemporary European History 7, no. 3 (1998), 343–60 Brown, Archie, ‘The Gorbachev Revolution and the End of the Cold War’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III: Endings (Cambridge, 2010), 244–66 Chen, Jian, ‘Tiananmen and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s Path toward 1989 and Beyond’, in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009), 96–131 Chen, Jian, ‘China, the Third World and the End of the Cold War’, in Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds, The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (London, 2011), 101–21 Colley, Linda, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992), 309–29 Costigliola, Frank, ‘An “Arm Around the Shoulder”: The United States, NATO and German Reunification, 1989–90’, Contemporary European History 3, no. 1 (March 1994), 87–110 Cox, Michael, and Steven Hurst, ‘“His Finest Hour?”

Similarly China, now recovering strongly from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, was facing off against the Soviets. The Americans, meanwhile, were bogged down in Vietnam—their first serious check in the Cold War. The triangular configuration of global power was already apparent. In Europe, the Berlin Wall had imposed a new stability, both for Germany and the continent as a whole. All these developments stimulated international dialogue, and summitry should be seen as part of that process: an attempt by key leaders to promote novel forms of engagement in order to make international affairs safer and more predictable.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

In particular, East Germans, who now no longer needed a visa to travel to Czechoslovakia, also no longer needed a certificate renouncing GDR citizenship to travel to West Germany over the Czech border; so they could, in effect, simply circumvent the Berlin Wall by making a short detour via Czechoslovakia. East Page 332 Germans started pouring out by this route at a rate of about 9000 a day, an average of 375 an hour. It was clear that the Berlin Wall was effectively redundant. On 9 November 1989 seventy-one years to the day since the collapse of Imperial Germany an event of momentous significance occurred, signalling in effect the collapse of the East German communist regime.

Without my husband's unfailing support, and more than equal partnership in parenting, the book could not have been written. Without my children, recounting the fates of those who were born into less fortunate historical circumstances might have been much less meaningful. Page 1 One The Course of German History In those extraordinary months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when discussion of the unification of the two Germanies was for the first time in forty years back on the serious political agenda, many voices were raised giving views on 'the German question'. From a variety of quarters, prejudices were aired which had lain dormant along with the memories, gas masks and other relics of the Second World War over the years when the Cold War and the balance of terror had seemed to ensure a fragile peace in a divided Europe.

Yet the foundations which had been laid by 1949 set the pattern for paths followed in the future: diverging paths which shattered the hopes of many for another kind of new Germany after the defeat of Hitler's Reich. Page 168 Seven Crystallization and Consolidation, 194961 The period from the foundation of two separate states in 1949 to the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 is one in which the division of Germany was confirmed, and in which the peculiar characters of the two new states were consolidated. While in 1949 much still appeared open, by the beginning of the 1960s patterns had been laid which were to shape the next quarter of a century of German history.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

The Wilson Center was in the Ronald Reagan Building. Every day I’d go to work, walking past the slab of the Berlin Wall displayed prominently at the building’s entrance like the ancient spoils of some imperial victory. Then I’d walk past Wilson’s stirring words carved into a stone wall: WE WILL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS CARRIED NEAREST OUR HEARTS. FOR DEMOCRACY. It was hard not to feel a sense of America’s arc of triumph in reverse on that short walk: from our birth as a superpower in World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall (of course, Wilson’s and Reagan’s considerable flaws were left unaccounted in these settings).

People wondered at her fall from Nobel Peace laureate of the early nineties to international pariah. But it made a certain kind of sad sense to me. A survivor from a country on the periphery of power in the world, she once surfed the wave of democracy that accompanied the end of the Cold War. She rocketed to international attention in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down, by leading a democratic movement protesting the military government. By 2017, she was doing what she felt she needed to do to survive in a world where nationalism ran amok. Her own journey—from democracy icon to tacit collaborator in brutality fueled by Buddhist nationalism and rampant anti-Rohingya disinformation on Facebook—didn’t cut against the currents of history, it drifted in the wake of events in the wider world.

And sitting in the old headquarters of the GDR, this monument to the world that America transformed with the end of the Cold War, I began to see the outlines of how America’s own actions over the last thirty years made this transformation possible—in our own country and in others. This is the world we made. 2 Freedom’s High-Water Mark Sandor Lederer was six years old when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. His father was a foreign correspondent based in East Berlin, and Sandor remembers the energy of the people in the streets, the excited conversations at the dinner table, the sense that something important was happening all around him even if he was too young to fully grasp it.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

Ltd (Zuzhou), 16, 18 DSM (The Netherlands), 215 E Earth Observatory (NASA), 160 “Earth Overshoot Day” (1970–2020), 48fig–49 Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) [UN], 150 East Berlin (East Germany) Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing West and, 75–77, 88, 89 Brandenburg Gate in, 76–77, 79, 89–90 reunification of, 17, 78 Eastern European countries collapse of economies (1980s) of, 15 declining income inequality in some of, 41 Soviet Union economic model used in, 7, 8 Warsaw Pact of the, 77 East Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing West and, 75–77, 88, 89 Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin, 76–77, 79, 89–90 integration of West Germany and, 17, 78 moving toward free-market model (1991), 15 Soviet Union economic model adopted (1950s–1970s) by, 7 See also Germany; West Germany East India Companies, 108, 130 Ebola virus, 107 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes), 103 Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 121–122, 186 The Economist, 230 Economist Intelligence Unit's global democracy index (2019), 233 Education COVID-19 pandemic and digital connectivity access to, 227 effective government focusing on health care, housing, and, 225–227 history of US segregated, 226 increase of female levels of, 9 legacy preferences for university admissions practice, 226 Singapore's outstanding system of, 230 Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth graph, 137–138fig Eltobgy, Maha, 250–251 Emerging markets Chinese economy interacting with, 63–66 economic growth (2002–2019) of, 64–65fig Emissions cap-and-trade scheme (EU), 166, 183 Employees.

Their failure at this industrial transition point showed that the state-led economic model put forth by the Soviet Union was less resilient than the market-based one promoted by the West. In China, the government of new leader Deng Xiaoping started its own Reform and Opening-Up in 1979, gradually introducing capitalist and market-based policies (see Chapter 3). In 1989, Germany experienced a moment of euphoria, as the Berlin Wall, which separated East from West, fell. Shortly thereafter, political reunification of Germany was at last established. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had officially disintegrated. Many economies that lay in its sphere of influence, including those of East Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, turned toward the West and its capitalist, free-market model.

isbn=9780674660489. 20 “Member States,” ASEAN, https://asean.org/asean/asean-member-states/. 21 “Total Population of the ASEAN countries,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/796222/total-population-of-the-asean-countries/. 22 “Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2019,” OECD, https://www.oecd.org/development/asia-pacific/01_SAEO2019_Overview_WEB.pdf. 23 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 24 “Vietnam Emerges a Key Winner from the US-China Trade War,” Channel News Asia, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/us-china-trade-war-winners-losers-countries-vietnam-hanoi-saigon-11690308. 25 “Southeast Asia Churns Out Billion-Dollar Start-Ups,” Bain, https://www.bain.com/insights/southeast-asia-churns-out-billion-dollar-start-ups-snap-chart/. 26 “India's Economic Reform Agenda (2014–2019), a Scorecard,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://indiareforms.csis.org/2014reforms. 27 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, Chapter 1, p. 9, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 28 “India's Harsh Covid-19 Lockdown Displaced at Least 10 Million Migrants,” Niharika Sharma, Quartz India, September 2020, https://qz.com/india/1903018/indias-covid-19-lockdown-displaced-at-least-10-million-migrants/. 29 “International Literacy Day 2020: Kerala, Most Literate State in India, Check Rank-Wise List,” The Hindustan Times, September 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/international-literacy-day-2020-kerala-most-literate-state-in-india-check-rank-wise-list/story-IodNVGgy5hc7PjEXUBKnIO.html. 30 “Chinese Investments in Africa,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/09/06/figures-of-the-week-chinese-investment-in-africa/. 31 “Global Economic Prospects, Sub-Saharan Africa,” The World Bank, January 2019, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/307811542818500671/Global-Economic-Prospects-Jan-2019-Sub-Saharan-Africa-analysis.pdf. 32 “The Asian Century Is Set to Begin,” Financial Times, March 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/520cb6f6-2958-11e9-a5ab-ff8ef2b976c7. 33 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 34 “Air Pollution,” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/. 35 “World Inequality Report 2018: Income Inequality in India,” World Inequality Lab, https://wir2018.wid.world/. 4 Divided Societies On the morning of August 12, 1961, Berliners woke up to a harsh new reality. A wall had appeared in their city, dividing it right through the middle. It was a culmination of a long process of diverging geopolitical interests—yet a brutal shock to many. The Berlin Wall would last for nearly 30 years and scar several generations of Germans. Fifteen years earlier, at the end of World War II, Germany had been overrun by the Allies. The Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France brought down the Nazi leadership and ended the most devastating war in history.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

Ltd (Zuzhou), 16, 18 DSM (The Netherlands), 215 E Earth Observatory (NASA), 160 “Earth Overshoot Day” (1970–2020), 48fig–49 Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) [UN], 150 East Berlin (East Germany) Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing West and, 75–77, 88, 89 Brandenburg Gate in, 76–77, 79, 89–90 reunification of, 17, 78 Eastern European countries collapse of economies (1980s) of, 15 declining income inequality in some of, 41 Soviet Union economic model used in, 7, 8 Warsaw Pact of the, 77 East Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing West and, 75–77, 88, 89 Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin, 76–77, 79, 89–90 integration of West Germany and, 17, 78 moving toward free-market model (1991), 15 Soviet Union economic model adopted (1950s–1970s) by, 7 See also Germany; West Germany East India Companies, 108, 130 Ebola virus, 107 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes), 103 Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 121–122, 186 The Economist, 230 Economist Intelligence Unit's global democracy index (2019), 233 Education COVID-19 pandemic and digital connectivity access to, 227 effective government focusing on health care, housing, and, 225–227 history of US segregated, 226 increase of female levels of, 9 legacy preferences for university admissions practice, 226 Singapore's outstanding system of, 230 Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth graph, 137–138fig Eltobgy, Maha, 250–251 Emerging markets Chinese economy interacting with, 63–66 economic growth (2002–2019) of, 64–65fig Emissions cap-and-trade scheme (EU), 166, 183 Employees.

Their failure at this industrial transition point showed that the state-led economic model put forth by the Soviet Union was less resilient than the market-based one promoted by the West. In China, the government of new leader Deng Xiaoping started its own Reform and Opening-Up in 1979, gradually introducing capitalist and market-based policies (see Chapter 3). In 1989, Germany experienced a moment of euphoria, as the Berlin Wall, which separated East from West, fell. Shortly thereafter, political reunification of Germany was at last established. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had officially disintegrated. Many economies that lay in its sphere of influence, including those of East Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, turned toward the West and its capitalist, free-market model.

isbn=9780674660489. 20 “Member States,” ASEAN, https://asean.org/asean/asean-member-states/. 21 “Total Population of the ASEAN countries,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/796222/total-population-of-the-asean-countries/. 22 “Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2019,” OECD, https://www.oecd.org/development/asia-pacific/01_SAEO2019_Overview_WEB.pdf. 23 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 24 “Vietnam Emerges a Key Winner from the US-China Trade War,” Channel News Asia, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/us-china-trade-war-winners-losers-countries-vietnam-hanoi-saigon-11690308. 25 “Southeast Asia Churns Out Billion-Dollar Start-Ups,” Bain, https://www.bain.com/insights/southeast-asia-churns-out-billion-dollar-start-ups-snap-chart/. 26 “India's Economic Reform Agenda (2014–2019), a Scorecard,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://indiareforms.csis.org/2014reforms. 27 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, Chapter 1, p. 9, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 28 “India's Harsh Covid-19 Lockdown Displaced at Least 10 Million Migrants,” Niharika Sharma, Quartz India, September 2020, https://qz.com/india/1903018/indias-covid-19-lockdown-displaced-at-least-10-million-migrants/. 29 “International Literacy Day 2020: Kerala, Most Literate State in India, Check Rank-Wise List,” The Hindustan Times, September 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/international-literacy-day-2020-kerala-most-literate-state-in-india-check-rank-wise-list/story-IodNVGgy5hc7PjEXUBKnIO.html. 30 “Chinese Investments in Africa,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/09/06/figures-of-the-week-chinese-investment-in-africa/. 31 “Global Economic Prospects, Sub-Saharan Africa,” The World Bank, January 2019, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/307811542818500671/Global-Economic-Prospects-Jan-2019-Sub-Saharan-Africa-analysis.pdf. 32 “The Asian Century Is Set to Begin,” Financial Times, March 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/520cb6f6-2958-11e9-a5ab-ff8ef2b976c7. 33 “World Economic Outlook: Latest World Economic Outlook Growth Projections,” International Monetary Fund, October 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/09/30/world-economic-outlook-october-2020. 34 “Air Pollution,” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/. 35 “World Inequality Report 2018: Income Inequality in India,” World Inequality Lab, https://wir2018.wid.world/. 4 Divided Societies On the morning of August 12, 1961, Berliners woke up to a harsh new reality. A wall had appeared in their city, dividing it right through the middle. It was a culmination of a long process of diverging geopolitical interests—yet a brutal shock to many. The Berlin Wall would last for nearly 30 years and scar several generations of Germans. Fifteen years earlier, at the end of World War II, Germany had been overrun by the Allies. The Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France brought down the Nazi leadership and ended the most devastating war in history.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

When the walls of San Giovanni fell, it was a stark demonstration that the economic returns to violence in the world had risen sharply. The fall of the Berlin Wall says something different, namely that returns to violence are now falling. This is something that few have even begun to recognize, but it will have dramatic consequences. For reasons we explore in this chapter, the Berlin Wall may prove to be far more symbolic of the whole era of the industrial nationstate than those in the crowd that night in Berlin or the millions watching from a distance understood. The Berlin Wall was built to a very different purpose than the walls of San Giovanni-to prevent people on the inside from escaping rather than to prevent predators on the outside from entering.

A time much like now. 89 Chapter 5 THE LIFE AND HEALTH OF THE NATIONSTATE Democracy and Nationalism as Resource Strategies in the Age of Violence "Most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs." 1 ROBERT DE BALSAC, 1502 THE RUBBLE OF HISTORY On November 9 and 10, 1989, television broadcast to the world scenes of exuberant East Berliners dismantling the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers. Fledgling entrepreneurs among the crowd picked up pieces of the wall that were later marketed to capitalists far and wide as souvenir paperweights. A brisk business in these relics was done for years thereafter. Even as we write, one can still encounter occasional ads in small magazines offering bits of old East German concrete for sale at prices ordinarily commanded by highgrade silver ore. We believe that those who bought the Berlin Wall paperweights should be in no rush to sell. They hold mementos of something bigger than the collapse of Communism.

They hold mementos of something bigger than the collapse of Communism. We believe that the Berlin Wall became the most important pile of historical rubble since the walls of San Giovanni were blasted to smithereens almost five centuries earlier in February 1495. The leveling of San Giovanni by the French king Charles VIII was the first blast of the Gunpowder Revolution. It marked the end of the feudal phase of history and the advent of industrialism, as we outlined earlier. The destruction of the Berlin Wall marks another historical watershed, the passage between the Industrial Age and the new Information Age. Never has there been so great a symbolic triumph of efficiency over power.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Victorians would be shocked to find that their beloved British Empire – which provided the essential foundations for nineteenth-century globalization – had more or less disappeared by the late 1940s, by which time the UK itself was on the brink of bankruptcy. Those many fans of the Soviet economic system during the 1930s Depression years would doubtless be astonished to discover that the entire edifice began to crumble following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. SOUTHERN SPAIN Even when patterns of globalization endure for many centuries, they can break down remarkably quickly, leading to dramatic changes in fortune. Consider, for example, the history of Andalucía in southern Spain, a story that veered from one seemingly permanent political structure (Islam) to another (Christianity) within just a handful of years.

Soviet living standards rose relative to those in the US in the interwar period – from 20 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1938 – only to return to 21 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. They rose again during the Cold War, reaching a peak of 38 per cent of American incomes in 1975, before falling to 31 per cent as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The Soviet version of economic progress – the one that Steffens and Shaw believed in so passionately – just didn’t deliver the goods. HOW THE WEST DIDN’T WIN Still, it would be wrong to suggest that the proponents of communism in its various forms were the only ones unable to see clearly into the future.

London and Paris eventually established a tougher ‘Dual Control’ system – which understandably provoked a nationalist backlash and an army revolt.13 To be fair, it has not all been reverse gear in Europe. For many years, former Soviet satellites appeared to have found a home in the European Union’s welcoming democratic arms. Poland, for example, went from strength to strength economically following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Between 1990 and 2015, Polish per capita incomes more than doubled, thanks in large part to major institutional reforms associated with Poland’s efforts to join the EU, a feat it eventually accomplished in 2004. The contrast with Ukraine – stuck in a no man’s land between the European Union and Russia – is striking.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Richard Gott III celebrated his Harvard graduation with a tour of Europe. He visited the supreme monument of Cold War anxiety, the Berlin Wall. Standing in the shadow of the landmark, he contemplated its history and future. Would this symbol of totalitarian power one day lie in ruins? This was a matter discussed by diplomats, historians, op-ed writers, TV pundits, and spy novelists. Opinions varied. Gott, who was planning postgraduate work in astrophysics, brought a different perspective. He devised a simple trick for estimating how long the Berlin Wall would stand. He did the math in his head and announced his prediction to a friend, Chuck Allen.

Even the whole of the observable universe is now widely believed to be an insignificant speck in a yet-greater multiverse. The cosmic “you are here” dot says we’re smack in the middle of nowhere. The Copernican principle is generally applied to an observer’s location in space, but the delta t argument applies it to an observer’s location in time. Gott began with the assumption that his visit to the Berlin Wall had not taken place at any special moment in the wall’s history. That premise allowed Gott to predict the wall’s future without any expertise on Cold War geopolitics. His 1969 prediction was that there was a 50 percent chance that the wall would stand at least another 2.67 years after his visit but no more than 24 years.

Because these two pins bound the middle half of the bar, it’s even odds that the present moment falls inside this range. That means there’s a 50 percent chance that your relationship’s future will be somewhere between one-third and three times as long as its past. Gott used this calculation with his Berlin Wall prediction. This prediction is one of many similar ones you might make. In his Nature article, Gott adopted the 95 percent confidence level that is widely used in science and statistics. To publish a result in a scientific journal, it is generally necessary to show a 95 percent or greater probability that the result is not due to sampling error.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Tellingly, how democracies atrophy and perish has become the question that most preoccupies liberal scholars today.5 The very ideal of ‘an open society’, too, has lost its once-fêted lustre.6 For many disillusioned citizens, openness to the world now suggests more grounds for anxiety than for hope. When the Berlin Wall was toppled, there were only sixteen border fences in the world. Now there are sixty-five fortified perimeters either completed or under construction. According to Quebec University expert Elisabeth Vallet, almost a third of the world’s countries are rearing barriers along their borders.7 The three decades following 1989 turned out to be an ‘inter-mural period’, a brief barricade-free interval between the dramatic breaching of the Berlin Wall, exciting utopian fantasies of a borderless world, and a global craze of wall-building, with cement and barbed-wire barriers embodying existential (if sometimes imaginary) fears.

THE LIGHT THAT FAILED Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy IVAN KRASTEV AND STEPHEN HOLMES Contents Imitation and its Discontents 1 The Copycat Mind 2 Imitation as Retaliation 3 Imitation as Dispossession The Closing of an Age Acknowledgements Notes Index Imitation and its Discontents We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies? Edward Young The future was better yesterday. We used to believe that the year 1989 divided ‘the past from the future almost as clearly as the Berlin wall divided the East from the West’.1 We had ‘trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist’.2 That is not the way we think today. Most of us now have trouble imagining a future, even in the West, that remains securely democratic and liberal.

The younger one, the Bulgarian, was born on the other side of the East–West divide some four years after the Wall went up, and grew up believing that tearing down walls was a pathway to political liberty and individual freedom. While our backgrounds are different, both of us lived for years in the shadow of the Wall and its dramatically televised demolition turned out to be the defining moment in our political and intellectual lives. First the Berlin Wall and then its absence have indelibly marked our political thinking. The illusion that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of an Age of Liberalism and Democracy was our illusion too. This book represents our attempt to understand not only why we were once ready to embrace this illusion but also how to think about a world onto which a high tide of illiberal and anti-democratic ‘anarchy’ has now been so ominously loosed.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

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

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

An Essay on Europe (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011) Katz, Bruce; Noring, Luise; and Garrelts, Nantke, ‘Cities and refugees: the German experience’, Brookings Institution report, 18 September 2016 Lambert, Charles, ‘French immigration problems’, Foreign Affairs, January 1928 Leuenberger, Christine, ‘Constructions of the Berlin Wall: how material culture is used in psychological theory’, Social Problems, vol. 53, no. 1 (February 2006), pp. 18–37 Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project, Pew Research Center report, 2010 Ross, Corey, ‘East Germans and the Berlin Wall: popular opinion and social change before and after the border closure of August 1961’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 39, no. 1 (January 2004), pp. 25–43 Stein, Mary Beth, ‘The politics of humor: the Berlin Wall in jokes and graffiti’, Western Folklore, vol. 48, no. 2 (April 1989), pp. 85–108 Steinmetz, Vanessa, ‘Das sollen Flüchtlinge künftig leisten’, Spiegel Online, 24 May 2016 Chapter 8: UK Bruce, John Collingwood, The Roman Wall (London: J.

What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.’ – Kofi Annan People gather at the Berlin Wall as it starts to come down, November 1989. EARLY ONE GREY MORNING IN 1979 I BOARDED A MILITARY train in West Germany heading through East Germany to Charlottenburg station in the West German sector of Berlin, formerly the capital of a united Germany. By that time the Berlin Wall had been up for eighteen years and it appeared to be a permanent fixture in our lives, one that would keep us apart for ever. There didn’t seem to be any prospect of living another way – the present was fixed in concrete, barbed wire, part of a conflict that threatened to split enough atoms to kill us all.

When I first gazed over the miles of brickwork snaking along the mountain tops, I was not as overawed as I had been at, say, the Grand Canyon. Nor did I feel overwhelmed, as I was by the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai. I did not feel political ideology emanating from it, as I did when I visited the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. But there was something else. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I understood China just a little bit better than before. It didn’t make me any sort of expert – far from it – but in that moment I had a much better appreciation of phrases such as ‘ancient culture’ and ‘the greatest feat in human history’, and of the concept that many in the People’s Republic still divide the world into those who are Chinese and those who are not.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Also present is the appropriation of language that happens when you scour science for concepts like “strange attractors,” or when you create portmanteaus such as “plutopian meliorism” and posit that we can now speak of the “Enlightenment Electrified.” Then there is the final issue of what kind of language differentiation you need to use in the face of a hybridizing hegemony of “unimodern unimedia.” Of special note in this book is the period between 1989 and 2001, in which all three siblings reached something of a tipping point. After the Berlin Wall came down and the sense of nuclear menace diminished, I stopped looking over my shoulder for the first time, expecting clear skies without vapor trails. But the events of 9/11 transformed the H-bomb into the human bomb, and the specific threat of death from the sky transformed itself xvi THREE SIBLINGS into a free-floating anxiety about weapons of mass destruction and terror.

Though jeered at by professional planners of her day—one dismissed her work as “bitter coffee-house ramblings”—Jacobs has certainly had the last laugh, with The Death and Life of Great American Cities utterly upending town planning for more than fifty years through its articulation of precisely what makes a neighborhood worth inhabiting. We will spend at least another generation working out how Jacob’s fine-grained mixtures should function within digital environments, but mining her work for insights into the culture machine does not stop there. Just after the fall of the Berlin wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Jacobs wrote Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, in which she identifies two complementary and opposing moral syndromes: one based on taking (also known as the guardian syndrome), and the other based on trading (or the commercial syndrome).

It must be contextualized within a much wider and less metaphoric series of battles worldwide, stretching back decades. A key feature of these conflicts has been the oscillation between irrational exuberance and untethered terror. To delineate the period we are living through, I combine the hopefulness that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall with the fear and rage that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. This period I call 89/11 (pronounced “eightynine eleven”), and this section of the book will both define that era’s characteristics and move past the stasis it engendered via the creation of what I term “bespoke futures.”1 What looked like it would be a facile history in 1989—the victory of one sort of built system over another, the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, capitalism over a command economy—turned out to be vastly more complex.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Clinton drew a parallel between the challenges of promoting Internet freedom and the experiences of supporting dissidents during the Cold War. Speaking of her recent visit to Germany to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Clinton mentioned “the courageous men and women” who “made the case against oppression by circulating small pamphlets called samizdat,” which “helped pierce the concrete and concertina wire of the Iron Curtain.” (Newseum was a very appropriate venue to give in to Cold War nostalgia. It happens to house the largest display of sections of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany). Something very similar is happening today, argued Clinton, adding that “as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls.”

By the virtue of sharing part of its name with the word “firewall,” the Berlin Wall is by far the most abused term from the vocabulary of the Cold War. Senators are particularly fond of the metaphorical thinking that it inspires. Arlen Specter, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has urged the American government to “fight fire with fire in finding ways to breach these firewalls, which dictatorships use to control their people and keep themselves in power.” Why? Because “tearing down these walls can match the effect of what happened when the Berlin Wall was torn down.” Speaking in October 2009 Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, argued that “as we approach the 20th anniversary of the breaking of the Berlin Wall, we must ... commit ourselves to finding ways to tear down ... the cyber-walls.”

And to dispel any suspicions that such linguistic promiscuity could be a mere coincidence, Eli Lake, a contributing editor for the New Republic, opines that “during the cold war, the dominant metaphor for describing the repression of totalitarian regimes was The Berlin Wall. To update that metaphor, we should talk about The Firewall,” as if the similarity between the two cases was nothing but self-evident. Things get worse once observers begin to develop what they think are informative and insightful parallels that go beyond the mere pairing of the Berlin Wall with the Firewall, attempting to establish a nearly functional identity between some of the activities and phenomena of the Cold War era and those of today’s Internet.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

As I do this, I have to keep reminding myself that hardly any of them remember any of the events I’m describing. When I talk about Stalin and Truman, even Reagan and Gorbachev, it could as easily be Napoleon, Caesar, or Alexander the Great. Most members of the Class of 2005, for example, were only five years old when the Berlin Wall came down. They know that the Cold War in various ways shaped their lives, because they’ve been told how it affected their families. Some of them—by no means all—understand that if a few decisions had been made differently at a few critical moments during that conflict, they might not even have had a life.

There followed, though, a string of setbacks that made Kennedy’s first months in the White House themselves an embarrassment: the failed Bay of Pigs landings against Fidel Castro’s Cuba in April, 1961; the Soviet Union’s success that same month in putting the first man into orbit around the earth; a badly handled summit conference at Vienna in June at which Khrushchev renewed his Berlin ultimatum; and in August East Germany’s unopposed construction of the Berlin Wall. When Khrushchev announced shortly thereafter that the Soviet Union would soon resume nuclear weapons testing with a 100-megaton blast—almost seven times the size of BRAVO—Kennedy had had enough. Drawing on new, copious, and convincing evidence from reconnaissance satellites, he called Khrushchev’s bluff.

With West Berlin isolated from East Berlin and East Germany, he had no further need to try to force the western powers out of the city, with all the risks of nuclear war that such an effort would have entailed. He could breathe more easily now, and so too—if truth be told—could western leaders. “It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy acknowledged, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”54 The president could not resist observing, though, when he himself visited the Berlin Wall in June, 1963, that “we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was “the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see.”55 X. AND ON the other side of the wall, capitalism was succeeding.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

The Grunewald forest, for instance, with its many lakes, is a great getaway. Or follow the course of the former Berlin Wall along the marked Berliner Mauerweg. For more ideas, consult the guide published by the bicycle club ADFC (448 4724; www.adfc-berlin.de; Brunnenstrasse 28; noon-8pm Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm Sat; Bernauer Strasse, Rosenthaler Platz). It’s available at its offices, bookshops and bike stores. THE BERLIN WALL It’s more than a tad ironic that Berlin’s most popular tourist attraction is one that no longer exists. For 28 years the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Cold War, divided not only a city but the world.

Sample not just famous beer but also world-class wines, most notably the noble riesling, while exploring ancient cellars. Experiencing the country through its food and drink will add a rich layer to your memories (and possibly your belly!). Top of section TOP EXPERIENCES Berlin Wall 1 Few events in history have the power to move the entire world. The Kennedy assassination; landing on the moon; 9/11... And, of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. If you were alive back then and old enough, you will probably remember the crowds of euphoric revellers cheering and dancing at the Brandenburg Gate (Click here). Although little is left of the physical barrier, its legacy lives on in the imagination and in places such as Checkpoint Charlie (Click here), the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Click here) and the East Side Gallery (Click here), with its colourful murals.

Further south, gritty but cool Kreuzberg is party central, as is student-flavoured Friedrichshain east across the Spree River and home to the East Side Gallery stretch of the Berlin Wall. Western Berlin’s hub is Charlottenburg, with great shopping and a famous royal palace. BERLIN FOR FIRST TIMERS No one will believe you’ve been to Berlin if you haven’t had your picture snapped against the backdrop of the Brandenburger Tor and taken in the stellar views from the top of the Reichstag dome (reserve ahead; Click here). If you only have time for one museum, make it the Pergamon with its pirate’s chest of ancient treasures. Pondering the Cold War on a stroll along the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of Berlin Wall, is an essential activity.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

.* And if we assume that we’re arriving precisely halfway into something’s duration, the best guess we can make for how long it will last into the future becomes obvious: exactly as long as it’s lasted already. Gott saw the Berlin Wall eight years after it was built, so his best guess was that it would stand for eight years more. (It ended up being twenty.) This straightforward reasoning, which Gott named the Copernican Principle, results in a simple algorithm that can be used to make predictions about all sorts of topics. Without any preconceived expectations, we might use it to obtain predictions for the end of not only the Berlin Wall but any number of other short- and long-lived phenomena. The Copernican Principle predicts that the United States of America will last as a nation until approximately the year 2255, that Google will last until roughly 2032, and that the relationship your friend began a month ago will probably last about another month (maybe tell him not to RSVP to that wedding invitation just yet).

In the case of a raffle, one way to plead ignorance would be to assume what’s called the “uniform prior,” which considers every proportion of winning tickets to be equally likely.* In the case of the Berlin Wall, an uninformative prior means saying that we don’t know anything about the time span we’re trying to predict: the wall could equally well come down in the next five minutes or last for five millennia. Aside from that uninformative prior, the only piece of data we supply to Bayes’s Rule, as we’ve seen, is the fact that we’ve encountered the Berlin Wall when it is eight years old. Any hypothesis that would have predicted a less than eight-year life span for the wall is thereby ruled out immediately, since those hypotheses can’t account for our situation at all.

Alert me only once every ten minutes, say; then tell me everything. 6 Bayes’s Rule Predicting the Future All human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. —BERTRAND RUSSELL The sun’ll come out tomorrow. You can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be sun. —ANNIE In 1969, before embarking on a doctorate in astrophysics at Princeton, J. Richard Gott III took a trip to Europe. There he saw the Berlin Wall, which had been built eight years earlier. Standing in the shadow of the wall, a stark symbol of the Cold War, he began to wonder how much longer it would continue to divide the East and West. On the face of it, there’s something absurd about trying to make this kind of prediction. Even setting aside the impossibility of forecasting geopolitics, the question seems mathematically laughable: it’s trying to make a prediction from a single data point.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

As to America’s two British-fathered siblings, Canada has adopted the US as its new parent and is adjusting accordingly; Australian politics has been in an advanced state of decay ever since the late Gough Whitlam, the prime minister, was removed via an intelligence coup masterminded in London. The country now specializes in battery-farming provincial politicians of a provincial cast with impressive regularity. In all these locations, citizens deserve better. Twenty-five years ago when the Berlin Wall came down, it was not simply the Soviet Union or the ‘communist idea’ or the efficacy of ‘socialist solutions’ that collapsed. Western European social democracy, too, went down. In the face of the triumphalist capitalist storm that swept the world, it had neither the vision nor the determination to defend elements of its own past social programmes.

And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.’ Wilde’s spirit is very much alive in the collective heart of the young who have come out onto the streets in protest against the forms of capitalism that have dominated the world since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. They shouted their demands against the 1 per cent in New York, against US-backed dictatorship in Cairo, against the corruptions of the extreme centre in Greece and Spain, and for self-determination in Scotland. The European Union – one of the largest economic entities on the planet, occupying a space greater than that of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago – is in a mess.

And yet it is worth noting that throughout the Cold War years, from 1949 to 1990, NATO never fought a single battle. It was neither tried nor tested. Instead, it was a military propaganda organization, designed to control allies rather than punish enemies. Yet things changed following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Where once the purpose was a defensive show of strength, it now became an offensive test of strength, giving rise to operational shifts and corresponding changes in its command structure. This was on public record at the Welsh summit in 2014. There have been two and a half phases in NATO’s development since 1949.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

Similar tunes are played by the Danish People’s Party, the Swedish Democrats, the People’s Party of Switzerland and the notoriously Islamophobic Geert Wilders in Holland. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an ‘illiberal democracy’ of its own. But the most conspicuous setback for democracy has taken place in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were high hopes for a democratic order in the old Soviet Union, but these hopes faded in 1999 when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin. Putin, a former KGB operative, has since been both prime minister and president twice. He has muzzled the press, imprisoned opponents and presided over the murder of radical journalists, even as the display of democracy has been preserved.

The speeches in this chapter are also about the purpose to which peace must be turned. Pericles offers a eulogy to democracy as much as to the departed. Lloyd George defines the land fit for heroes. Wilson imagines a global alliance of democratic nations. Churchill offers blood, sweat, toil and tears to see off the tyrant and Reagan stands to speak on the right side of the Berlin Wall which marks off the free world. In all instances, the war is being fought for a noble purpose, not merely to keep the enemy at bay, but to deepen the commitment to a free nation. The original casus belli – that the nation was in peril – is never enough. The war has to be fought for better politics.

Though he initially denied knowing about it, Reagan later announced that it had been a mistake. It was, however, during his second term as president that Reagan forged a diplomatic relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, chairman of the Soviet Union. This was the context in which Reagan gave the following speech at the Berlin Wall, on the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the wall. The West German government requested that the president’s schedule be adjusted to allow him to visit Berlin on his way back from an economic summit in Venice. Reagan’s visit brought a protest to the Berlin streets.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

We also look at these disruptive events from the viewpoint of change-makers: In the face of disruption, what determines whether we end up in moments of madness or mindfulness? The Toppling of Tyrants In the fall of 1989, two weeks before the Berlin Wall crumbled, we took an international student group to East Berlin, where we met with civil rights activists in the basement of a church. At one point, the professor who was with us, peace researcher Johan Galtung, put a prediction on the table: “The Berlin Wall will come down before the end of the year.” Everybody doubted that, including the people who were organizing the resistance against the East German regime. And we were all wrong.

As a consequence, the radioactive fuel began overheating and put the plant on a path toward catastrophic meltdown. As the year went on, the Arab Spring spread across the globe. Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in Libya. The Occupy Wall Street movement, which took inspiration in part from the Arab Spring, staged actions in more than a thousand cities across the globe.3 The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and the near-meltdown of the western financial system all share some features: 1. the end of an inflexible, centralized control structure, one that previously had been considered indestructible 2. the beginning of a spontaneous, decentralized grassroots movement of people letting go of their fear and waking up to another level of awareness and interconnectedness 3. the opening of some small cracks in the old system, followed by its crumbling and eventual collapse 4. the rebound of the old forces as soon as the memory of the collapse began to fade away; the old forces tried to obscure the actual root causes of the breakdown in order to extend their privileged access to power and influence (an example is Wall Street’s financial oligarchy) We believe that these kinds of events will keep coming our way.

They tend to show up along the fault lines that divide the collective social body of our communities and societies. Again, we cannot fully predict when or where a disaster will occur, but understanding the space of possibility allows us to be much more attentive to subtle signals that foreshadow bigger events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the meltdown of the financial system, and the toppling of authoritarian regimes. What is the geography of the major fault lines that divide the collective socioeconomic body—the sum total of human relationships—today? We believe that there are three major fault lines, concerning three principal relationships that we engage in as human beings: (1) our relationship with nature and our planet; (2) our relationships with one another; and (3) our relationship with ourselves.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

In his speech during the gala dinner on the 6th, he rebutted accusations that Moscow bore sole responsibility for the continent’s post-war division and he took issue with West Germany for seizing on his reforms to ‘reanimate’ dreams of a German Reich ‘within the boundaries of 1937’. He also specifically rejected demands that Moscow dismantle the Berlin Wall – a call made by Reagan in 1987 and again by Bush in 1989. ‘We are constantly called on to liquidate this or that division,’ Gorbachev complained. ‘We often have to hear, “Let the USSR get rid of the Berlin Wall, then we’ll believe in its peaceful intentions.”’ He was adamant that ‘we don’t idealise the order that has settled on Europe. But the fact is that until now the recognition of the post-war reality has insured peace on the continent.

Because they had not been given any formal written statement, the incredulous press corps hung on Schabowski’s every word, squeezing all they could out of them.[50] Finally someone asked the fatal question: ‘Mr Schabowski, what is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?’ Schabowski: It has been brought to my attention that it is 7 p.m. That has to be the last question. Thank you for your understanding. Um … What will happen to the Berlin Wall? Information has already been provided in connection with travel activities. Um, the issue of travel, um, the ability to cross the Wall from our side … hasn’t been answered yet and exclusively the question in the sense … so this, I’ll put it this way, fortified state border of the GDR … um, we have always said that there have to be several other factors, um, taken into consideration.

People power was explosive, but not in the military sense – the demonstrators of 1989 demanded democracy and reform, they disarmed governments that had seemed impregnable and, in a human tide of travellers and migrants, they broke open the once-impenetrable Iron Curtain. The symbolic moment that captured the drama of those months was the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November. In 1989, everything seemed in flux. Currents of revolutionary change surged up from below, while the wielders of power attempted political reform at the top.[2] The Marxist–Leninist ideology of Soviet communism, once the mental architecture of the Soviet bloc, haemorrhaged credibility and rapidly lost grip.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

His action in provoking the Cuban missile crisis, seen to have damaged the Soviet Union’s international standing, was among the reasons for his deposition. So was his authorization of the building of the Berlin Wall. With Khrushchev’s departure, the Cold War lost an erratic, blustering, unpredictable component. Two new Soviet leaders replaced him: Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party and Alexei Kosygin as Prime Minister. The shift of power in the Kremlin began a new phase of the Cold War. There would be future points of tension, certainly, but the erection of the Berlin Wall, the defusing of the Cuban crisis and the toppling of Khrushchev saw the worst of the heat evaporate from the Cold War.

The American leadership continued during the crisis to think that Cuba was also related to the Berlin question – a way of putting pressure on America to give way on West Berlin. This indeed appears to have been an indirect reason for Khrushchev’s dangerous initiative; he remained obsessed with the German question, aware that the Berlin Wall had actually constituted a defeat for the socialist East and a humiliation in the eyes of the world for Marxism-Leninism. But he also had other motives. The impulsive Kremlin chief was acutely aware that the Soviet Union lagged far behind the United States in long-range missile capability. And he was more than sensitive to the fact that American intermediate-range missiles were aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain, Italy and Turkey.

The Adenauer government itself held to national unity as the ultimate objective and refused to recognize the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state. In practice, however, reunification was a dead letter long before the division of Germany became quite literally concrete with the erection of the Berlin Wall starting in August 1961. By then Adenauer had twice, in 1953 and 1957, won convincing electoral victories. The narrow margins of 1949 had been replaced by a huge increase in support for his party. In the 1957 election to the Bundestag, the Federal Parliament, the CDU and its Bavarian sister-party the CSU (Christian Social Union) won an absolute majority (50.2 per cent of the vote), the only time that any party won such an outright victory in the history of the Federal Republic.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

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

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

The mind-walls have grown higher and more forbidding since September 11, 2001, the “9/11” of fear that was the true beginning of the twenty-first century. But we can take heart from another 9/11, written European-style, with the day before the month. On the evening of November 9, 1989, citizens began to hack away at the roughcast concrete of the Berlin Wall with whatever they could lay their hands on—and the wall came down. That marked the effective end of the short twentieth century. In Part One of this book, I examine the crisis that has engulfed Europeans and Americans at the start of a new century. I try to establish what has really happened and why.

Germany, and especially divided Berlin, was a thermometer of the worldwide struggle between the two blocs known as “East” and “West.” Limited though Germany’s sovereignty was, everyone looked with interest (and some nervousness) to see what new ways, if any, the Germans themselves might find to lower the Berlin Wall. Now Britain is the divided country—divided not by a concrete wall, of course, but by what Germans call the Mauer im Kopf, the wall in our heads. Britain is a thermometer—or is it a seismograph?—on whose trembling needle you can measure the improvement or deterioration of relations between Europe and America.

They grew fainter, more confused, in the music of the 1970s and 1980s, when enlargement from six to twelve member states made the European orchestra more polyphonous, and détente softened the conflict between communist East and anticommunist West; but they were still there in the minds of the men and women who shaped the European project. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and that year of wonders, 1989, which saw the threat of Soviet communism softly and suddenly vanish away. What an opportunity—and what a crisis! Fifteen years later, the European Union comprises twenty-five enormously diverse European states, including, incredibly, three Baltic republics which in 1989 were still part of the Soviet Union.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

How DARE you invoke the sacrifices of those [who] fought one.’ 11 More recently, Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England, compared Theresa May’s Brexit deal to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s too: ‘In the 1930s, with appeasement; in the 1970s, when the British economy was the “sick man” of Europe and the government saw its role as managing decline; and now, in the turmoil that has followed the Brexit referendum. In all three cases, the conventional wisdom of the day was wrong’, www.bbc.co.uk/­news/­business-46446105, accessed 5 December 2018 12 ‘From the Berlin Wall to the Arab Spring’, www.counterpart.org/­stories/­from-the-berlin-wall-to-the-arab-spring 13 ‘Medvedev compares “Arab Spring” to fall of Berlin Wall’, www.expatica.com/­ru/news/­country-news/­Medvedev-compares-Arab-Spring-to-fall-of-Berlin-Wall_274177.html, accessed 30 November 2018 14 Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/­the-press-office/­2011/05/19/­remarks-president-middle-east-and-north-africa, accessed 2 May 2018 15 In Egypt, even as Tahrir Square filled, analysts started to question the revolutionary thesis.

The Russians saw Russian history in the Arab Spring, with Medvedev fearing that, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, these demonstrations would prove destabilising for Russia.13 Meanwhile, President Obama likened it to the Boston Tea Party and the beginning of America’s war for independence, drawing analogies too with the civil rights protest of Rosa Parks.14 Everyone saw themselves in these events. So they felt confident they knew where they would lead and how they would end. The reliance on analogies implied inevitability: just like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Boston Tea Party, the demonstrations would usher in a new era of democratic freedoms.

Countries are different, personalities are different and everyone operating in the present is different to those from the past, so make decisions with information that their predecessors did not possess. But when the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, analogies popped up like daisies. Just the term ‘Arab Spring’ evoked comparisons with the European revolutions of 1848 and the Prague Spring anti-Communist rising of 1968. Even more common were references to the fall of the Berlin Wall, another event that had defied prediction. In August 2011, one NGO commentator wrote: ‘The Arab Spring is truly historic. People are standing up in a region where customs have required deference to the wise and elder. This is nothing short of a socio-cultural quake. Today’s mostly youth-led revolt is new for the Middle East but not for the world.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

From Greece my young family drifted to Portugal, where I wrote a third book, Balkan Ghosts, excerpted in The Atlantic four months before the Berlin Wall fell. The excerpt ended with this conclusion: “In the 1970s and 1980s the world witnessed the limits of superpower influence in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the 1990s those limits may well become visible in a Third World region within Europe itself. The Balkans could shape the end of the century, just as they did the beginning.”[22] Then, on November 30, 1989, less than three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, I wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Two concepts are emerging out of the ruins of Communist Europe.

And yet he revels in complications: observing Roman limes near Ingolstadt, he mentions that imperial pretensions to universalism have been “a mask for dominion” that predates modernity with all of its nightmares.[18] The shadow of the Holocaust stains the baroque and Gothic splendor of Danubia, providing this travelogue with its moral power. Magris writes about a Central Europe that is whole even though the fall of the Berlin Wall still lies in the future—Danube was published three years before that event, and had been in progress for many years. It is the lifework of an area expert on the verge of being an encyclopedist. Imagining the post Cold War between the lines of the text, the book nonetheless reflects the now-lost nuances of the Communist 1970s and early 1980s that I knew as a reporter: how the Slovaks suffered a lesser fate than the Czechs following the Soviet repression of the 1968 Prague Spring; how Hungary’s internal political detente in the final decades of the Cold War allowed for a relatively freer climate there, in which even the regime wanted to forget politics; and how in Yugoslavia “Marshal Tito ended by resembling Francis Joseph more and more, and certainly not because he had fought beneath his banners in the First World War, but rather because of his awareness of inheriting a supra-national, Danubian legacy.”[19] The odyssey continues.

And after World War II, we found ourselves a small enclave backed up against the Iron Curtain,” when Trieste became a Cold War spy center almost like Berlin and Vienna. After all, though Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was still part of the Communist bloc.[*3] So in the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Illy, as the new centrist-independent mayor of Trieste, began to encourage Slovenia’s integration with European institutions, as well as a reconciliation between Slovene-speakers and Italian-speakers in Trieste, in order to heal an ethnic conflict that particularly had its roots in the World War II atrocities committed by Yugoslav Communist partisans against the local Italian population.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Healy had to look elsewhere and ended up with Saddam Hussein for want of better. The totalitarianism of the Baathist ultra-right was preferable to the real enemy – the liberal version of democracy that permitted him to organize a party and argue his case. His choice anticipated the choices of the twenty-first century. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, hardly any communist tyrannies survived. When people wanted to go from justifiable democratic opposition into fellow travelling with totalitarianism, what else was there to travel with other than the regimes and movements of the ultra-right? I write this with the benefit of hindsight. In 1985, the collapse of the WRP didn’t seem significant to me or anyone else.

The post-Baathist future was ‘going to be like walking a tightrope, balancing the legitimate grievances of all those who have suffered against the knowledge that if everyone is held accountable who is in fact guilty, the country will be torn apart’. In the Nineties, however, the ranks of those outside Iraq who wanted to overthrow the Baath Party were thin. The Berlin Wall was down and the terrors of the twentieth century appeared to be over. Consumers dedicated their lives to getting and spending, and the liberal-minded among them relaxed and enjoyed their world music and GM-free organic food. Makiya cut a lonely figure as he toured American universities and think tanks trying to prick consciences.

Marxism never got anywhere in Britain where the Left generally meant a Labour Party that true Marxists despised for its boringly ‘reformist’ attempts to make most people’s lives a little bit better. But given the success of Marxism elsewhere, they could dream that a true revolutionary socialist party would supplant Labour. And forty years on, what was left of his Left? Socialism had vanished in the Eighties. Long before the Berlin Wall came down people had stopped thinking about it or seeing it as a plausible answer to the problems of organizing societies. It wasn’t just that communism was clearly finished. In the free world, trade union membership fell, and all left-wing parties with a chance of winning an election stopped pretending that they could and should nationalize the commanding heights of the economy.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

The trip from darkness into light, from despair into hope, from the have-nots to the haves was so vividly exemplified by a trip down the Berlin corridor. It was only a simpleton who could not begin to question how and why this arrangement had been devised. A walk along the Berlin Wall served to confound your wildest explanation. It was a mystery and an anachronism. In one’s strangest dreams you couldn’t have come up with a method such as the Berlin Wall for dividing one city into two, splitting communities and families down the middle of their own houses. More bizarre still, a visit to Checkpoint Charlie and its museum revealed that German was still killing German for trying to cross this man-made border from one Germany to another Germany.

When put together with other tour observations, Sigint22 and satellite imagery, patterns emerged which could range from routine training exercises at unit level to divisional or larger exercises. On the other hand it needn’t just be exercise. It was Brixmis who observed the first signs of the Berlin Wall going up in 1961, were able to alert the allied military governing authorities and test the resolve of the Khruschev-backed fledgling DDR. Nothing was done and the obscenity that divided families in their own houses was erected over night without challenge. Ian Wellstead, a legendary Brixmis tour officer of the day, observed the first blocks being mortared together and could have kicked them down himself had he been given the nod, but the politicians of the day let it go unchallenged.

However, it was clear that several strands of my previous education and experience seemed entirely appropriate: my brief dalliance with intelligence at Ashford, my knowledge of both Russian and German languages, plus the fact that I had actually lived in Berlin for three years and understood the Berlin Wall only too well. It all convinced me that Brixmis was going to be my calling. On return from the staff course I resolved to pursue the Brixmis option further. There were no Defence Council Instructions on the subject, which were the normal way of discovering forces-wide policies and schemes, covering everything from training course volunteers to the latest boarding-school allowance rates.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

RACHEL LEWIS/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Remembering the Wall, Berlin 9 It’s hard to believe, 20 years on, that the Berlin Wall really cut through this city. The best way to examine its role in Berlin (Click here) is to make your way – on foot or by bike – along the Berlin Wall Trail ( Click here ). Passing the Brandenburg Gate (Click here), analysing graffiti at the East Side Gallery or learning about its history at the Documentation Centre: the path brings it all into context. It’s heartbreaking, hopeful and sombre, and integral to trying to understand Germany’s capital. Berliner Mauerweg (Berlin Wall Trail), Germany DAVID PEEVERS/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Appreciating Budapest 10 Hungary’s capital ( Click here ) has cleaned up its act in recent years.

Charter 77’s group of Prague intellectuals, including the playwright–philosopher Václav Havel, continued their underground opposition throughout the 1980s. By 1989 Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November raised expectations of change. On 17 November an official student march in Prague was smashed by police. Daily demonstrations followed, culminating in a general strike on 27 November. Dissidents led by Havel formed the Anti-Communist Civic Forum and negotiated the resignation of the Communist government on 3 December, less than a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A ‘Government of National Understanding’ was formed, with Havel elected president on 29 December.

Only a huge airlift by the Allies managed to keep the city stocked with food and supplies. In October 1949 East Berlin became the capital of the GDR, the German Democratic Republic. The Berlin Wall, built in August 1961, was originally intended to prevent the drain of skilled labour from the East, but soon became a Cold War symbol. For decades East Berlin and West Berlin developed separately, until Hungary breached the Iron Curtain in May 1989; the Berlin Wall followed on 9 November. By 1 July 1990 the wall was being hacked to pieces. The Unification Treaty signed on 3 October that year designated Berlin the official capital of Germany, and in June 1991 the parliament voted to move the seat of government from Bonn back to Berlin.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The recent experience of economic growth is that it has destroyed opportunities, either for particular social groups or for future generations. Can it be reshaped in order to continue without incurring such untenable costs? One possible conclusion would be that this point marks the end of the triumphant free market capitalism that has ruled economic policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism. The financial crisis and subsequent recession have certainly made the role of government more prominent, but mainly as a result of crisis management. Many commentators have argued that the state should reenter economic management in a more deliberate way, given the staggering demonstrations of market failure we’ve experienced.2 I will indeed go on in this part of the book to discuss the many ways in which markets fail, and the policy conclusions to which pervasive market failures point.

However, the circumstances are changing. The changing structure of the economy is affecting the way markets should be organized. HOW MARKETS FAIL Two decades after the crisis of communism, capitalism seems to be in crisis. Or so it is widely believed. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—and around the first anniversary of the onset of the massive financial crisis—the BBC’s World Service commissioned a survey about capitalism covering more than twenty-nine thousand people in twenty-seven countries. Only in two countries—the United States and Pakistan—did more than a fifth of respondents agree that capitalism is working well.

The last chapter discussed the need for better information to guide policy, and this chapter has discussed the need for clarity about values if social welfare is to be well served by policymakers. The third leg of the Economy of Enough is a set of institutions that ensure that society is governed well, and this is the subject of the next chapter. How might we respond to a general crisis of governance? EIGHT Institutions The recent anniversary of the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall brought back emotional memories for Europeans of my generation. Like many children growing up in the Cold War 1960s, I had nuclear nightmares: grey landscapes of ash and devastation with no one else left alive, and the ticking of Geiger counters counting out the rest of eternity. The postwar division of Europe dominated the cultural landscape too.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

“Sputnik was proof of Russia’s ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, said the pessimists, and it was just a matter of time before the Soviets would threaten the United States.”22 The Cold War was at its chilliest in the late fifties and early sixties. In 1960, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 surveillance plane over the Urals. On August 17, 1961, the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s most graphic image of the division between East and West, was constructed overnight by the German Democratic Republic’s communist regime. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked a terrifying contest of nuclear brinksmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Nuclear war, once unthinkable, was being reimagined as a logistical challenge by game theorists at military research institutes like the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica, California–based think tank set up by the US Air Force in 1964 to “provide intellectual muscle”23 for American nuclear planners.

With the creation of the Web, concludes John Naughton, the Internet achieved “liftoff.”48 Without Berners-Lee’s brilliantly simple innovation there would be no Google, Amazon, Facebook, or the millions of other websites and online businesses that we use on a daily basis. Without the Web, we wouldn’t all be living in Ericsson’s Networked Society. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his initial Web proposal in March 1989 at CERN. Six months later, a few hundred miles to the northeast of Geneva, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War came to an end. Back then, with the dramatic destruction of the Wall in November, it was thought that 1989 would be remembered as a watershed year that marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of free-market liberalism. The Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama, assuming that the great debate between capitalists and socialists over the best way to organize industrial society had finally been settled, described the moment that the Wall came down as the “End of History.”

“We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold,” notes the moral philosopher Michael Sandel about an “era of market triumphalism” that began at the end of the Cold War.104 And the Internet, John Doerr’s “largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,” engineered by Cold War scientists and coming of age in the same year that the Berlin Wall fell, has become particularly fertile ground for the triumphalism of free-market ideologues like Tom Perkins. There’s much, of course, for Perkins to be triumphant about. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $30 billion apiece because they successfully cornered the market in the buying and selling of digital advertising.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

It was, according to many pundits and politicians, Iraq’s Berlin Wall. ‘You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history,’ said Bill Hemmer on CNN, ‘indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.’ According to the New York Daily News, ‘a scene reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall began to unspool – and the Iraqis, like the East Germans before them, found some courage.’ US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld agreed: ‘Watching them [pulling down the statue], one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall’. In the Mirror, Anton Antonowicz wrote an impassioned piece: ‘For an oppressed people this final act in the fading daylight, the wrenching down of this ghastly symbol of the regime, is their Berlin Wall moment.’

In the Mirror, Anton Antonowicz wrote an impassioned piece: ‘For an oppressed people this final act in the fading daylight, the wrenching down of this ghastly symbol of the regime, is their Berlin Wall moment.’ Even two years later, President George W. Bush would tell troops: ‘The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty.’15 It would not, though, because this was not a moment of liberty: it was a simulation of a moment of liberty. Caught in a hyperreality of his own creation, President Bush could no longer tell the difference.

See also Samuel Strehle, ‘A poetic anthropology of war: Jean Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf War’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, May 2014. 9Quoted in Nicholas Watt, ‘Baghdad is safe, the infidels are committing suicide’, Guardian, 8 April 2003. 10Colonel Chris Vernon, transcribed in ‘British Military Update’, CNN, 29 March 2003, available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/29/se.14.html. 11Peter Maass, ‘The Toppling: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war’, New Yorker, 3 January 2011. 12Florian Göttke, Toppled, pp. 58–65. 13Peter Maass, ‘The Toppling’; ‘I toppled Saddam’s statue, now I want him back’, BBC News, 5 July 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-36712233; ‘Iraqi who toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue 15 years ago regrets his action’, NPR, 9 April 2018; ‘Saddam Hussein statue toppled in Baghdad, April 2003 – video’, Guardian, 9 March 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/mar/09/saddam-hussein-statue-toppled-bagdhad-april-2003-video; Florian Göttke, Toppled, pp. 21–40. 14Patrick Baz, ‘A tale of two statues’, AFP Correspondent, 9 April 2018, https://correspondent.afp.com/tale-two-statues. 15Quoted in Peter Maass, ‘The Toppling’; Dhiaa Kareem, ‘“The Butcher of Baghdad”: US Press Hyper-personalization of the US-led Invasion of Iraq’, Annual Review of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, vol. 16, p. 124; Anton Antonowicz, ‘What was it like in Baghdad when Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled? Defining moment vividly retold’, Mirror, 9 April 2018; ‘Bush compares fall of Saddam’s statue to fall of Berlin Wall’, Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2005. 16Quotes from Peter Maass, ‘The Toppling’. 17Sean Aday, John Cluverius and Steven Livingston, ‘As Goes the Statue, So Goes the War: The Emergence of the Victory Frame in Television Coverage of the Iraq War’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 49, no. 3.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

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

But we were struck as well by the newly discovered sense of the fragility of all things political. Living through a great disruption teaches you several lessons. The most important is that what defines the direction of history is sometimes a chain of minor events amid a background of big ideas. As the historian Mary Elise Sarotte argues in her book Collapse, the actual opening of the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 1989, “was not the result of a decision by political leaders in East Berlin, . . . or of an agreement with the government of West Germany. . . . [It] was not the result of a plan by the four powers that still held ultimate legal authority in divided Berlin. . . . The opening represented a dramatic instance of surprise, a moment when structures both literal and figurative crumbled unexpectedly.

Europe’s experience with a world without borders—what we speak of as globalization—resembles Saramago’s imagined flirtation with immortality. It is a tale of a sublime dream turned nightmarish. The immediate post-1989 excitement prompted by the shattering of walls has been replaced by a dizzying anxiety and a demand to build fences. Since the Berlin Wall fell—an event heralded as a world opened up—Europe has put up, or started to erect, 1,200 kilometers of fences expressly designed to keep others out. If only yesterday most Europeans were hopeful about the impact of globalization on their lives, today they are unsettled by a future globalized world.

It is, among many other things, also a migration of arguments, emotions, political identities, and votes. The refugee crisis turned out to be Europe’s 9/11. The Migration Crisis: Or Why Hasn’t History Come to an End? A little more than a quarter-century ago, in what now seems like the very distant year of 1989—the annus mirabilis that saw Germans rejoicing on the rubble of the Berlin Wall—an intellectual and US State Department official neatly captured the spirit of the time. With the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued, all major ideological conflicts had been resolved. The contest was over, and history had produced a winner: Western-style liberal democracy. Taking a page from Hegel, Fukuyama presented the West’s victory in the Cold War as a favorable verdict delivered by history itself.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Return to beginning of chapter Charlottenburg The glittering heart of West Berlin during the Cold War, glitzy Charlottenburg has fallen a bit off the tourist radar since reunification. Compared to the wild-child character of the eastern districts, it seems like a middle-aged burgher happy with the status quo. Experimentation is elsewhere. * * * THE BERLIN WALL It’s more than a tad ironic that Berlin’s most popular tourist attraction is one that no longer exists. For 28 years, the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Cold War, divided not only the city but the world. Construction began shortly after midnight of 13 August 1961, when East German soldiers rolled out miles of barbed wire that would soon be replaced with prefab concrete slabs.

Return to beginning of chapter THE 1950S The economic vision of Bavarian-born (from Fürth), cigar-puffing Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) unleashed West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder. Between 1951 and 1961 the economy averaged an annual growth rate of 8%. * * * For an informative overview of the Berlin Wall, see www.berlin.de/mauer on the Berlin city website. * * * Erhard was economic minister and later vice-chancellor in Konrad Adenauer’s government. His policies encouraged investment and boosted economic activity to support West Germany’s system of welfare-state capitalism. He helped create the European Coal and Steel Community to regulate coal and steel production with France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries, and in 1958 West Germany joined the European Economic Community (the EU today).

Economic differences widened into military ones when West Germany joined NATO in 1955 and East Germany moved into the fold of the Warsaw Pact, where it remained from 1956 to 1990. Return to beginning of chapter THE WALL The exodus of young, well-educated and employed East German refugees seeking a better fortune in West Germany strained the troubled GDR economy so much that the GDR government – with Soviet consent – built a wall to keep them in. The Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s most potent symbol, went up between East and West Berlin on the night of 12 August 1961. The inner-German border was fenced off and mined. * * * Berlin and the Wall by Ann Tusa is a saga about the events, trials and triumphs of the Cold War, the building of the Wall and its effects on the people and the city of Berlin


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Yet Reagan was not simply more religious than JFK had been or more overtly so. He was more conciliatory than Kennedy had allowed himself to be when the Berlin Wall was all of a year old. “We in the West are ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down the barriers that separate people, to create a safer, freer world,” Reagan said, though the conciliation was to be on American terms, of course. After November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War effectively evaporated, Reagan’s 1987 speech would be remembered not for the call to create a safer, freer world in cooperation with the Soviet East—and still less for its call to make Berlin the air transportation hub of Europe.

When China joined the ranks of the communist countries in 1949, the perfection of the East as a despotic foil to the democratic and anticommunist West was complete.11 After many tribulations, the West triumphed in November 1989. It did not so much defeat as overtake the communist East. The bedraggled, denim-clad citizens of East Germany voyaged westward over the Berlin Wall. The force was no longer there to restrain them. They, too, wanted to be in and of the West, as did many of their counterparts in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was austerely alone in victory, far better positioned than it had been in 1918 or 1945. In 1918 and 1945, the enemies of the West had not been subdued.

In 1954, Herbert Hoover found his way to Berlin and to the Athenian and imperiled liberty of its residents: “Thanks to the spirit and courage of men under the leadership of two great mayors you can, like the men of ancient Athens, hold your heads high and say: ‘I am a Berliner,’” this unbeliever in the NATO alliance declared. The Berlin Wall matched American rhetoric of a Germany trapped between East and West, communism and capitalism, walled-in authoritarianism and unwalled freedom. These contrasting tensions were obviously worsening in 1962 and early 1963.39 And so, Kennedy scheduled a trip to West Berlin, “the testicles of the West,” as Nikita Khrushchev loved calling the city.


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

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

.  Introduction ‘The฀attack฀must฀have฀all฀the฀shocking฀senselessness฀ of฀gratuitous฀blasphemy.’ (Vladimir฀the฀diplomat,฀in฀฀ Joseph฀Conrad,฀The฀Secret฀Agent) The฀Berlin฀Wall฀and฀the฀Twin฀Towers Two฀dramatic฀events฀of฀the฀last฀twenty฀years฀share฀a฀pair฀of฀iconic฀ numbers.฀On฀/,฀the฀World฀Trade฀Center฀towers฀were฀rammed฀ by฀planes฀hijacked฀by฀terrorists.฀On฀/,฀a฀dozen฀years฀previously,฀ the฀Berlin฀Wall฀faced฀a฀different฀kind฀of฀assault.฀ The฀Berlin฀Wall฀did฀not฀fall;฀it฀was฀destroyed฀physically฀by฀the฀ bare฀ hands฀ of฀ angry฀ people฀ from฀ both฀ sides฀ of฀ divided฀ Germany฀ separated฀ by฀ the฀ ugly฀ structure,฀ using฀ very฀ crude฀ equipment.฀ It฀ signalled฀the฀collapse฀of฀the฀last฀empire฀of฀the฀twentieth฀century฀ –฀the฀Communist฀empire฀centred฀in฀Russia.

.฀ The฀ central฀ terror฀ machine฀ was฀ silenced฀ soon฀ after฀ ฀ when฀ Nikita฀ Khrushchev,฀ who฀ had฀ inherited฀ Stalin’s฀ post฀ as฀ general฀ secretary฀ of฀ the฀ Communist฀ Party,฀ told฀ the฀ world฀ how฀ cruel฀ and฀ arbitrary฀ Stalin’s฀rule฀had฀been฀and฀how฀many฀people฀had฀perished,฀most฀of฀ them฀loyal฀citizens฀of฀the฀Soviet฀Union฀and฀a฀large฀proportion฀of฀ them฀Bolsheviks.฀The฀destruction฀of฀the฀Berlin฀Wall฀signalled฀the฀ end,฀ in฀ Europe฀ at฀ least,฀ of฀ that฀ regime.฀ In฀ ฀ the฀ Communist฀ empire฀in฀Eastern฀Europe,฀and฀in฀฀the฀USSR฀itself,฀collapsed.฀ It฀ did฀ so฀ without฀ a฀ shot฀ being฀ fired฀ by฀ its฀ enemies,฀ without฀ the฀ awesome฀ nuclear฀ arsenal฀ on฀ both฀ sides฀ of฀ the฀ Cold฀ War฀ being฀   ฀  alerted,฀ let฀ alone฀ used.฀ The฀ nightmare฀ scenario฀ of฀ the฀ Cold฀ War฀ –฀the฀Dr฀Strangelove฀fantasy฀–฀did฀not฀realise฀itself.

Index Abbasid฀caliphate฀ Abdullah,฀King฀of฀Jordan฀ Abdullah,฀Shaikh฀ Abu฀Bakr,฀Caliph฀– Abu฀Ghraib฀ Adams,฀Gerry฀ Afghanistan and฀Bin฀Laden฀–,฀– Clinton’s฀bombing฀ mujahideen฀ Soviet฀intervention฀–,฀,฀ – Taliban฀regime฀ Africa Pan-African฀Movement฀ see฀also฀individual฀countries฀by฀ name Ahmad,฀Sir฀Syed฀,฀ al-Qaeda on฀/฀ and฀anarchism฀ background฀– beliefs฀see฀Global฀Islamism and฀Kashmir฀ nature฀of฀terrorism฀– structure฀– tactics฀– typical฀statements฀by฀ view฀of฀the฀conflict฀ worldwide฀terrorist฀activities฀ Alexander฀II,฀Tsar฀of฀Russia฀ Algeria฀ Ali,฀Caliph฀,฀–,฀ Ali,฀Mohammad฀ Ali,฀Shaukat฀ Aligarh฀Muslim฀University฀ Alliance฀for฀Freedom฀for฀Latin฀ America฀ anarchism฀,฀– Anderson,฀Benedict฀ Angola฀ Angry฀Brigade฀ Annan,฀Kofi฀ anti-Semitism฀,฀,฀– Anushilan฀ Arab฀countries Arabia฀as฀imaginary฀nation฀– history฀–   political฀systems฀ reasons฀for฀hostility฀to฀Israel฀ – and฀reform/modernity฀– relations฀with฀Israel฀– relative฀well-being฀– and฀Sykes–Picot฀Agreement฀ ()฀– see฀also฀individual฀countries฀by฀ name Arafat,฀Yasser฀ Army฀of฀the฀Faithful฀see฀Lashkar-eToiba Arnett,฀Peter฀– Asian฀crisis฀()฀ Atatürk,฀Kemal฀,฀ Azad,฀Maulana฀Abul฀Kalam฀ Baader-Meinhof฀Group฀ Ba’ath฀Party:฀origins฀and฀nature฀ Bakunin,฀Mikhael฀ Balfour,฀Arthur฀,฀ Balfour฀Declaration฀()฀–,฀ Balkans background฀to฀Yugoslav฀crisis฀,฀  Bin฀Laden฀on฀Bosnia฀ and฀mujahideen฀ NATO฀intervention฀ pre-First฀World฀War฀nationalism฀ ,฀ Yugoslav฀crisis฀,฀ Bangladesh฀,฀,฀–,฀ Barak,฀Ehud฀ Bates,฀Stephen฀ Begin,฀Menachem฀,฀ Bell,฀Daniel฀ Bergen,฀Peter฀– Berlin฀Wall,฀fall฀of฀()฀ Bhutto,฀Zulfikar฀Ali฀ Bible฀,฀ Bin฀Laden฀see฀Laden,฀Osama฀Bin Black฀Hands฀,฀ Blair,฀Tony฀,฀ Bosnia฀,฀,฀,฀ Bradlaugh,฀Chris฀ Britain attitude฀to฀/฀– Bin฀Laden฀on฀,฀ and฀dismemberment฀of฀Ottoman฀ Empire฀–,฀,฀ end฀of฀empire฀ and฀establishment฀of฀Israel฀ multiculturalism฀ reasons฀for฀Muslim฀hostility฀ religious฀discrimination฀– Suez฀crisis฀()฀ war฀against฀terror฀,฀,฀– Buddhism฀ Burgess,฀Guy฀– Burke,฀Edmund฀ Bush,฀George฀W.฀,฀–,฀ Boutros-Ghali,฀Boutros฀ caliphate decline฀and฀abolition฀– history฀–,฀– power฀and฀importance฀–,฀ – Calvin,฀John฀– Cambodia฀ Camp฀David฀Accords฀()฀ capitalism anti-capitalist฀terrorism฀–,฀ – Communism’s฀challenge฀to฀– Marx฀on฀– Catholicism and฀fundamentalism฀ and฀social฀reform฀– Chechnya฀,฀,฀,฀ Cheney,฀Dick฀ Chiang฀Kai฀Shek฀ China฀,฀,฀,฀  ฀  Christianity fifteenth฀century฀ fundamentalism฀,฀ and฀ideology฀–,฀– Islam’s฀relationship฀to฀– and฀modernity฀ and฀philosophy฀– Reformation฀and฀secularism฀ and฀social฀reform฀– see฀also฀Catholicism;฀Puritanism Churchill,฀Winston฀ CIA฀,฀ Clarke,฀Charles฀ Clinton,฀Bill฀,฀,฀ Cold฀War,฀end฀of฀,฀– colonialism฀,฀,฀– Comintern฀see฀Communist฀ International Communism and฀culture฀– heyday฀– as฀ideology฀–,฀– modern฀appeal฀ West’s฀defeat฀of฀– Communist฀International฀ (Comintern)฀,฀ Crone,฀Patricia฀,฀ Curzon,฀Lord฀ Czechoslovakia:฀Prague฀Spring฀()฀  democracy,฀and฀Islam฀ Denmark:฀cartoons฀of฀Muhammad฀ –,฀ Deobandi฀school฀,฀–,฀ Destutt,฀Antoine฀Louis฀Claude,฀ Comte฀de฀Tracy,฀฀ East฀India฀Company฀ East฀Timor฀ education:฀Muslim฀–,฀ Egypt฀,฀,฀,฀ Encounter฀(magazine)฀ Engels,฀Friedrich฀–,฀,฀– ETA฀ Ferdinand,฀Archduke฀ Feuerbach,฀Ludwig฀ First฀World฀War฀–,฀ Florence:฀Renaissance฀ foreign฀affairs,฀modern฀conduct฀of฀ – France and฀dismemberment฀of฀Ottoman฀ Empire฀–,฀ end฀of฀empire฀ Paris฀Commune฀ student฀rebellion฀()฀ Suez฀crisis฀()฀ fundamentalism฀–,฀– Gandhi,฀Mohandas฀,฀,฀ Garfield,฀James฀Abram฀ Gaza฀,฀ gender฀issues฀,฀,฀– Germany฀,฀– Gibson,฀Mel฀ Global฀Islamism and฀anti-Semitism฀– background฀– defeating฀– definition฀ demands฀– evaluation฀–,฀– as฀ideology฀–,฀– and฀Nazism฀ reasons฀for฀appeal฀– globalisation฀–,฀–,฀,฀–,฀ – Goebbels,฀Joseph฀ Grey,฀Lord฀ Guantánamo฀Bay฀,฀ Guevara,฀Che฀ Gulf฀War฀()฀,฀   Habsburg฀Empire:฀fate฀of฀former฀ members฀– Halliday,฀Fred฀,฀ Hamas฀,฀,฀,฀ Hastings,฀Warren฀ Hegel,฀Georg฀Wilhelm฀Friedrich฀ – Hekmatyar,฀Gulbuddin฀ Herzl,฀Theodore฀ Hezbollah฀,฀ Hijaz฀ Hinds,฀Martin฀,฀ Hitler,฀Adolf฀ Hobbes,฀Thomas฀ Holocaust:฀effects฀ homosexuality:฀Western฀attitude฀ Hume,฀David฀,฀ Huntington,฀Samuel฀–,฀ Husayni,฀Amin฀al-,฀Mufti฀of฀ Jerusalem฀ Hussain,฀Hasib฀– Hussein,฀King฀of฀Jordan฀ Husayn,฀Sharif฀of฀Mecca฀–,฀,฀ –,฀ Ibn฀Taymiyya฀ ideology anarchism฀as฀– Communism฀as฀–,฀– Islamism฀as฀–,฀– nationalism฀as฀,฀– nature฀of฀– original฀use฀and฀meaning฀– and฀philosophy฀– and฀religion฀– IMF฀see฀International฀Monetary฀Fund immigration Muslim฀ and฀racism฀ imperialism end฀of฀European฀empires฀– need฀to฀re-examine฀Western฀ see฀also฀colonialism;฀Habsburg฀ Empire;฀Ottoman฀Empire India under฀East฀India฀Company฀ imperial฀government฀structure฀  and฀Kashmir฀– Khalistan฀movement฀ Khilafat฀agitation฀ Maoist฀groups฀in฀ modern฀successes฀ and฀modernity฀,฀– musical฀tradition฀ Muslims฀in฀,฀,฀–,฀ national฀integrity฀ nationalist฀movement฀ and฀Pakistan฀ Parsees฀ Partition฀–,฀ Indian฀Mutiny฀()฀ Indonesia฀,฀,฀,฀ Inquisition฀– International฀Monetary฀Fund฀(IMF)฀ ,฀ International฀Workingmen’s฀ Association฀,฀,฀,฀ Iqbal,฀Muhammad฀–,฀ Iran฀–,฀,฀ Iran,฀Shah฀of฀,฀–,฀– Iran–Iraq฀War฀(–)฀,฀,฀ Iranian฀Revolution฀()฀,฀,฀ –,฀– Iraq current฀state฀– invasion฀of฀()฀ Kuwait฀invasion฀()฀,฀– republic฀declared฀ and฀Sykes–Picot฀Agreement฀ ()฀ Ireland฀,฀– see฀also฀Northern฀Ireland Irgun฀,฀  ฀  Irish฀Republican฀Army฀(IRA)฀–,฀ ,฀,฀– Islam countries฀with฀a฀Muslim฀majority฀  as฀distinct฀from฀Islamism฀,฀ distinction฀between฀Arabs฀and฀ other฀Muslims฀– effects฀of฀loss฀of฀caliphate฀ history฀–,฀– and฀ideology฀ and฀integration฀ local฀variations฀,฀ and฀militancy฀ and฀national฀liberation฀ need฀for฀greater฀study฀of฀culture฀ – need฀to฀integrate฀history฀into฀ world฀history฀– and฀political฀authority฀– reasons฀for฀Muslim฀decline฀– and฀reform/revival฀– relationship฀to฀Judaism฀and฀ Christianity฀– relative฀well-being฀of฀Muslim฀ countries฀– rules฀about฀portraying฀ Muhammad฀ and฀secularism฀– and฀terrorism฀,฀– umma,฀nature฀of฀,฀– Islamism forms฀of฀– see฀also฀Global฀Islamism Israel –฀war฀ attack฀on฀Qana฀– Bin฀Laden฀on฀– function฀for฀Global฀Islamism฀ internal฀divisions฀ Israel–Palestine฀issue฀– and฀Lebanon฀ origins฀–,฀,฀– reasons฀for฀Arab฀hostility฀– relations฀with฀Arab฀countries฀ – and฀Suez฀crisis฀()฀ Jabotinsky,฀Ze’ev฀ Jesus฀Christ฀–,฀– Jews anti-Semitism฀,฀,฀– fundamentalism฀ Islam’s฀relationship฀to฀Judaism฀ – and฀Jesus฀– nationalist฀movement฀in฀Palestine฀  in฀USA฀ see฀also฀Israel jihad:฀definition฀ Jinnah,฀Mohammad฀Ali฀–,฀ Jordan฀,฀ Juste,฀Carsten฀ Jyllands฀Posten฀(newspaper)฀– Kashmir฀,฀,฀– Kautsky,฀Karl฀ Kennedy,฀John฀F.฀ Kenya฀ Khalidi,฀Hashim฀al-฀ Khalistan฀movement฀,฀ Khilafat฀agitation฀ Khmer฀Rouge฀ Khomeini,฀Ayatollah฀Ruholla฀,฀ – Khrushchev,฀Nikita฀,฀ Koestler,฀Arthur฀ Ku฀Klux฀Klan฀ Kuwait:฀Iraqi฀invasion฀(–)฀,฀ – Laden,฀Osama฀Bin abilities฀and฀tactics฀–,฀   and฀Afghanistan฀– consequences฀of฀ideology฀– demands฀– evaluation฀of฀ideology฀–,฀ – as฀face฀of฀al-Qaeda฀ and฀Global฀Islamism’s฀ideology฀ – as฀global฀Muslim฀leader฀–,฀  negotiation฀offer฀ reasons฀for฀start฀of฀conflict฀– view฀of฀the฀conflict฀ Lashkar-e-Toiba฀(Army฀of฀the฀ Faithful)฀ Latin฀America฀–,฀ Lawrence,฀T.E.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Western intelligence agencies shunned few risks, using cutouts, front organizations, leaks, and forgeries, as well as a shrewd balance of denials and semi-denials. But just when the CIA had honed its political warfare skills in Berlin, U.S. intelligence retreated from the disinformation battlefield almost completely. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it did more than block physical movement between the West and the East; it also came to symbolize an ever-sharper division: the West deescalated as the East escalated. The third argument of this book is that the digital revolution fundamentally altered the disinformation game.

Langley analysts pointed out that they observed “rather elaborate progressions in prolonged campaigns.”15 These anti-Western disinformation campaigns were aggressive, fast-paced, and used innovative methods that evolved quickly and in unexpected, frightening ways. One such measure exploited a military exercise known as FALLEX 62. In September 1962, NATO held the first exercise that acted out the assumption that World War III could start with a major Soviet attack on Western Europe. The Berlin Wall had just gone up the previous year. FALLEX 62 was equally highly classified and disconcerting: in the scenario, a medium-sized nuclear device is said to have exploded over a German army airfield, followed by several nuclear strikes against airfields and missile bases in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Turkey.

In the end, the GRU colonel was swayed not by strategic considerations but by the disappointing state of nuclear weapons miniaturization at the time. Penkovsky, who spoke little English, was a daring spy. He worked for the CIA and MI6 for sixteen months, from April 12, 1961, to September 4, 1962.4 The Cold War was at its most freezing then; the Berlin Wall went up in June 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated in the late summer of 1962, pushing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The GRU spy, ambitious to the point of recklessness, passed detailed plans and descriptions of missile launch sites in Cuba to the CIA. Without Penkovsky’s help, the Americans would have struggled to identify Soviet missiles at their launch pads and to track their operational readiness.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

In October 1989, when Mitterrand continued to berate the chancellor, Kohl responded angrily: “It [the single currency] poses a heap of problems for me, my majority is reluctant, the business community doesn’t want it, the time is not right.”37 Berlin Wall Falls; Kohl Increases Resistance to Monetary Union The Berlin Wall, which had separated East and West Germany since 1961, fell unexpectedly on November 9, 1989. A miscommunication that day by an official of East Germany’s ruling party led East Berliners to believe they could start traveling to the West immediately. Thousands gathered at the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, and the guards had no alternative but to let people cross into West Germany. The “heavily armed border” opened “literally overnight.”38 Reunification of the two Germanys had seemed a distant goal.

Chaired by European Commission President Jacques Delors, this new committee made assertive claims about the benefits of a European monetary union but otherwise repeated the Werner Committee’s plan. The Delors Committee completed its report in April 1989, and European leaders agreed to use it as a basis for further action at a summit in Madrid in late June that year. November 9, 1989: The Berlin Wall falls. Although a series of events had undermined the regimes of Eastern Europe, it was ultimately a miscommunication on this day that led many East Germans to rush to a checkpoint in the Berlin Wall, which led to its fall. Later the same month, Chancellor Kohl presented a ten-​point plan for reunification. After Kohl reassured the Americans that the German commitment to NATO would remain steadfast, the reunification received the blessing of US President George H.

Although he was too young to have fought in World War II, he had seen the war’s destruction and had 8   e u r o t r a g e d y suffered great personal loss. He described himself as the last pro-​European chancellor and believed that as memories of the war faded, Germany’s commitment to Europe would diminish. After the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Kohl became the chancellor of German unity, bringing the East and West together. In German politics, he acquired exceptional autonomy and was able to make executive decisions in the manner of American presidents, relying on a small group of close advisers. Riding on his extraordinary authority and invoking the themes of peace and friendship, Kohl came to believe it was his historical role to make a European single currency possible.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

It has been carefully transcribed by the artist from the originals in Berlin, as Goodnight’s commentary reassuringly points out: ‘At President Bush’s request, the names of people killed at the Berlin Wall are written on the dove of peace. These names represent over 900 people who were killed trying to escape to the west.’ The source of the figure is not revealed, but it does not match the 82 names recorded as having been killed at the Berlin wall itself during its twenty-eight years of existence. The sheer scale and effort needed to realize the work are presented with more conviction than its content. ‘The life-size horses weigh seven tons between them and took three and a half years to complete,’ she explains, as if to demonstrate that the achievements of the Bush administration are to be measured quantitatively rather than qualitatively.

According to the helpful gloss, there for the benefit of those of us too literal-minded fully to understand the equine allegory, ‘President Bush’s diplomatic skills enabled the hole in the wall to become so large that all of Eastern Europe was set free from communist rule; the Cold War had ended.’ Rival claims are made by the Ronald Reagan Library in California. Both Reagan and Bush have fragments of the authentic Berlin Wall on show to demonstrate their case for claiming that they personally won the Cold War. Over at the Reagan Library, visitors are invited in semi-biblical language to ‘touch a piece of the Berlin wall He sent crashing down, relive the history He made, and look with Him into the limitless future He dared to dream for us’. For all its celebration of the triumph of America over the evil empire, the Bush Library is set in a landscape glittering with paranoia.

It was still dominated by the smoke-blackened serpentine façade of Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus, a department store and office building from the 1930s that became a base for the Gestapo. The tangle of tramlines and the stone hulks of the buildings whose cliff-like frontages once defined Central Europe’s version of Times Square were still visible. The workers’ riots of 1953 turned the Potsdamer Platz into a battlefield. And finally the building of the Berlin Wall caused the entire area to revert to scrub, inhabited only by wild foxes. What had been the centre of one of Europe’s greatest cities turned into a wasteland at the edge of two provincial backwaters that no longer spoke to each other. The stalemate came to an abrupt end with the reunification of the two Germanys.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Hungary was a country they could visit without a passport, and now, it seemed, they might circumvent the Berlin Wall by escaping westward through the Hungarian-Austrian border. In June and July, tens of thousands drove south for “vacation” in Hungary, with the intention of ditching the cars and then crossing the border on foot. They knew that once they made it to the West German embassy in Vienna, they would get a passport with no questions asked, as well as a free bus ride to the Federal Republic, where they could embark on a new life in freedom. They were no longer condemned to live behind the Berlin Wall.3 It turned out that the Western cameras had misled the would-be refugees.

One of them, the playwright Václav Havel, also coined an ideal for citizens faced with pressures of self-censorship that would have caused people in 1914 to scratch their heads: living in truth. Historians explored everyday life under Communism more directly after 1989, when Brezhnev’s doctrine was scrapped, along with an edifice dividing Germany’s former capital called the “Berlin Wall,” except for a half-kilometer strip meant to edify tourists. The supposedly evident bankruptcy of this repressive system caused some to talk of an “end of history,” because all countries were destined for free-market liberalism. Now Eastern Europe was connected not only to its own interrupted history but also to the West.

The plots of novels and films became predictable, even in those that were most artistically serious. The heroine of the eminent East German author Christa Wolf’s Divided Heaven—written well after Stalin’s death and showing the continuing pull of the genre in East Germany—chooses the socialism of East Berlin over her lover in West Berlin. But it was not her doing alone: the Berlin Wall serves as a plot device resolving political and personal dilemmas that had become inseparable. Yet the protagonist, a healthy, optimistic proletarian, would have left her (bourgeois, indifferent) lover in any case, as she feels the “pull of a great historical movement.” East Germany is the better Germany; what she finds in West Berlin is the absence of any principle or idea worth struggling for, and instead aimless, easy living.


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

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

The session was nearly universally condemned, even by those as astute in foreign policy as Richard Nixon, who declared, “No summit since Yalta has threatened Western interests so much as the two days at Reykjavik.” The following year, 1987, Reykjavik received some acclaim when agreements reached over that weekend were signed in the White House as part of a sweeping arms control treaty. Since then—despite the earth-shattering events of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and end of the Cold War—Reykjavik has mostly been relegated to a footnote in history, something akin to the Glassboro summit of 1967 between U.S. president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin. Specialists have debated the summit’s significance, particularly at four conferences held on its anniversaries, but their debates have largely remained there—among specialists at conferences.

But after the president got official “permission” to do so, he loved saluting the troops. (Ronald Reagan Library) What Time called “the four most famous words of the Reagan presidency” were almost not spoken, owing to opposition from nearly all of Reagan’s aides. But he spoke them anyway, on June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance from the Berlin Wall. Screens had been set up to protect him against any East German sniper. The president called out, “Mr. Gorbachev,” paused, and then repeated the name for emphasis—“Mr. Gorbachev—tear down this Wall!” It had an electrifying effect that day, and was evoked again when the Wall fell two years later.

Gorbachev listened as Honecker channeled Leonid Brezhnev when blaming the country’s unrest on “the unbridled defamation campaign that is being internationally coordinated against East Germany.” In his own remarks, Gorbachev responded to Reagan’s speech on the other side of the Wall. Someone, Gorbachev remarked, had previously said, “Let the U.S.S.R. get rid of the Berlin Wall, then we’ll believe in its peaceful intentions,” which was a fair summary of Reagan’s main message. But Gorbachev took exception to that someone since “the postwar reality has insured peace on the continent.” While rebuking Reagan and seeming amorous toward Honecker, Gorbachev also signaled the opposite.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

But Chancellor Kohl did not use his “authority, political weight and influence” in the way Gorbachev wanted; a mere seventeen days after their conversation, he began a process that ended with West Germany swallowing East Germany the following fall. Long before then, all the other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had collapsed. In Poland, even before the Berlin Wall fell, the anti-Communist movement, Solidarity, triumphed in June 1989 elections, and a non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, took power in August. In Hungary, the Communist party endorsed a multiparty political system in June. In Bulgaria, the grizzled party boss, Todor Zhivkov, fell on the same day as the Berlin Wall (although he was replaced by a Communist reformer). In Czechoslovakia, the president, by the end of the year, was playwright and longtime dissident Václav Havel.

CHAPTER 12 1989: TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE AT HOME NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE WAS a pivotal year in the history of Communism and of the whole twentieth century. The liberation of Eastern Europe—a “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia, remarkably smooth transitions in Poland and Hungary, bloody in Romania—and the fall of the Berlin Wall led with startling swiftness to the unification of Germany and its accession to NATO the next year. By then, if not before, most observers would agree, the cold war was really over. But the epochal events of 1989 abroad would not have occurred without the domestic developments that preceded and accompanied them in the Soviet Union.

That’s all I have to say.”83 After this public confession, Yeltsin fell ill for two weeks and canceled several public appearances, while aides informed him that his popularity rating had dropped sharply.84 Well might Gorbachev have felt, as the end of the year approached, that at least the Yeltsin threat had receded. But not for long. CHAPTER 13 1989: TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE ABROAD IN THE LONG RUN, THE FALL of the Berlin Wall was inevitable. How could Germans remain forever separated when they were so attached (occasionally too attached) to their shared nationhood? But when and how the wall fell was not predictable. It did not fall because in the summer of 1987 President Reagan declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”


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Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah. We were, of course, dead wrong. The global power and influence of Anglo-American language and culture in the broadest sense was about to hit another new high. When the Cold War ended, after the Berlin Wall came down and once the internet took off in the 1990s, there was an astonishing new landscape to explore and describe. Sometimes during these years the spread of Anglo-American culture seemed like the fulfilment of the ambition expressed by America’s Founding Fathers to play a role ‘among the Powers of the Earth’ derived, as they put it, from ‘the Laws of Nature’.

French and European fury against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ was only intensified by the realisation that, among the new post-war generation of baby boomers, Anglo-American culture was exceedingly desirable. It was probably a futile protest; today it has been calculated that about one-twentieth of day-to-day French vocabulary is composed of anglicismes. For example, a McDonald’s hamburger is simply a ‘McD’. After the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Cold War moved into a more stable phase, while the United States (but not Britain) fought the threat of Communism in South-East Asia. Britain, meanwhile, had divested itself of almost all its colonial possessions, letting the ‘winds of change’ blow through Africa.

By the late 1970s the Soviet and American stand-off was nearing its final phase, occasionally referred to as the ‘second Cold War’. Now the Anglo-American hegemony-often hotly disputed by anti-American liberals – was wholly underpinned by rampant capitalism, represented by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in Britain and Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency in the United States. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 this new global culture would morph into the worldwide cultural revolution that would become Globish. The eerie decade that preceded the crisis of 2001 was the first in a century in which the world was no longer in the shadow of war. Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the End of History’. It was during this unreal and optimistic hiatus that the little term coined by Jean-Paul Nerrière in 1995, ‘Globish’ – simple, inelegant and almost universal-first gained currency.


The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Soviet material from the Russian vaults is also plentiful even though a lot of it is accessible only in foreign libraries. Diaries and transcripts of meetings and conversations sharpen our picture of a momentous period in world politics. It has become possible, for instance, to trace exactly how Ronald Reagan’s 1987 ‘Berlin Wall’ speech underwent its successive revisions or how Soviet leaders amended their words before finalizing the Party Central Committee minutes.1 The records have to be handled with some caution, not least because politicians filtered what they allowed to be recorded. But it is better to have more archives than fewer.

The Soviet Army retained a menacing presence close to West Germany’s eastern border, and Kohl appreciated the need to hold close to Reagan. He appreciated the American President’s political intuition: ‘He was one of the few visiting statesmen and politicians who sensed physically what it is to divide a nation. When we were here in Berlin and we stood on the Berlin Wall, and he saw this, he compared it to one dividing the human body.’47 A kind of friendship grew between them: ‘It was such a personal relationship. It’s that simple. We had no problems with protocol. We would call each other up from time to time and whenever we would see each other again, it wasn’t a big “to do”.’48 Gorbachëv bided his time about West Germany and welcomed Mitterrand to Moscow in late November 1988.

Gorbachëv retorted that Ceauşescu had courted a financial linkage with the West and now, through no fault of the USSR, was suffering the consequences. While inviting him to mend the old ties with Moscow, he had no illusions about the chances of success with a leader of Ceauşescu’s vanity and arrogance.24 At the Political Consultative Committee, in the heart of East Berlin, Gorbachëv contended that the Berlin Wall required discussion among communist leaderships. Honecker took this badly. He regarded any hint about easing the strict division between the two Germanies with horror.25 Apparently Gorbachëv desired agreement on how to deal with Reagan’s scheduled visit to West Berlin in June 1987. The White House was aspiring to make a big impact: the West Germans had told the French as early as March that the President would give a big speech in front of the Brandenburg Gates and call for the free passage of people and ideas between the two halves of Europe.26 Whether Gorbachëv’s suggestion came from Soviet intelligence or his own intuition is not known.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

The postwar liberalization of trade helped open up new low-cost sources of supply; coupled with the development of new financial institutions and products (made possible in part by silicon-based technologies), it facilitated the forward thrust toward global market capitalism even during the years of the cold war. In the following quarter century, the embrace of free-market capitalism helped bring inflation to quiescence and interest rates to single digits globally. The defining moment for the world's economies was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, revealing a state of economic ruin behind the iron curtain far beyond the expectations of the most knowledgeable Western economists. Central planning was exposed as an unredeemable failure; coupled with and supported by the growing disillusionment over the interventionist economic policies of the Western democracies, market capitalism began quietly to displace those policies in much of the world.

Normally such differences would get aired and resolved behind the scenes. I'd been looking toward building the same collaborative relationship with the White House that I'd seen during the Ford administration and that I knew had existed at times between Reagan and Paul Volcker. It was not to be. Great things happened on George Bush's watch: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war, a clear victory in the Persian Gulf, and the negotiation of the NAFTA agreement to free North American trade. But the economy was his Achilles' heel, and as a result we ended up with a terrible relationship. 113 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright.

* ft*™M C i * - I HNEBSSr* N *i I A ^ ^ ^ ^ _ J ^bA^A ^^U • ^ ^ • • t I - - fc rai m m • - - ^ ^ " E_"^'iTi:". -~ • • = - " More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. History took an astonishing turn when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. But even more amazing to me in the following days was the economic ruin exposed by the fall of the wall. By the time Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev made his third visit to the United States during the following spring, the Soviet Union itself had begun to disintegrate. He is shown below with President George H.


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Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova

anti-communist, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, megaproject, Skype

However, this border region hums with an especially siren-like tone, and distinguishes itself for three reasons. One, because of unfinished business from the Cold War; two, because it is one of Europe’s great wildernesses; three, because it has been a continental confluence ever since there have been continents. My generation in Eastern Europe came of age just as the Berlin Wall came down. This border shadowed my Bulgarian childhood during the last era of ‘Socialism with a human face’, as the unfortunate slogan had it. So it was natural that a journey along the boundary quickly became fairly involving for me. Once near a border, it is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something.

If we divide political borders into soft and hard, the border of this book has half a century of Cold War hardness: Bulgaria to the north versus Greece and Turkey to the south marked the cut-off line between the Warsaw Pact countries of the Soviet bloc and NATO member states in the Western sphere of influence. In short, it was Europe’s southernmost Iron Curtain, a forested Berlin Wall darkened by the armies of three countries. It was deadly, and it remains prickly with dread to this day. Now the Greek–Bulgarian border is softened by shared membership of the European Union. The Turkish–Bulgarian and Turkish–Greek borders have lost their old hardness but acquired a new one: its symptom is the new wire walls erected to stem the human flow from the Middle East.

Why did a German man have to fly over the border in a hot-air balloon, as the apocryphal story went, unless it was actually true (it was)? Because we were living in an open-air prison. A feeling of melancholy revolt began to germinate. Six years later, ‘the sandals’ didn’t have to come all this way to escape because the Berlin Wall fell. Our family crossed the border – though not that one, but some other imaginary border over the Pacific, on the way to a new life in New Zealand, a place defined by beaches of a different kind. It was summer again when I arrived, thirty years later. At Burgas airport, vineyards lined the landing strip and the air smelled of petrol and imminent sex.


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

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

In terms of its own values of freedom, Europe would be far better off without the EU. There are parallels here with the Berlin Wall. When the Wall fell in 1989, there were widespread celebrations. Yet many on the Left were fearful of what would follow, warning that this could only benefit the political Right. Some of us insisted, however, that whatever the short-term turmoil and trouble it unleashed, the Wall had to go if there was to be any hope of European progress and unity. In that sense, the EU now looks rather like a Berlin Wall for the twenty-first century. The anti-EU movement may well be dominated today by those on the Right (that, as suggested above, is largely the pro-EU Left’s own doing).

In the UK and Europe, a Left that was losing touch with the working class and turning on its popular base would help pioneer the displacement of politics into the undemocratic world of Euro courts and commissions. Some forty-five years after the Second World War, Western capitalist democracy arguably reached its highest point of historical supremacy with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the rival Soviet bloc. Yet even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was little evidence of any renewed faith in democracy among the rulers of the Western world. In 1989 American author Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis was hailed as a statement of the historic triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet there was little real triumphalism in Fukuyama’s argument.

What happened in the forty years between to explain this change? The shorthand version of what happened is that the Left in the UK and across Europe lost the political war at home, and so sought refuge in the EU. The defeat of the powerful trade union movement in the 1980s, most notably in the 1984–5 miners’ strike, was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That not only destroyed Stalinism, but also dealt a heavy blow to all those on the Left whose politics rested on a paler version of Soviet-style state socialism. Finding it harder to win an argument or connect with a working-class constituency in the UK, the Left seized upon the peaceful pastures of Europe’s courts and commissions as a more fruitful field to work in.


On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky

Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, complexity theory, dark matter, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, language acquisition, launch on warning, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Although this course is misleading for the reasons mentioned, I will nevertheless illustrate the general pattern with a few current examples. Given the consistency, contemporary examples are rarely hard to find. We are meeting in November 1999, a month that happens to be the tenth anniversary of several important events. One was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which effectively brought the Soviet system to an end. A second was the final large-scale massacre in El Salvador, carried out by US terrorist forces called “the army of El Salvador” – organized, armed, and trained by the reigning superpower, which has long controlled the region in essentially this manner.

There is also much more to say about the performance of the secular priesthood throughout these awful years and until today. The record has been reviewed in some detail in print, with the usual fate of “unpopular ideas.” There is perhaps little point in reviewing it again, and time is short, so let me turn to the second anniversary: the fall of the Berlin Wall. This too is a rich topic, one that has received a great deal of attention on the tenth anniversary, unlike the destruction of Central America by US terror. Let us consider some of the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet dungeon that largely escaped attention – in the West, not among the traditional victims.

The openness does not matter much: the press, and intellectuals generally, commonly adhere to the 172 The secular priesthood and the perils of democracy “general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention” what they reveal. But the information is there, for those who choose to know. I will mention a few recent examples to give the flavor. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, US global strategy shifted in an instructive way. It is called “deterrence strategy,” because the US only “deters” others, and never attacks. This is an instance of another historical universal, or close to it: in a military conflict, each side is fighting in self-defense, and it is an important task of the secular priesthood, on all sides, to uphold that banner vigorously.


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

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

But the multiplier effect these forces create and the velocity with which they move make this phenomenon qualitatively different from anything that has come before. Globalization, like capitalism, is powered by the individual impulses of billions of people. It is not the result of someone’s economic reform plan, and it can’t be reversed by decree. In recent years, we’ve been seduced by an argument that goes something like this: It isn’t simply the Berlin Wall that has fallen; globalization’s relentless progress is ripping down all kinds of walls. All that movement across borders will eventually strip nation-states of their power, because governments will never be able to manage the international commercial, political, social, and environmental challenges that globalization creates.

-endorsed liberal economic theories, known collectively as the Washington Consensus.a The results speak for themselves. Between 1980 and 2002, world trade more than tripled. The costs of doing business—especially in transportation and communications—fell sharply. Many protectionist barriers, like tariffs and import quotas, went the way of the Berlin Wall. Tariff rates (as a percentage of total import costs) were halved during this period in America, were more than halved in Europe, and fell by 80 percent in Canada. Following the 1948 inception of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), eight rounds of talks helped create the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

Before Margaret Thatcher privatized a long list of large companies, British Airways, British Gas, British Steel, British Telecom, and British Petroleum, as well as large shipbuilders, regional water and electricity companies, airport operators, parts of the nuclear and coal industries, and even Rolls-Royce were all publicly owned. Even Thatcher would not privatize Britain’s National Health Service, however, which remains Europe’s largest employer with more than 1.5 million names on the payroll. Mercantilism Had the fall of the Berlin Wall truly marked the final triumph of free-market democracy, the term state capitalism might have quietly passed from the scene. But these words have now taken on a distinctly new meaning, one that will become enormously important for international politics and the global economy over the next ten years.


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The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

And when the other nation is as large and powerful as Russia, this likelihood raises the prospect of determined interference. Such interference would create dangerous turmoil as NATO and the EU began expanding eastward in the aftermath of the Cold War. Celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. * * * FOURTEEN * * * ECHOES ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 9, 1989, enormous crowds began surging toward official crossings on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Having received orders not to shoot, twenty-five-year veteran border guard Harald Jäger was running out of options. Bullhorns bellowed warnings that it was not, as a televised statement had said an hour earlier, “possible . . . to go through the border.”

The treaty heaped humiliations on Germany after World War I, with no clear end in sight, and created the economic and political conditions that led to World War II. Having improbably abandoned communism for democracy and capitalism in a near-bloodless revolution, Russians were, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, feeling similarly humiliated and threatened by an unexpected Western military advance toward their borders.45 The European Union, in contrast to NATO, did have the capacity to provide a “Marshall Plan” for the East but was unwilling. The EU’s focus was on deepening economic and political integration within its existing boundaries.

The combined separatist territories, under effective Russian control, now form a valuable protective arc along Russia’s western and southwestern border.62 Just as Stalin strengthened the Soviet Union’s buffer zone in response to the Marshall Plan, which he expected Washington to supplement with military force, Putin has strengthened Russia’s buffer zone in response to NATO expansion. IN 2016, ON THE OCCASION of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Cold War, the German daily Bild interviewed Vladimir Putin. What, he was asked, had gone wrong in relations between Russia and the West? “Everything,” Putin responded. “[T]he Berlin Wall fell, but invisible walls were moved to the East of Europe.” Moscow, he insisted, had been promised that “NATO would not expand eastwards,” a reference to alleged commitments from then-NATO secretary general Manfred Wörner and U.S. secretary of state James Baker. But NATO and the United States, Putin said, decided that they alone would “sit on the throne in Europe.”


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Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Caryatids from a Venetian edition of Vitruvius, 1511 Brothel in Amsterdam The fetishisation of architecture appears in these stories as a kind of metaphor for the modern condition of reification, but there are cases in which this metaphor is brought to startling life. In 1979 a woman called Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer married the Berlin Wall, hence her bizarre surname – ‘Berlin Wall’ in German. Mrs Berliner-Mauer is not alone in her tastes, but a vocal member of a group of self-defined ‘Objectum Sexuals’, established by a woman named Erika Eiffel, who is married to . . . well, you can probably guess. The Objectum Sexuals are united by their shared attraction to inorganic objects, especially large architectural structures, although Mrs Berliner-Mauer explains, ‘I also find [that] other manufactured things look good, [such] as bridges, fences, railroad tracks, gates . . .

Motionless stone may seem the anaphrodisiac opposite of living flesh, but in this chapter I’ll reveal the secret sex life of buildings, their capacity to enflame and arouse. It’s a story about houses made for lovers, structures that thwart love and people who love buildings themselves. Although some of the characters that populate this story – like the woman who married the Berlin Wall – may seem extreme cases, the fact is that our sex lives mostly take place in architectural surroundings. So what do buildings do to our libidos? Before I try to answer that question, let’s go back to the scene I described above: the sun-drenched beach, the celebrity corpse and, most important of all, the cliff-top villa.

This behaviour, the reductio ad absurdum of fetishism, may seem the province of damaged libidos, but it is merely an extreme consequence of the more general tendency identified by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Pyramus and Thisbe transfer their love to the wall that stands between them, a wall that is for them animated and responsive, they are entering into the Faustian bargain of reification, which animates the world but stills the soul. Mrs Berliner-Mauer is an extreme case, but the Berlin Wall – despite the fact that it cruelly separated many real lovers – had a broader aphrodisiac appeal, as noted by David Bowie in his song ‘“Heroes”’. At first listen it may seem that Bowie is singing about two heroic lovers divided by the Iron Curtain. But listen more closely (and note the quotation marks around the title): he actually describes a pair standing together on one side of the wall, kissing as they imagine the barrier as an eternal, immutable structure, and the possibility of beating the ‘shame’ on the other side, ‘for ever and ever’.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

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

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

In the short term, too, history is being made. The Internet, effectively non-existent 20 years ago, linked 1 billion people by 2005, 2 billion people by 2010 and 3 billion people by 2015. Now, over half of humanity is online.3 China has erupted from autarky to become the world’s biggest exporter and economy. India is close behind. The Berlin Wall is gone, and the clash of economic ideologies that defined the second half of the twentieth century is gone with it. All this feels like old news when set against the headlines since the turn of the new millennium: 9/11; devastating tsunamis and hurricanes; a global financial crisis that struck dumb the world’s highest-paid brains; a nuclear meltdown in hyper-safe Japan; suicide bombings in the heart of Paris, City of Love; riots over inequality—and happier events like the explosion of mobile and social media, cracking the human genome, the advent of 3D printing, the breaking of long-standing taboos such as gay marriage, the detection of gravitational waves and the discovery of Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.

Part I lays out the big, hard facts of the age, and rebuts the loose and often irresponsible rhetoric that pervades today’s public discourse. We step back and make clear the connective and developmental forces that defined the Renaissance of five hundred years ago and which, over the past quarter-century, have completely remade the world we live in now. Columbus’s voyages of discovery, the fall of the Berlin Wall—both events highlighted the breakdown of long-standing barriers of ignorance and myth, and the opening of fresh, planet-wide systems of political and economic exchange. The Gutenberg press, the Internet—both shifted the whole of human communication to a new normal: information abundance, cheap distribution, radical variety and wide participation.

At about the same time: England and France ended their Hundred Years War, a violent disruption to daily life that had dragged on since 1337; Constantinople, the ancient Roman capital that had guarded Europe’s eastern frontier for over 1,100 years, finally fell to the new gunpowder cannons of the Ottoman Empire; and the warring Italian powers—Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples and the Papal States—signed into being the Italic League, a mutual nonaggression pact that allowed the whole peninsula to demobilize and invest its energies into peacetime pursuits.12 For similar reasons, we mark 1990 as the approximate start date for the New Renaissance. In the span of just a few years: the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, China rejoined the world economy and the commercial Internet lit up. Suddenly, the world felt quite different. As we will see in Part I, the hard data shows that this period was different. We loosely bookend the last Renaissance at about 1550. We must follow the evolution of ideas and events for however long it takes to clarify their meaning in the big picture.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

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

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

Although these reforms were aimed at reversing the bureaucratic structure that had become a major constraint to economic progress, now they are often seen as important catalysts in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and, as such, the end of the Cold War and the start of the modern era of globalisation. In the summer of 1989, just a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, as the pressures on the Eastern European communist states intensified, Francis Fukuyama, a US State Department official, wrote a paper titled ‘The End of History’ where he argued, ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’4 The paper seemed to capture the zeitgeist.

Following the landmark 1978 Chinese reforms that started the ‘household responsibility system’ in the countryside, giving some farmers ownership of their products for the first time, the first ‘special economic zone’ was formed in Shenzhen in 1980. This concept allowed for the introduction and experimentation of more flexible market policies. Although the reforms were slow and not without controversy, by 1984 it became permissible to form individual enterprises with fewer than eight people and, by 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first stock markets were opened in Shenzhen and Shanghai. The broadening reach of market capitalism seemed assured. The changes of the times brought with them many investment opportunities and a more interconnected world, sparking an optimism that infected stock markets. In 1985, during my first year at work, the Dow Jones stock index in the US rallied by just over 27%, the strongest single year since 1975 (the year of recovery from the crash that followed the oil crisis and deep recession of 1973/1974).

Companies in public ownership in the UK accounted for 12% of GDP in 1979 but only about 2% by 1997.6 By the mid-1990s the trend for privatisation had spread to the rest of Europe, even reaching Socialist-led governments such as that of Lionel Jospin in France, which launched a $7.1 billion initial offering of France Telecom in 1997 and made a $10.4 billion secondary offering a year later (as the fervor for telecom companies accelerated around the expanding technology bubble). The secular trend was punctuated temporarily by a (sharp but short-lived) crash in 1987 before lower interest rates and a continuation of economic growth pushed equities to all-time highs. The continuation of the re-rating of equities was spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and, soon after, the unravelling of the Soviet Bloc. The Dax, the main German stock market index, surged by 30% between October 1989 and July 1990. As a consequence, a more integrated global economy emerged in the 1990s. Throughout this period, equity markets enjoyed a decline in the discount rate; not only did interest rates stay low as a result of the purging of global high inflation but also the end of the Cold War helped push the equity risk premium down further (the required hurdle rate for investing in risky assets compared with low-risk bonds).


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

The rocky relations between Paris and Berlin in recent years, however, had left Europe adrift, struggling to cope with the repercussions of the global financial crisis and the resurgence of big-power competition. “I knew this was the key question of our times,” Macron said, describing the state of the world he faced after his election in May 2017. “Nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I realized we were at a new inflection point with the rise of China, the return of an aggressive Russia, and the retreat of America from global leadership. So where is Europe? Rather than trapped between these superpowers, as a zone to be fought over by others, I believe Europe needs its own renaissance to leap beyond its past and become an autonomous power equal to others.

But the postwar vision of building a United States of Europe transformed the destiny of two embattled neighbors. Over the past seventy years, France has provided the political leadership and Germany the economic dynamism that have driven Europe’s remarkable resurrection. Since Germany’s unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, however, that delicate balance of power has shifted. As wartime memories have faded, Germany’s prosperity has made its people more conscious of their own mercantile interests and less willing to make economic sacrifices for their partners. France’s failure to adapt to the rigors of globalized markets has caused its political stature to diminish relative to Germany, whose power has been magnified by an expanded population from formerly communist East Germany.

Wolfgang Schäuble, who loyally served as Kohl’s chief of staff and later as Merkel’s finance minister before becoming president of the Bundestag, was once asked at a dinner party in Berlin if there was any significant difference in their approach to politics. “Merkel is not emotionally invested in Europe in the same way that Kohl and I were,” he replied. Like Merkel, Macron, who was still a child when the Berlin Wall fell, was also personally removed from the agonizing wars that shaped relations between France and Germany, but he did view de Gaulle and Mitterrand as role models for his presidency. His official photographic portrait showed him with a copy of the general’s memoirs in the background. He liked to recall de Gaulle’s words fifty years earlier when he admonished his ministers: “Never forget that for France there can be no alternative but friendship with Germany.”


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

You can no longer say that everything we do is against the Russians. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. That ended the Cold War as far as any sane person was concerned. In October 1989, a month before, the Bush administration had released a secret national security directive, now public, in which it called for support for our great friend Saddam Hussein and other comparable figures in the Middle East in defense against the Russians. That was October 1989. In March 1990—that’s four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall—the White House had to make its annual presentation to Congress calling for a huge military budget, which was the same as in all earlier years, except for the pretexts.

For those who wish to understand the nature of the Cold War, and a good deal of modern history, there could hardly be a more instructive moment than when the Cold War came to an end. The first question is: What happened to NATO, which was established to protect Europe from the hordes of the slave state, according to doctrine? Answer: with no more Russian hordes, NATO rapidly expanded. After the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany to be unified and to join NATO, a hostile military alliance and the most powerful in history. An astonishing concession in the light of recent history, when Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia several times. Gorbachev believed that Washington had promised him that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East,” meaning to East Berlin, let alone East Germany.

Rather, the threats were “radical nationalism,” meaning intolerable independence. With the clouds lifted, the sun shone through briefly, but has been ignored. With Russian support for Cuba ending, the US stepped up its economic warfare, hoping to move in for the kill. Meanwhile within US domains, matters continued routinely. A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War, six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, armed and trained by the US, and fresh from renewed US training, acting on direct orders of the High Command. There was little notice, in accord with the Orwellian principle.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

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

THIS BOOK ATTEMPTS to place the Cold War as a global phenomenon within a hundred-year perspective. It begins in the 1890s, with the first global capitalist crisis, the radicalization of the European labor movement, and the expansion of the United States and Russia as transcontinental empires. It ends around 1990, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the United States finally emerging as a true global hegemon. In taking a hundred-year perspective on the Cold War my purpose is not to subsume other seminal events—world wars, colonial collapse, economic and technological change, environmental degradation—into one neat framework.

“I never got out of the car,” he remembered later, “but I made a full tour and saw what the city was like.”13 On 13 August 1961, barbed wire started to go up along the dividing line separating the two parts of Berlin. The subway tunnels were quickly blocked off. The East German police shot at those who dared to cross. The city of Berlin had again become a victim of the Cold War. And this time its division seemed permanent. But erecting the Berlin Wall signaled East Bloc weakness, not strength. The people of Berlin resisted as best they could. “There was this one street we used to go to,” one of them remembers, “which was split down the middle by the wall. The street was in the west but the houses were in the east. The soldiers bricked up the front doors but people jumped out of the windows.

France’s de Gaulle, with characteristic smugness after France’s own disasters in Indochina, referred to the war as a Vietnamese “national resistance” against the United States, and US escalations as “illusions” that provoked China and the Soviet Union and were “condemned by a large number of the peoples of Europe, Africa, Latin America and is more and more threatening to world peace.”27 In terms of the global Cold War, the US involvement in Indochina provided opportunities for the Soviet Union to reassert itself as the universal alternative to American domination and capitalist exploitation. From the Hungarian uprising to the Berlin Wall and the Congo crises, the Soviet Union seemed to fall behind. Challenged by US power, as well as by dissatisfaction in eastern Europe, the break with China, and the creation of the Third World, the Soviets and their system appeared to be out of tune with the way the world was turning. Vietnam gave them a chance to gain strength.


pages: 405 words: 109,114

Unfinished Business by Tamim Bayoumi

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

The Maastricht Treaty that laid out the road to monetary union was a finely honed compromise that papered over these tensions rather than resolving them. This reflected several dynamics. First, the Treaty was a rushed job that reflected the political imperatives coming from the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 reunification of Germany. The single currency was created as a defensive reaction to German reunification rather than as a positive affirmation of European integration. Reflecting this speed, the final treaty closely followed the plan created by the earlier Delors Committee that had been dominated by European central bankers.

As one historian of the process has put it, “the outcome looked more like an extension of the principle of international monetary cooperation and coordination—which is exactly what it was”.32 * * * The Maastricht Treaty It was the unanticipated collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe later in 1989 that triggered a rapid push for monetary union that embraced the only plan readily available, the one in the Delors Report. On November 28, 1989, just three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Kohl presented a ten-point plan for German unity to the Bundestag without consulting his allies. Two days later, President Mitterrand told German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher that Germany was now a “brake” on European integration and that unless Germany agreed to serious negotiations on a single currency by the end of 1990 it risked a revival of the pre-1913 “triple alliance” between France, Britain, and the Soviet Union.33 Faced with the prospect to diplomatic isolation, Chancellor Kohl agreed to initiate an intergovernmental conference on monetary union at the Strasbourg summit of European leaders on December 8, 1990, just before Mitterrand’s deadline expired.

In the end, supported by a range of special measures and generous statistical interpretations, all of the potential entrants were admitted into monetary union starting on January 1, 1999. * * * The Flawed Single Currency The drive to create a single European currency unexpectedly succeeded largely due to a dose of sheer luck and two underlying dynamics. The good luck was the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall that created a need to bind a unified Germany more fully to the rest of the European Union, an imperative used to create the single currency. One dynamic was the understanding between Mitterrand and Kohl on the need for progress on greater European monetary integration that allowed crucial decisions to be made without the process getting bogged down in bureaucratic niceties.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Because economics is driven by both secular trends and cyclical patterns, we need to start by looking at both sets of forces separately and then consider how they interact. Only in this way can we properly understand why recent events happened and where they may lead. CHAPTER FOUR Annus Mirabilis Why did I free Nelson Mandela in February 1990? Because of the Berlin Wall. Once Communism collapsed in 1989, I felt sure that the ANC would abandon its revolutionary aspirations. This meant we had a chance to negotiate a peaceful end to Apartheid.1 —F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, 1989-94 You ask me why India broke out of the Hindu rate of growth in 1991.

Five vast and irreversible changes transformed the world in the two decades before the crisis, starting in the pivotal year of the late twentieth century—the Annus Mirabilis of 1989. The reason for choosing this starting point will be obvious from the first of these transformations. One, the seventy-year experiment with communism came to an end in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was demolished. Even more important than the physical break-up of the Soviet bloc was the ideological collapse of Marxism as a political doctrine and of central planning as an idea for organizing economic activity without markets. From 1989 onward, all nations, regardless of their political institutions, their stage of development, or their local traditions, were forced to acknowledge private property, the profit motive, and the voluntary exchange of goods and services through competitive markets as the only plausible basis for economic life.

The World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century had consumed or directly destroyed much of the physical wealth created by three successive generations. As a result, each of these generations was forced to save a large share of its income to invest in the reconstruction of houses, factories, and physical infrastructure that their parents had destroyed. The postwar baby boom generation suffered no such depredations—and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall implied that no such disaster was going to occur in the near future. Even localized wars became far less likely after the end of proxy conflicts in Africa and southeast Asia between the United States and Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the declining value of natural resources and farmland, especially in comparison with the products of technology and intellectual property, reduced the economic incentives for territorial expansion.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Before 1989, graffiti appeared only on the west face of the Wall, as soldiers shot on sight anyone approaching the eastern side. In the west, the Berlin Wall became famous for its graffiti and artworks. Large lengths were entirely covered in brightly painted murals and slogans, such as Irgendwann fällt jede Mauer (‘Eventually every wall falls’). The graffiti humanised an utterly inhuman structure that divided families as well as a city. Today, after the collapse of the East German regime, little is left of the Berlin Wall. The longest remaining stretch has been turned into a 1.3-kilometre art gallery, the East Side Gallery, at a cost of some €2.2 million.102 It was opened in 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the Wall’s fall.

But thankfully this was to be the first successful revolution in German history, one achieved without bloodshed. On 4 November, 500,000 marched in East Berlin, converging on Alexanderplatz to demand elections. Within five days the barriers on the Berlin Wall had been raised, and East Berliners were free to walk the streets of West Berlin, many of them for the first time in their lives. In Czechoslovakia, people were given hope by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Prague’s Wenceslas Square became the stage for their Velvet Revolution. At the centre of the city, this kilometre-long square was where people gathered every day after they had finished work, gaining confidence as their numbers grew, sharing information and news (the public media were not to be trusted), reading the many colourful posters plastered on walls, and – the final act of each day – singing the national anthem.

As well as improvements to urban infrastructure, twentieth-century advances in medical treatments helped eradicate some urban diseases (smallpox) and reduced the threat from others (TB, measles). However, new viruses – such as SARS or the H5N1 influenza virus – continue to pose a real threat to the densely populated megacities of the twenty-first century. The Berlin Wall, photographed in 1986 by French artist Thierry Noir at Bethaniendamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg. In 1984, Noir and Christophe Bouchet had painted this stretch of the Wall, becoming the first artists to use it in this way. The City Wall Walls create the spaces in which we live, separating the public from the private, protecting us from the elements and other people.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As applied to economics, a disequilibrium is a position that is unsustainable, meaning that at some point a large change in the pattern of spending and production will take place as the economy moves to a new equilibrium. The word accurately describes the evolution of the world economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I discuss in Chapter 1. Radical uncertainty refers to uncertainty so profound that it is impossible to represent the future in terms of a knowable and exhaustive list of outcomes to which we can attach probabilities. Economists conventionally assume that ‘rational’ people can construct such probabilities.

The story of the crisis By the start of the twenty-first century it seemed that economic prosperity and democracy went hand in hand. Modern capitalism spawned growing prosperity based on growing trade, free markets and competition, and global banks. In 2008 the system collapsed. To understand why the crisis was so big, and came as such a surprise, we should start at the key turning point – the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the time it was thought to represent the end of communism, indeed the end of the appeal of socialism and central planning. For some it was the end of history.16 For most, it represented a victory for free market economics. Contrary to the prediction of Marx, capitalism had displaced communism.

And the savings glut pushed down long-term real interest rates to unprecedentedly low levels.21 In the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, real rates were positive and moved within a range of 3 to 5 per cent. My estimate is that the average ten-year world real interest rate fell steadily from 4 per cent or so around the fall of the Berlin Wall to 1.5 per cent when the crisis hit, and has since fallen further to around zero.22 As the Asian economies grew and grew, the volume of saving placed in the world capital market by their savers, including the Chinese government, rose and rose. So not only did those countries add millions of people to the pool of labour producing goods to be sold around the world, depressing real wages in other countries, they added billions of dollars to the pool of saving seeking an outlet, depressing real rates of interest in the global capital market.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

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

This is the state in which we find ourselves after the financial crisis and the migration crisis, with growing geopolitical tensions, where political liberation after the Arab Spring is no longer associated with stability and democratization, but with chaos and bloodshed. When the iconic image of our time is no longer the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. And that is without mentioning potential looming disaster from climate change. In the past, the great efflorescences in history – those major episodes of openness and progress – petered out because of what has been called Cardwell’s Law, after the technology historian Donald S.

If we are more judgmental when we answer questions in a messy room where researchers have prepared a used plastic cup on the table and rigged the rubbish bin with greasy pizza boxes and dirty tissues, what happens to our values when the whole world feels a bit untidy? 9/11 vs 11/9 I grew up in an era where the defining event was the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Watching old videos of East and West Germans joyfully smashing and hacking the hated wall to pieces, and hugging old friends and strangers, still moves me to tears every time. It summarized all the hopes of that time, the idea that we are all fellow humans, with the same yearning for love and freedom, only separated by walls that will be torn down.

Large majorities of all generations of Americans think 9/11 is the event that had the biggest effect on their country during their lifetime, even those who experienced World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights revolution and the moon landing.14 This affects our worldview just like the fall of the Berlin Wall did, but in the opposite direction. Uncertainty and fear make us more suspicious about the world and outgroups. You would expect uncertainty to result in openness to different perspectives on a problem, but combined with a threat it actually makes us more rigid in our thinking and less tolerant of political opponents.


Strangers on a Bridge by James Donovan

Berlin Wall, Khyber Pass

It was our first meeting. The family graciously presented me with a small crystal paperweight containing an actual piece of rubble from the Berlin Wall and an inscription, signed by the entire family, which reads: This is a piece of the Berlin Wall, from behind which you delivered Frederic on February 10, 1962. The gratitude of the Pryor family will last long after this Wall is a thing of the past. In August, 1962, there was an incident at the Berlin Wall in which an escaping East German youth was shot by VOPOs and left to die within full view of West Berlin spectators. At the height of this crisis a Soviet courier came to the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse and asked for an American Mission officer.

It is from the written records—the original diary expanded from contemporaneous notes, letters to and from Abel and his “family,” the official transcript of court proceedings, and finally, cabled reports to the State Department on my East Berlin mission—that this book has been written. Why did I accept the defense assignment? What was Abel like? Why did our Supreme Court divide 5 to 4 in upholding his conviction? What are the feelings of an American who goes behind the Berlin Wall, without diplomatic status or immunity, to negotiate with the Soviets? Was the final exchange on the Glienicke Bridge in the best national interest of the United States? All these questions, and more, answer themselves in the written records. Sitting alone late one night, back in 1957, I thought of my daily relationship with Abel and wrote in my diary (a little stiffly, I now think): We are two dissimilar men drawn close by fate and American law . . . into a classic case which deserves classic treatment. 1957 * * * “The Abel Spy Trial,” copy of an original lithograph by William Sharp.

After the luncheon I took a cab to the Harvard Club to meet a Washington contact for my final briefing. I gave him my detailed itinerary for the trip, and he informed me when I could expect official instructions in London. He told me that the East Germans were holding a young American Yale student from Michigan named Frederic L. Pryor for trial on espionage charges. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, Pryor had been doing research in East Berlin to complete his doctorate thesis on trade behind the Iron Curtain. He dug too deeply, obtained some material regarded as confidential, and now the East Germans planned a propaganda trial. The prosecutor had publicly announced he would demand the death penalty for the young American.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

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

Kennedy could do so and even stretched further—by assessing both Khrushchev’s problem and offering a distinction that the Soviets might use to solve it. In doing so, however, Kennedy created a new problem that he had not yet fully grasped: whether Berlin, West Germany, and the Western alliance could survive the blow to morale of any perceived retreat from the defense of U.S. rights to all of Berlin.31 The Berlin Wall Shortly after midnight on August 13, Soviet forces ringed Berlin, while the East German police stopped subways and built a barbed wire barrier along the boundary with West Berlin. On August 19, the East Germans started to build a Wall that would divide Berlin for twenty-eight years. Ulbricht had wanted to squeeze the Western allies out and close air corridors so that Berliners, East and West, could not flee.

Reagan’s address was unlike JFK’s impromptu remarks in Berlin; the president had planned, rewritten, and edited the speech with great care.10 The Speech at Westminster Reagan opened with a trip report, leading to his arrival “at home… in your house,” “democracy’s shrine.” One of his two key themes was a shared Anglo-American dedication to the institutions of freedom. He contrasted the homes of liberty with the Berlin Wall, a “dreadful gray gash.” He saluted Solidarity’s resistance to oppression in Poland, “at the center of European civilization.” The president recalled with optimism the Churchillian challenge of the age—the contest between the “not-at-all-fragile flower” of democracy and totalitarianism. He acknowledged great threats, including that of global nuclear war and even extinction.

Bush liked direct, informal outreach to other leaders, with plenty of phone calls and personal notes. The president flattered other leaders with attention. He asked lots of questions. He sought their opinions. I recall being the notetaker for a one-on-one meeting between President Bush and President Francois Mitterrand on the island of St. Martin in mid-December 1989. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and huge questions about the future of Germany and Europe loomed. Bush arranged separate meetings with Thatcher in Bermuda and with Mitterrand to stay in close personal contact—and to nudge them toward U.S. preferences. After a small group meeting with Mitterrand to discuss breaking events in Europe, Bush added the one-on-one with the French president.


pages: 891 words: 220,950

Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy

anti-communist, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, oil shock, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment

In December 1962 Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State (and a considerable Anglophile), famously told the young soldiers at West Point, the premier US military academy, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’.128 (‘Always a conceited ass,’ wrote Macmillan in his diary,129 commenting later to a friend that Acheson was ‘a nice man, but a kind of American caricature of an Englishman, and always overstates his case’.130) Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl did the same some forty-seven years later at a conference to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall when, speaking of his old antagonist Margaret Thatcher in the company of Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Senior, he declared: Thatcher says the European Parliament should have no power because Westminster cannot surrender a single bit of its sovereignty. Her ideas are pre-Churchillian. She thinks the postwar era isn’t over yet.

The day he put that in his diary – 15 September – coincided with the decision as to which minister would go to what bunker if a Third World War came. In addition to designating Butler and Lloyd first and second ‘gravediggers’ should he himself be wiped out, Macmillan, in an especially grim period between the building of what became the Berlin Wall in the early hours of 13 August and the Soviets exploding the biggest H-bomb ever (fifty megatons dropped in the Arctic on the island of Novaia Zemlya on 30 October37), had to put together the final pieces of machinery of government for nuclear war and its aftermath. Only when the Cabinet Office’s nuclear retaliation desk declassified the file forty-five years later did the few surviving ministers of the Macmillan government (the ‘gravediggers’ apart – who were all by then themselves dead) have an inkling of what was in store for them if Berlin had triggered war.

Eventually, a contingency anticipated by the JIC at the beginning of the crisis nullified much – but never all – of the venomous danger in which Berlin placed the world, though not without a final ratcheting up of tension and a dramatic tank-to-tank confrontation at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. That contingency was to become perhaps the most symbolic image of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall, thrown up at great speed in August 1961 and whose dismantling in November 1989 dramatically signified the end (or so it was assumed at the time) of Cold War confrontation. Two and a half years before it was built, the JIC anticipated the wall in a single sentence. ‘They [the Soviets] will probably permit the [GDR] to seal off East Berlin from West Berlin to prevent the refugee exodus.’61 The early Sixties saw a second peak of Cold War hostility (the Suez crisis and the invasion of Hungary by the USSR in the autumn of 1956 were moments of great East–West peril rather than a prolonged period).


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force” led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9—and to the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny. The accolades are deserved; the events, memorable. But alternative perspectives may be revealing. German chancellor Angela Merkel provided such a perspective—unintentionally—when she called on all of us to “use this invaluable gift of freedom . . . to overcome the walls of our time.” One way to follow her good advice would be to dismantle the massive wall, dwarfing the Berlin wall in scale and length, now snaking through Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

After reviewing the record, Carothers concludes that all U.S. leaders have been “schizophrenic”—supporting democracy if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic objectives, thus in Soviet satellites but not in U.S. client states. This perspective is dramatically confirmed by the recent commemoration of the events of November 1989. The fall of the Berlin wall was rightly celebrated, but there was little notice of what happened one week later: on November 16, in El Salvador, the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, by the elite, U.S.-armed Atlacatl battalion, fresh from renewed training at the JFK Special Warfare School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

S. embassy in, 66, 88, 170, 174 Bahrain, 266 bailouts, 238, 272 Bajaur, Pakistan, 119 Baker, Dean, 115, 196, 287 Baker, Gerald, 271 Baker, Jim, 102 ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs, 39–40, 78–79 Balzar, John, 47 Banco del Sur, 135 Barak, Ehud, 35, 41, 281–282 Al-Barakaat, 48 Barnett, Correlli, 28 Barofsky, Neil, 272 Bartels, Larry M., 109 Battle of Mogadishu, 46–47 Beck, Ulrich, 269 Beinin, Joel, 260 ben-Ami, Shlomo, 104 Benghazi, 267 Benn, Aluf, 127 Bergen, Peter, 52 Berle, A. A., 231–232 Berlin Wall, fall of, 177 Biden, Joe, 113, 173, 201 bin Laden, Osama, 52, 275–279, 291, 293–295 biofuels, 22, 23–24 Blair, Tony, 34 Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, 135 Bolivia, 135–138, 167, 247 Boone, Peter, 238 Bouton, Marshall, 58 BP, 87 Branfman, Fred, 256–257 Brazil, 22, 247, 268 Brenner, Robert, 235 Bretton Woods system, 107–108 Britain, 22, 85, 134, 148 Broad, William J., 20 Brookings Institute, 242, 256 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky), 180–181 Brown, Scott, 191, 192 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 102 Buergenthal, Thomas, 243 Burke, Jason, 121, 143–144 Bush, George H.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

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

Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument.2 Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word “history.” Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing,” and that I was ipso facto proven wrong. And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times.

And this weakness, so massive and unexpected, suggests that the pessimistic lessons about history that our century supposedly taught us need to be rethought from the beginning. 2 The Weakness of Strong States I The current crisis of authoritarianism did not begin with Gorbachev’s perestroika or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It started over one and a half decades earlier, with the fall of a series of rightwing authoritarian governments in Southern Europe. In 1974 the Caetano regime in Portugal was ousted in an army coup. After a period of instability verging on civil war, the socialist Mario Soares was elected prime minister in April 1976, and the country has seen peaceful democratic rule ever since.

As a result of elections—which the Polish communists also tried unsuccessfully to rig—a Solidarity government came to power in July. In July and August 1989, tens and then hundreds of thousands of East Germans began fleeing into West Germany, leading to a crisis that rapidly led to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German state. The East German collapse then triggered the fall of communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. By early 1991, all formerly communist states in Eastern Europe, including Albania and the major republics of Yugoslavia, had held reasonably free, multiparty elections.


9-11 by Noam Chomsky

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

Graham Allison, “How to Stop Nuclear Terror,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004. 31. Robertson, Daily Beast, 2011. 9-11 1. Not Since the War of 1812 Based on an interview with Il Manifesto (Italy), September 19, 2001. Q: The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t claim any victims, but it did profoundly change the geopolitical scene. Do you think that the attacks of 9-11 could have a similar effect? CHOMSKY: The fall of the Berlin Wall was an event of great importance and did change the geopolitical scene, but not in the ways usually assumed, in my opinion. I’ve tried to explain my reasons elsewhere and won’t go into it now. The horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target.

In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,”16 including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadoran battalion, who had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state. That act also framed a decade, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the “voice for the voiceless,” by much the same hands, while he was reading mass.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

His resignation marked a key political change: It effectively ended the tradition of Chinese leaders ruling like emperors until death.2 It also shifted power from a single supreme leader to the group leadership of the party and effectively marked the beginning of de facto term limits. Imperial strongman rule in China was over. Meanwhile, that very afternoon, five thousand miles away in Berlin, the government of East Germany capitulated to overwhelming upheaval and threw open the country’s western borders for the first time in twenty-eight years. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Political relationships and systems around the world were about to undergo seismic changes—most obviously in Eastern Europe, but also in Namibia and in developing countries around the world. Dictators supported by the United States and the Soviet Union would fall. Proxy wars and conflict that had wreaked havoc in developing countries would decline.

Citizens in developing countries were not just angry. They were now emboldened. The push to democracy was on. THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY Changes began to unfurl around the world. Namibia gained its independence from South Africa and held its first elections for a new assembly the same day that the Berlin Wall fell. In February 1990—just twelve weeks later—South Africa released Nelson Mandela from jail. The apartheid government, propped up for so long by anticommunist fervor, followed its arch-nemesis the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. Democracy spread across Africa: to Benin, Mali, Zambia, Lesotho, and Malawi.

Deng Xiaoping led China for only about fourteen years (1979 through about 1992, although his influence continued for many years thereafter), and while he was never officially head of state, he was indisputably China’s paramount leader, and the first such leader to step down voluntarily from power rather than rule for life. He resigned the last of his formal positions—as chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party—on the morning of the same day that the Berlin Wall fell: November 9, 1989. Since Mao’s death, the average tenure of the chairman of the Communist Party has been just seven years. In just a few decades, China has moved from de facto imperial rule to a form of term limits. At the same time, Chinese citizens have more freedoms than they once had, especially on the economic side, although personal freedoms remain highly restricted.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Human affairs proceed in their intricate, endlessly varied, and unpredictable paths, but occasionally events occur that are taken to be sharp turning points in history. There have been several in recent years. It is a near platitude in the West that after September 11, 2001, nothing will be the same. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was another event accorded this high status. There is a great deal to say about these two cases, both the myth and the reality. But in referring to the 514th year I of course have something different in mind: the year 1492, which did, undoubtedly, direct world history on a radically new course, with awesome and lasting consequences.

That remarkable year “changed everything,” thanks primarily to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within Russia and his “breathtaking renunciation of the use of force…a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history,” leading to the partially open Russian elections of March 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, which opened the way to liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny. The general mood was captured well by barrister Matthew Ryder, speaking for the “niners,” the generation that is now providing global leadership, with Barack Obama in the lead, their conception of history having been “shaped by a world changed without guns” in 1989, events that gave them confidence in the power of dedication to nonviolence and justice.1 The accolades for November 9 are deserved, and the events are indeed memorable.

Some alternative perspectives may be instructive. One was provided, unintentionally, by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who called on all of us to “use this invaluable gift of freedom…to overcome the walls of our time.”2 Excellent advice, and we can easily follow it. One good start would be to dismantle the massive wall, dwarfing the Berlin wall in scale and length, which is snaking its way through Palestinian territory in gross violation of international law. Like virtually every state action, the “annexation wall,” as it should be termed, is justified in terms of security. But as is commonly the case, the claim lacks any credibility.


pages: 306 words: 92,704

After the Berlin Wall by Christopher Hilton

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce

AFTER THE BERLIN WALL AFTER THE BERLIN WALL PUTTING TWO GERMANYS BACK TOGETHER AGAIN CHRISTOPHER HILTON First published 2009 The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG www.thehistorypress.co.uk This ebook edition first published in 2011 All rights reserved © Christopher Hilton, 2009, 2011 The right of Christopher Hilton, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

TIMELINE 1945 7 May Germany surrenders 3 July Allied troops take over their four sectors in Berlin 16 July Potsdam Conference begins 2 August Potsdam Conference ends 1946 21 April Communist Party and Social Democrats form the SED (Socialist Unity Party) to rule East Germany 1947 5 June Marshall Plan launched 1948 21 June Deutsche Mark introduced in the West 24 June Berlin blockade and airlift begins 24 July East German Mark introduced 1949 4 April NATO formed 11 May Berlin blockade and airlift ends 24 May FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) founded in the West, merging the American, British and French Zones 7 October GDR (German Democratic Republic) founded in the East from the Soviet Zone, with East Berlin as its capital 1953 16 June GDR workers uprising over increasing work norms 1955 9 May FRG accepted into NATO 14 May Communist states, including the GDR, sign the Warsaw Pact 1958 27 October Walter Ulbricht, GDR leader, threatens West Berlin 10 November Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev says it is time to cancel Berlin’s four-power status 1961 4 June At a summit in Vienna, Khruschev tries to pressure US President John Kennedy to demilitarise Berlin 1–12 August 21,828 refugees arrive in West Berlin 13 August Berlin Wall built 1963 26 June Kennedy visits Berlin and makes his ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech 1968 21 August Warsaw Pact countries crush Prague Spring 1970 19 March Willy Brandt visits GDR city Erfurt as part of his Ostpolitik policy 1971 3 May Ulbricht forced to resign, succeeded by Erich Honecker 1972 October Traffic Agreement signed, giving FRG citizens access to the GDR 21 December Basic Treaty signed, the FRG in effect recognising the GDR 1973 18 September The GDR and the FRG admitted to the United Nations 1985 11 March Mikhail Gorbachev elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 1987 12 June Ronald Reagan speaks at the Brandenburg Gate: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ 7–11 September Honecker visits FRG 1989 2 May Hungary opens its border with Austria, allowing GDR holidaymakers to cross 7 May GDR elections with 98.85 per cent for the government and widespread allegations of fraud 4 September Leipzig demonstrations begin 30 September GDR citizens in FRG Prague Embassy told they can travel to the West 6 October GDR fortieth anniversary 18 October Honecker forced to resign, succeeded by Egon Krenz 4 November A million people demonstrate in East Berlin 9 November The Wall opens 29 November Chancellor Helmut Kohl issues plan for a ‘confederation leading to a federation in Germany’ 7 December Krenz resigns.

They asked the question: you complain about human rights in China but what are you doing to Hagen Koch in Germany? So the Federal Press Office came here and they were upset because she had two pages and I had three … Since Koch is guardian of The Wall, what does he think of the twin row of cobblestones? Now they are incorporating little metal plates beside the cobblestones, BERLIN WALL 1961–1989, but they are positioned to be read from the West ... The cobblestones mark the outer Wall, but the real wall for the GDR was the inner Wall, because to the East that was The Wall: if you went to it you were arrested and if you got over it you would be shot. If The Wall had only been where the line of cobblestones is, Walter Ulbricht would have been finally right because he claimed he’d built a wall against evil capitalism – the anti-fascist protection wall – and it directly faced the West.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Conformism is the danger that one of those monopolistic firms, intentionally or inadvertently, will use its dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization. With food, we only belatedly understood this pattern. • • • I WASN’T ALWAYS SO SKEPTICAL. At my first job, I would eat lunch staring at the Berlin Wall, its impressive thickness, all of its divots and bruises. The wall had defined the impenetrable boundary of an empire; now it casually decorated a new center of power in the world. This section of the wall belonged to Bill Gates and it resided in Microsoft’s cafeteria. My career in journalism began at Gates’s software company.

To manage the threat, government needs a dramatic updating, a bolder program for regulating the Internet, a whole new apparatus for protecting privacy and the competitive marketplace. But before we can redress the problem, we need to be precise about it and to understand its genesis. In 1989, the Berlin Wall piled into collectible rubble—and the Internet was born in its modern form. The events were spiritually tethered. That idealistic year, capitalism shed its historic competitor, and the Internet began its own journey to the free market. The American government nurtured the nascent Internet—the “inter-network” in the geeked-out parlance of its earliest days.

The health of our democracy demands that we consider treating Facebook, Google, and Amazon with the same firm hand that led government to wage war on AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft—even dismembering them into smaller companies if circumstances (and the law) demand a forceful response. While it has been several generations since we wielded antitrust laws with such vigor, we should remember that these cases created the conditions that nurtured the invention of an open, gloriously innovative Internet in the first place. Nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after a terrible recession, and decades of growing inequality, regulation hasn’t regained its reputation. In some ways, its stature has receded even further. Large swaths of the left now share the right’s distaste for the regulatory state, a broad sense of indignation over corporations capturing the apparatus of the state.


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

The question for the U.N. World Tourism Organization was how to bottle that elixir, measure it and claim it officially as an industry. The answer came in two parts—first from geopolitics, then from the industry itself. It took nothing less than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire to open up minds and horizons. The Berlin Wall was the most famous of the barbed-wire barriers erected by eastern and central European puppet governments to cut off their people from their continental neighbors during the Cold War that had pitted the Communist countries against those in the democratic market system of capitalism.

The Berlin Wall was the most famous of the barbed-wire barriers erected by eastern and central European puppet governments to cut off their people from their continental neighbors during the Cold War that had pitted the Communist countries against those in the democratic market system of capitalism. Since the end of World War II, the two sides had fought hot wars through proxies in Asia and South America and aimed nuclear weapons at each other in the ultimate standoff for supremacy. The Soviet side lost and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated. By then Communist China had begun to open its doors to the West, positioning itself against the Soviet Union. The stark divisions of the Cold War were obscured and then eliminated. Those physical and allegorical “walls” melted away from the northern Baltic Sea, from countries like Estonia and Latvia, through Eastern Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia—down to the Adriatic Sea and Albania.

Rogue gangs and organized crime got footholds in many industries, including tourism and prostitution, when governments were at their weakest. The money was eye-popping and bribes helped the trade dig deep roots. In Eastern Europe underground syndicates took over prostitution in the former Czechoslovakia along the “Highway of Shame” originally patronized by German truck drivers. “Before the dust from the Berlin Wall had even settled, gangsters and chancers were laying the cables of a huge network of trafficking in women,” wrote Misha Glenny in McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. Estimates from individual countries suggest that these criminal syndicates earn in the hundreds of billions every year.


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

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

One stream of development lead to what Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965) labeled the “totalitarian” state, which tried to abolish the whole of civil society and subordinate the remaining atomized individuals to its own political ends. The right-wing version of this experiment ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, while the left-wing version crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The size, functions, and scope of the state increased in nontotalitarian countries as well, including virtually all democracies during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. While state sectors at the beginning of the century consumed little more than 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 4 state-building most Western European countries and the United States, they consumed nearly 50 percent (70 percent in the case of social democratic Sweden) by the 1980s.

Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke humanitarian disasters, drive 92 weak states and international legitimacy 93 massive waves of immigration, and attack their neighbors. Since September 11, it also has been clear that they shelter international terrorists who can do significant damage to the United States and other developed countries. During the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 11, 2001, the vast majority of international crises centered around weak or failing states. These included Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and East Timor. The international community in various guises stepped into each of these conflicts—often too late and with too few resources—and in several cases ended up literally taking over the governance function from local actors.

., 54 Akerlof, George, 47, 62, 81 Alchian, Armen, 47, 60, 83 American Center for International Labor Solidarity, 89 n6 American exceptionalism, 113 anti-Americanism, 105 Argentina, 9, 15, 19, 36, 57 fiscal federalism in, 25 Aristotle, 72 Army, U.S., 54 Asia, growth rates in, 19 Asian economic crisis, 18 authoritarian countries, problems of legitimacy in, 28 authoritarian transition, 27 133 Baird, Zoë, 74 Barings, 71 Barnard, Chester, 78, 80–81 Berle, Adolf, 48 Berlin Wall, 3 Bosnia, x, 93, 103, 116 Brazil, 12, 15, 28, 30 fiscal federalism in, 25 Britain, 3, 33, 38 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 3 Buchanan, James, 49 Bush, George W., 95, 108–109 Cambodia, x, 93 Center for International Private Enterprise, 89 n6 charisma, 67 charter schools, 59 Chile, 35 China, 1, 2 civil society, 30, 60 Clinton, William J., 74 Coase, Ronald, 45–47, 68 Cohen, Michael, 52, 79–81 Cohen, Theodore, 86 134 index colonialism, 2 Common Agricultural Policy (EU), 107 Congo, 93 Corruption Perception Index, 10 Cuba, 39 Cyert, Richard, 52, 79–80 Dayton Accord, 103 de Soto, Hernando, 21 decentralization, 25, 72 democracy, 26–29 Demsetz, Harold, 47, 60 Denmark, 22, 42 Doha Round, 107 Dominican Republic, 39 Douglas, Roger, 13 Douglas, Stephen, 114–115 East Timor, x, 93 Easterly, William, 36 education, public, 58 Egypt, 9, 35, 94 European Union, 106–107, 111, 116 attitudes toward sovereignty, 112 Common Agricultural Policy, 107 defense spending in, 111 failed state problem, 92–93, 97, 100 Fama, Eugene, 48 Federal Acquisition Regulations, 73 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 64 Federal Food Agency (U.S.), 64 federalism, 25, 44, 70 Federalist Papers, 72 Finance Ministry (Japan), 75 Forest Service (U.S.), 64 France, 12, 34, 105 Freedom House, 10 Friedman, Milton, 19 Friedrich, Carl J., 3 Functions of the Executive (Barnard), 78 game theory, 33 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 106 Germany, 12, 31, 35 Nazi, 3 patriotism in, 112 postwar occupation of, 38–39 Glorious Revolution, 33 Greif, Avner, 34 Guantánamo Bay, prisoners at, 105 Haiti, x, 39, 93 Hatch Act, 85 Hayek, Friedrich A., 4, 68, 82 hidden action, 60, 62, 64 Hirschman, Albert O., 59 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 Hong Kong, 19, 38 Hoover, Blaine, 86–87 Hoover, J.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

A scary world when … The long term … Is no longer measured … In centuries … Or decades … But in years … And sometimes … In months. It took the telephone 35 years to get into one-quarter of U.S. homes … TV took 26 … Radio 22span> … PCs 16 … The Internet 7.19 (And not just businesses are vulnerable … It took about nine days for the Berlin Wall to fall and for East Germany to effectively disappear … even though East Germany had the strongest economy behind the Iron Curtain … and some of the best scientists … but no freedom to create and build.)20 XI TECHNOLOGY IS NOT KIND … IT DOES NOT SAY “PLEASE” In the last decade of the twentieth century, the global economy bred … Mergers and start-ups on an unprecedented scale … $908,000,000,000 in mergers during 1997 alone … A 47 percent increase over the previous year.

AS THIS BOOK ENDS … YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THE CONCLUSIONS REACHED BY THE AUTHOR … OF A MODESTLY TITLED BOOK CALLED HISTORY OF THE WORLD …16 AFTER ALMOST ONE THOUSAND PAGES … HE CONCLUDES TWO THINGS … HISTORY CHANGES FASTER THAN ONE MIGHT EXPECT … AND HISTORY CHANGES SLOWER THAN ONE MIGHT EXPECT. In the 1960s, many expected flying cars, floating cities, large space stations … by 2001. They did not see the impact of pervasive instant, global, almost free networking … Of a massive proliferation of mostly nonviable states. In 1900 … or before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 … It was hardly obvious that the United States would become the world’s sole hegemon. (One of the best-selling books in the 1980s? … Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.) Nor is it obvious where Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, Singapore, the United Kingdom, or the United States will be at the end of the twenty-first century … (The current U.S. mantra: “U.S. as Number One: Lessons for the World” … may sound a little old in 100 years.)

Barrington Brown/Science Photo Library/Photo Researchers 7.1 Craig Venter Photograph by Bill Geiger/Courtesy of Craig Venter 7.2 Dr. Leder Courtesy of Phillip Leder, M.D., Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics 7.3 Cloned pigs Reuters NewMedia Inc./CORBIS 8.1 Kasparov Najlah Feanny/Stock Boston/Picturequest 9.1 Buck Fuller Hans Namuth/Photo Researchers 10.1 Factory workers Annie Griffiths Belt/CORBIS 10.2 Berlin Wall AFP/CORBIS 11.1 Bonobos John Giustina/BRUCE COLEMAN INC. ABOUT THE AUTHOR JUAN ENRIQUEZ is the director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, where he is building an interdisciplinary center focusing on how business will change as a result of the life sciences revolution.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I happen to have been born on November 9, 1989, in the pleasant countryside town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, then just under an hour’s drive from Paris. But while the birth of the Helbergs’ second child was newsworthy within the family, it was overshadowed by events elsewhere in the world. About 1,000 kilometers from the hospital where I lay, jubilant Berliners were streaming through gaps torn in the Berlin Wall.38 Divided for decades, Wessis and Ossis celebrated their reunification with flowers, champagne, and dancing. The rest of the free world joined in. From the maternity ward, I added my voice to the festive chorus. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe began holding free elections.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe began holding free elections. From Europe to Latin America, across Asia and Africa, free markets and liberal democracy were on the march. A young political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, famously concluded that we had reached “the End of History.” Not everyone was savoring the moment, however. On the day the Berlin Wall came down, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in Dresden, East Germany. In his own telling, he brandished a pistol to fend off an angry crowd intent on sacking the agency’s Dresden headquarters. Putin and his fellow spies raced to destroy the intelligence they’d collected.

Partly for this reason, Eric Rosenbach and Katherine Mansted, of Harvard’s Belfer Center, write that information “is now the world’s most consequential and contested geopolitical resource,” with many countries believing “that they are in a zero-sum race to acquire and use data.”23 Authoritarians—and China in particular—are uniquely positioned to win that race. Historically, totalitarian regimes have compiled reams of data on the people they control. Recall the extensive records amassed by the KGB in East Germany, and a young Vladimir Putin frantically burning them. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the East German Stasi had amassed so many files on its citizens—documents, photos, recordings—that its archives would have extended nearly seventy miles.24 But even the Stasi couldn’t have dreamed of the surveillance power of the Chinese state. Thanks to a proliferation of “online to offline” services—such as ride-hailing, bike-sharing, and food delivery—and the widespread adoption of mobile payment technology, Chinese companies have access to a trove of data that is both mind-bogglingly vast and incredibly detailed.


pages: 313 words: 100,317

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

And, as such, they enjoy what the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl once referred to as “the blessing of a late birth.” WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WALL ANYWAY? While it stood, the Berlin Wall was the city’s most famous and infamous structure. Yet just a year after November 9, 1989, it had already largely disappeared—pulverized or sold off around the world. At best, tourists near Checkpoint Charlie today might encounter a few street vendors selling coins, medals, gas masks, and uniform jackets from the vanished system. A national Berlin Wall Memorial opened on Bernauer Straße twenty years after the fall of the Wall. The location was a point of contention for years.

Something along the lines of: EAST GERMAN BORDER TROOPS GIVE UP—WALL NOW GUARDED BY WEST BERLIN POLICE! By now, Berlin’s tourism managers have realized that monuments commemorating crimes are not the least of the city’s attractions. Year after year, the Holocaust Memorial registers well over a million visitors; in 2011, 650,000 people gaped at the newly completed Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße; that same year, 340,000 tourists chose to visit the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (the special prison complex of the East German secret service), where they listened to former inmates describe what they had been forced to endure in Stasi prison cells and interrogations.

As a result, Potsdamer Platz had become a building cemetery of sorts, without tombstones. Only older Berliners could still conjure up the ghosts of these former buildings in their minds’ eyes. Until the early 1990s, the square was dominated by the one structure that had replaced the vanished buildings: the Berlin Wall. On the western side of the almost five-hundred-yard-wide desert at the center of the city, a platform surrounded by snack bars and souvenir stands had been put up, from which curious bystanders could observe the Wall. There they stood, looking directly into the binoculars of the border police at their guard posts, who in turn stared straight back into the tourists’ own.


Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, index card, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prenzlauer Berg, telemarketer, the built environment

Stasiland Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall Anna Funder Dedication For Craig Allchin Epigraph ‘…a silent crazy jungle under glass.’ The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers ‘The two of you, violator and victim (collaborator! violin!), are linked, forever perhaps, by the obscenity of what has been revealed to you, by the sad knowledge of what people are capable of. We are all guilty.’ The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Breyten Breytenbach ‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. ‘No, no!’ said the Queen.

said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Map of Germany 1945–90 Map of Berlin Wall 1961–89 1 Berlin, Winter 1996 2 Miriam 3 Bornholmer Bridge 4 Charlie 5 The Linoleum Palace 6 Stasi HQ 7 The Smell of Old Men 8 Telephone Calls 9 Julia Has No Story 10 The Italian Boyfriend 11 Major N. 12 The Lipsi 13 Von Schni— 14 The Worse You Feel 15 Herr Christian 16 Socialist Man 17 Drawing the Line 18 The Plate 19 Klaus 20 Herr Bock of Golm 21 Frau Paul 22 The Deal 23 Hohenschönhausen 24 Herr Bohnsack 25 Berlin, Spring 2000 26 The Wall 27 Puzzlers 28 Miriam and Charlie Some Notes on Sources Acknowledgments About the Author Praise for Anna Funder and Stasiland Also by Anna Funder Credits Copyright About the Publisher 1 Berlin, Winter 1996 I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station.

But it works—I’m curious. ‘U-huh. Before or after the Wall came down?’ ‘Before. He was over on a day trip from the west. I used to get quite a few westerners you know. He invited me’—she pats her large bosom with a flat hand—‘to his palace. But of course I couldn’t go.’ Of course she couldn’t go: the Berlin Wall ran a couple of kilometres from here and there was no getting over it. Along with the Great Wall of China, it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another. She is losing credibility fast, but her story is becoming correspondingly better. And, suddenly, I can’t smell a thing any more.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Could it be that what we had for three-quarters of a century – guaranteed prosperity and rising living standards – are about to disappear and become the experience of these countries who have been stuck in misery for the same long period? As they emerge, are we submerging? Is this the consequence of what is called globalization? Globalization became a buzzword in the 1990s sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It opened up an era of freer capital movements and freer trade across the world. It is hard to remember now that between 1992 and 2007 the developed and emerging economies enjoyed an unprecedentedly long period of growth with low inflation. These good things were attributed to globalization just as much as it is being blamed for the present slump.

Mervyn (now Lord) King, while he was Governor of the Bank of England, described the future as one of non-inflationary continuous expansion (NICE). The Long Boom The background to these happy thoughts had been the benevolent economic climate in the developed countries for the previous decade or so.1 Once again, political events shaped the economic context. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was smashed by demonstrators. Soon after, the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Eastern European nations abandoned Soviet-style rule and became open democratic economies able to pursue free market policies. The success was not only an ideological one. It had profound economic implications. At a stroke, several markets were added to global trade, leading to expanded profit-making opportunities for businessmen and financial traders alike.

They rely on a combination of longer run forces such as demographic trends and cycles, or bursts of innovation, such as the discovery of gold and silver (relevant for the Gold Standard during the nineteenth century) or innovations in credit creation, as happened in the late twentieth century, or oil/shale discoveries, and also political events which may change the geography of the markets, as the fall of the Berlin Wall did. Kondratieff did, however, cover data going back to the Industrial Revolution. The first Kondratieff cycle has an upswing from the 1780s to 1810/17 and a downward phase from 1810/17 to 1844/51.The next long cycle peaked somewhere between 1870 and 1875 and then entered a downward phase which ended in the 1890s.


pages: 256 words: 79,075

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

Thus there is much less interest in class politics, and this left sits amicably alongside a middle-class liberalism that does as liberalism does – trembles with a slight terror at the prospect of genuine equality between the classes. We live in harsh and uncaring times partly as a consequence of a tide that has swept across the globe in recent decades. One of the paradoxes of the fall of the Berlin Wall is that, while it represented a revolutionary liberation of human beings from under the yoke of totalitarianism, it also resulted in the unshackling of a particularly virulent strain of capitalism. A pessimist might even argue that the social democratic gains of the twentieth century depended to some extent on the existence of a class of semi-slaves toiling away behind an ‘iron curtain’.

Aberfan disaster (1966) 170–1 ACAS 38 acid attacks, delivery drivers protest against, London (July, 2017) 256–7 Ackroyd, Peter 249 Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea 150, 153–64, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 224 commission used as incentive for employees at 162–3 ‘fun’ culture 155, 161–2, 163, 164, 181 management 162–3, 224 performance league tables 183 politics, employee attitudes towards 164 ‘Renewals Consultant’ role 154 share scheme and dividends 159 staff turnover rate 159 training 155, 160–1 unions/collective action and 185, 186 university graduates employed at 153–4 wages/pay 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 working hours and conditions 155, 160–4, 180–1, 185–6 Age UK 113 Aiden (building site worker) 135–6 Aiden (former miner) 175 Airbnb 217 Alex (former pit mechanic) 55, 57, 62–3 algorithmic management systems 16–17, 209, 210, 211, 217–18, 222, 223, 227, 231, 232, 242, 249 Aman (Uber driver) 236–8, 239–40, 241, 242, 255 Amazon: accommodation, employee 20–2, 24–6 algorithmic management system 16–17 blue badges 20, 41 breaks, employee 12–14, 36, 48, 49–50, 52–3, 64–5 British workers and 31, 33–4, 35–41, 57, 65, 72–3 diet/health of employees 51–2, 64–5, 70–1 disciplinary system 36, 39–41, 42–4 employment agencies, use of 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 see also Transline and PMP Recruitment employment contracts 19–20, 53, 58 food served to employees 12–13, 14, 64 fulfillment centres in former mining areas 54–5 JB’s weekly budget whilst employed at 68–9 migrant labour, use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 picker role 14, 16, 18, 19, 49, 65, 119, 258 process guide role 22–3 recruitment process 19–20 Rugeley distribution centre, Staffordshire 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 security/security guards 11–13, 47, 48–9, 52 survey of employees, GMB 36 Swansea, warehouse in 145–6, 194 tax paid in UK by 146 tiredness/exhaustion of employees 44, 50–1, 65 transgender employees, treatment of 40–1 wages/salary 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 Amodeo, Michael 223 Anne (pensioner in Cwm) 197–8 anti-depressant medication 188 Armitage Shanks 57 Arora brothers 124–5 Aslam, Yaseen 229–30, 250 Assured Shorthold Tenancy 96 Attlee, Clement 173 ‘austerity’ policies 1–2, 6, 108 B&M Bargains 124–5, 126–30 BBC 138, 157, 173, 236 Bentham, Jeremy 182, 194 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989) 263 Bertram, Jo 235, 250–1 Bevan, Aneurin 144, 149, 192–3, 247 Bezos, Jeff 18 Big Issue, The 122 Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon 167, 170 Blackpool, Lancashire 77–140, 169, 187 accommodation in 80, 124, 137–8 B&M Bargains warehouse in 124–5, 126–31 Bloomfield district 137 building site work in 135–6 Central Drive 81, 120, 132–3 Golden Mile 121–2 health of residents 137 home care work in 81–90, 106–20, 140 homelessness in 95–105 job centres in 133–5 suicide rates in 100 unemployment in 121–3, 138, 139–40 Blaenau Gwent, Wales 187, 188, 190 see also under individual area and place name Booth, William 205 Brereton Colliery, Staffordshire 55 Brian (former miner) 196 Bryn Colliery, Wales 196 Brynmill, Swansea, Wales 150–1 building site work 121, 124, 135–6 buy-to-let housing market 24 Cadman, Scott 244, 245–6, 247–9 call centres 35, 61, 139, 150, 153–64, 180–6, 192, 199, 224 see also Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea Cameron, David 259 Cannock Chase 21, 28, 54 capitalism 83, 145, 181 co-opts rebellion against 149 consumerism and 146 debt, reliance on 62 English culture overwhelmed by 32–3, 198–9 fall of Berlin Wall (1989) and 263 ‘gig’ economy and 210, 215, 232 platform capitalism 215 religious fatalism appropriated by 161 care sector: Eastern European migrant labour and 114–15 length of home care visits and 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 staff training in 85–6 staffing crisis within 84–5, 119 zero hours contracts and 87 see also home care worker Carewatch UK 81–90, 109, 110, 118, 132, 135, 136, 150, 159 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) process and 88–90, 109–10 employee reviews of 83–4 employment contracts/conditions 87–8, 118–19 length of care visits and 110 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets and 114, 115 recruitment 81–2, 84–5 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 training 85–6 see also care sector and home care worker Cefn Mawr No. 2, Afan Valley, Wales 171–2 Celcon 57 Centre for Cities 61 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 153 Chartists 144, 149 China 183, 196–7 Chris (Amazon employee) 20, 21, 22–6, 65 Citizens Advice 243–4 CitySprint 246, 248–9, 251–2 Claire (Amazon employee) 36, 37–41, 50, 53 class: death of 4 erosion of class solidarity 193–4 fall of Berlin Wall and 263 liberalism and 263 scientific theories of 4, 17 see also middle-class and working-class Claudiu (housemate of JB) 22 coalition government (2010–15) 109, 115–16 coal mining: decline of industry 54, 55–6, 58, 144–5, 172–9 danger of/disasters 169–72 General Strike and 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 South Wales Valleys and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 Thatcher and 174–5, 263–4 collectivism 228 communism 17, 173, 178, 228, 263 Compare the Market 155 Conservative Party 3, 7, 109, 175 consumerism 146 Coombes, B.

Aberfan disaster (1966) 170–1 ACAS 38 acid attacks, delivery drivers protest against, London (July, 2017) 256–7 Ackroyd, Peter 249 Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea 150, 153–64, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 224 commission used as incentive for employees at 162–3 ‘fun’ culture 155, 161–2, 163, 164, 181 management 162–3, 224 performance league tables 183 politics, employee attitudes towards 164 ‘Renewals Consultant’ role 154 share scheme and dividends 159 staff turnover rate 159 training 155, 160–1 unions/collective action and 185, 186 university graduates employed at 153–4 wages/pay 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 working hours and conditions 155, 160–4, 180–1, 185–6 Age UK 113 Aiden (building site worker) 135–6 Aiden (former miner) 175 Airbnb 217 Alex (former pit mechanic) 55, 57, 62–3 algorithmic management systems 16–17, 209, 210, 211, 217–18, 222, 223, 227, 231, 232, 242, 249 Aman (Uber driver) 236–8, 239–40, 241, 242, 255 Amazon: accommodation, employee 20–2, 24–6 algorithmic management system 16–17 blue badges 20, 41 breaks, employee 12–14, 36, 48, 49–50, 52–3, 64–5 British workers and 31, 33–4, 35–41, 57, 65, 72–3 diet/health of employees 51–2, 64–5, 70–1 disciplinary system 36, 39–41, 42–4 employment agencies, use of 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 see also Transline and PMP Recruitment employment contracts 19–20, 53, 58 food served to employees 12–13, 14, 64 fulfillment centres in former mining areas 54–5 JB’s weekly budget whilst employed at 68–9 migrant labour, use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 picker role 14, 16, 18, 19, 49, 65, 119, 258 process guide role 22–3 recruitment process 19–20 Rugeley distribution centre, Staffordshire 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 security/security guards 11–13, 47, 48–9, 52 survey of employees, GMB 36 Swansea, warehouse in 145–6, 194 tax paid in UK by 146 tiredness/exhaustion of employees 44, 50–1, 65 transgender employees, treatment of 40–1 wages/salary 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 Amodeo, Michael 223 Anne (pensioner in Cwm) 197–8 anti-depressant medication 188 Armitage Shanks 57 Arora brothers 124–5 Aslam, Yaseen 229–30, 250 Assured Shorthold Tenancy 96 Attlee, Clement 173 ‘austerity’ policies 1–2, 6, 108 B&M Bargains 124–5, 126–30 BBC 138, 157, 173, 236 Bentham, Jeremy 182, 194 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989) 263 Bertram, Jo 235, 250–1 Bevan, Aneurin 144, 149, 192–3, 247 Bezos, Jeff 18 Big Issue, The 122 Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon 167, 170 Blackpool, Lancashire 77–140, 169, 187 accommodation in 80, 124, 137–8 B&M Bargains warehouse in 124–5, 126–31 Bloomfield district 137 building site work in 135–6 Central Drive 81, 120, 132–3 Golden Mile 121–2 health of residents 137 home care work in 81–90, 106–20, 140 homelessness in 95–105 job centres in 133–5 suicide rates in 100 unemployment in 121–3, 138, 139–40 Blaenau Gwent, Wales 187, 188, 190 see also under individual area and place name Booth, William 205 Brereton Colliery, Staffordshire 55 Brian (former miner) 196 Bryn Colliery, Wales 196 Brynmill, Swansea, Wales 150–1 building site work 121, 124, 135–6 buy-to-let housing market 24 Cadman, Scott 244, 245–6, 247–9 call centres 35, 61, 139, 150, 153–64, 180–6, 192, 199, 224 see also Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea Cameron, David 259 Cannock Chase 21, 28, 54 capitalism 83, 145, 181 co-opts rebellion against 149 consumerism and 146 debt, reliance on 62 English culture overwhelmed by 32–3, 198–9 fall of Berlin Wall (1989) and 263 ‘gig’ economy and 210, 215, 232 platform capitalism 215 religious fatalism appropriated by 161 care sector: Eastern European migrant labour and 114–15 length of home care visits and 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 staff training in 85–6 staffing crisis within 84–5, 119 zero hours contracts and 87 see also home care worker Carewatch UK 81–90, 109, 110, 118, 132, 135, 136, 150, 159 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) process and 88–90, 109–10 employee reviews of 83–4 employment contracts/conditions 87–8, 118–19 length of care visits and 110 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets and 114, 115 recruitment 81–2, 84–5 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 training 85–6 see also care sector and home care worker Cefn Mawr No. 2, Afan Valley, Wales 171–2 Celcon 57 Centre for Cities 61 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 153 Chartists 144, 149 China 183, 196–7 Chris (Amazon employee) 20, 21, 22–6, 65 Citizens Advice 243–4 CitySprint 246, 248–9, 251–2 Claire (Amazon employee) 36, 37–41, 50, 53 class: death of 4 erosion of class solidarity 193–4 fall of Berlin Wall and 263 liberalism and 263 scientific theories of 4, 17 see also middle-class and working-class Claudiu (housemate of JB) 22 coalition government (2010–15) 109, 115–16 coal mining: decline of industry 54, 55–6, 58, 144–5, 172–9 danger of/disasters 169–72 General Strike and 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 South Wales Valleys and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 Thatcher and 174–5, 263–4 collectivism 228 communism 17, 173, 178, 228, 263 Compare the Market 155 Conservative Party 3, 7, 109, 175 consumerism 146 Coombes, B.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

How did we get from an economy in which banks and credit function the way they are supposed to, to this place we’re in now, the Reykjavíkization of the world economy? The crisis was based on a problem, a mistake, a failure, and a culture; but before it was any of those things, it arose from a climate—and the climate was that which followed the capitalist world’s victory over communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was especially apparent to me because I grew up in Hong Kong at the time when it was the most unbridled free-market economy in the world. Hong Kong was the economic Wild West. There were no rules, no income taxes (well, eventually there was a top tax of 15 percent), no welfare state, no guarantee of health care or schooling.

The biggest boom in seventy years turned straight into the biggest bust. The rest of this book tells the story of how that happened, but there was one essential precursor to all the subsequent events, without which the explosion and implosion would not have occurred in the form they did: and that was the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Explicit arguments about the conflict between the West and the Communist bloc were never especially profitable. The camps were too entrenched; the larger philosophical issues tended to be boiled off until nothing but the residue of party politics remained.

David Kynaston points out that under communism, children from primary school upward were taught the principles and practice of the system and were thoroughly drilled in how it was supposed to work. There is nothing comparable to that in the capitalist world. The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little. This climate of thinking informed all subsequent events. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism began a victory party that ran for almost two decades. Capitalism is not inherently fair: it does not, in and of itself, distribute the rewards of economic growth equitably. Instead it runs on the bases of winner take all and to them that hath shall be given. For several decades after the Second World War, the Western liberal democracies devoted themselves to the question of how to harness capitalism’s potential for economic growth to the political imperative to provide better lives for ordinary people.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

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

US opposition to Haitian independence for two centuries also continued, quite independently of the Cold War. Events of the 1980s, notably after the fall of the Berlin wall, also illustrate with much clarity traditional US distaste for democracy and indifference to human rights. We return to details (chapter 8). Another instructive example is Saddam Hussein, a favored friend and trading partner of the West right through his worst atrocities. As the Berlin wall was tottering in October 1989, the White House intervened directly, in a highly secret meeting, to ensure that Iraq would receive another $1 billion in loan guarantees, overcoming Treasury and Commerce department objections that Iraq was not creditworthy.

In a 1988 end-of-year analysis of the Cold War in the New York Times, Dimitri Simes wrote that the impending disappearance of the Soviet enemy offers the US three advantages: first, we can shift NATO costs to European competitors; second, we can end “the manipulation of America by third world nations,” “resist unwarranted third world demands for assistance,” and strike a harder bargain with “defiant third world debtors”; and third, military power can be used more freely “as a United States foreign policy instrument...against those who contemplate challenging important American interests,” with no fear of “triggering counterintervention,” the deterrent having been removed. In brief, the US can regain some power within the rich men’s club, tighten the screws on the Third World, and resort more freely to violence against defenseless victims. The senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was right on target.30 The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 can be taken as the symbolic end of the Cold War. After that, it took real dedication to conjure up the Soviet threat, though habits die slowly. Thus, in early 1990, much excitement was generated by a document published anonymously by University of California Sovietologist Martin Malia, railing about how Brezhnev had “intervened at will throughout the Third World” and “Russia bestrode the world” while “the liberal-to-radical mainstream of Anglo-American Sovietology” regarded Stalinism as having “a democratic cast,” indulging in “blatant fantasies...about democratic Stalinism” and “puerile fetishization of Lenin,” along with a host of similar insights apparently picked up in some Paris café.

Thus, in early 1990, much excitement was generated by a document published anonymously by University of California Sovietologist Martin Malia, railing about how Brezhnev had “intervened at will throughout the Third World” and “Russia bestrode the world” while “the liberal-to-radical mainstream of Anglo-American Sovietology” regarded Stalinism as having “a democratic cast,” indulging in “blatant fantasies...about democratic Stalinism” and “puerile fetishization of Lenin,” along with a host of similar insights apparently picked up in some Paris café. But in the 1990s, only the most disciplined minds can handle this kind of fare with appropriate gravity.31 Much can be learned about the Cold War era by observing what happened after the Berlin wall fell. The case of Cuba is instructive. For 170 years, the US has sought to prevent Cuban independence. From 1959, the pretext for invasion, terror, and economic warfare was the security threat posed by this outpost of the Kremlin. With the threat gone, the reaction was uniform: we must step up the attack.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

As I was growing up, it was terra incognita— exotic, foreign territory, and much of it off-limits to American citizens. As I began my academic career, the continent was in volatile transition, a world of fragile regimes whose demise opened up intriguing new worlds, epitomized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the shah’s regime in Teheran. Today, Eurasia is being reconfigured once again. Its western and eastern poles are moving into an ever-deeper embrace, with global political-economic implications. Those fateful developments, unfolding before our eyes, configure the story presented in the pages to follow.

Mikhail Gorbachev, taking power in 1985, understood the structural problems of the Soviet Union, responding with his glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) campaigns. Political turbulence intensified, however, following the Afghan withdrawal in early 1989, even though the withdrawal extinguished what had been a significant cause of previous dissatisfaction. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall went down, without a decisive Soviet response, deepening a sense—both in the Soviet satellites and within the USSR itself—that fundamental change was impending. The Impact and Implications While Gorbachev was vacationing in the Crimea, on August 19, 1991, his vice president, prime minister, defense minister, KGB chief, and other senior officials suddenly attempted a coup.

New Linkages and Deepened Ties In the more advanced western regions of the former USSR, the major shortterm impact of the USSR’s collapse and the sudden new market orientation was to deepen interdependence between Russia and noncommunist Europe, especially Germany. In the first two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former republics of the USSR itself joined the EU. This post–Cold War expansion of the EU—the direct consequence of Soviet collapse—had major implications for the nature of Europe itself as well as for Europe’s ties to the broader world. It shifted the geographical center of the EU close to a thousand miles east— from France deep into Germany.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

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

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

Even Xan Smiley, astutest of the foreign correspondents, and the Economist did not notice that something decisive had happened - a forgivable mistake (this writer has reason to hope), given the needle-in-haystack nature of truth in that system. But what was really meant was that Moscow was giving up the Berlin Wall. Within months, Solidarność was discussing a new Poland, and within a few more months the Berlin Wall had indeed gone, and so, thereafter, did everything else go, including, by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. There was a romantic theory that this had been achieved by ‘We, the People’, a theory that could only elicit a chuckle from the grave of Andropov.

Georgy Malenkov about to watch Arsenal play Manchester United during a visit to London, March 1956; Nikita Khrushchev and Władysław Gomułka at the United Nations, September 1960; John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower leave the White House for the former’s inauguration, January 1960 25. and 26. The non-Atlantic in the ascendant. Two symbols of Communist glamour: Yuri Gagarin and Fidel Castro; the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer-Platz, August 1962 27. and 28. The Atlantic in trouble. Some of the hundreds of thousands of white settlers fleeing Algeria, May 1962; captured American airmen being paraded through the streets of Hanoi, July 1966 29. and 30. The new Europe. Ludwig Erhard and Charles de Gaulle at a dinner hosted by Konrad Adenauer, September 1962; Willi Stoph and Willy Brandt, May 1970 31. and 32.

West Germany was saved from herself by East Germany. Here was a warning as to what might happen if the Atlantic link were ever really sundered. Brezhnev might visit Bonn (1978) and talk of our ‘common European home’, but, as Margaret Thatcher later remarked, homes are built with walls, and the Berlin Wall was one too many. The ‘German Democratic Republic’ was an embarrassment. It remained a place where the inhabitants had to be contained by a wall, and a very ugly one at that, complete with minefields and yapping hounds on dog-runs, in case they all decided to move out, as they had done before 1961, when the wall was built.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

As the tour of the American facilities was taking place, Russia was in a state of pandemonium. The Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier, but the red flag of the Soviet Union still flew over the Kremlin. The geopolitical landscape between the superpowers was in flux. “It wasn’t so clear the [Soviet leaders] weren’t going to re-form,” remembers Dr. Craig Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There was a lot of anxiety about the fact that they might re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a time of great instability. While the world rejoiced over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense Department had been coping with a myriad of national security unknowns.

“The danger of the situation simply getting out of control, from developments or accidents or incidents that neither side—leaders on either side—were even aware of, much less in control of, could have led to war,” says the former CIA officer Dr. Raymond Garthoff, an expert in Soviet missile launches. The information about the Soviet high-altitude nuclear tests remained classified until after the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet nuclear weapon detonated on October 28, 1962, over Zhezqazghan in Kazakhstan at an altitude of ninety-three miles had a consequential effect. According to Russian scientists, “the nuclear detonation caused an electromagnetic pulse [EMP] that covered all of Kazakhstan,” including “electrical cables buried underground.”

The exercises involved a pre-scripted war game scenario in which U.S. forces would quickly deploy to a location to confront a hypothetical Soviet invasion of a specific territory. In the past, the war games had taken place in Cold War settings like the Zagros Mountains in Iran and the Fulda Gap in Germany. In the summer of 1990 the Cold War climate had changed. The Berlin Wall had come down eight months before, and CENTCOM commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf decided that for Internal Look 90, U.S. forces would engage in a SIMNET-based war game against a different foe, other than the Soviet Union. A scripted narrative was drawn up involving Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his military, the fourth largest in the world.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

I knew much more than most people, because while the crisis was on, I happened to bump into a friend from the American embassy staff on a busy street. He told me. Still, I knew too little to be scared that I might be killed by an American nuclear bomb at any moment.” The precarious two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis came close to overshadowing the emergency in Europe of a year earlier, the erection of the Berlin Wall. But the Wall never caused the same amount of trepidation, certainly not among ordinary people, nor in Washington or Moscow. The confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie was one of those dicey moments when overly aggressive subordinate commanders got out of control, as they did, with potentially more dangerous consequences, in Cuba.

An occasional scurrying figure seemed all but swallowed by the voracious chill of Socialist space. Below, against a backdrop of blocked windows, Dobermans strutted with fierce nervous intensity, ready to maul anyone rash enough to cross the intervening space—if, indeed, a fleeing human could get that far. I might as well have been regarding the yard of a huge open-air prison. The Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis occupy central places in the history of the Cold War. Thereafter, with one notable exception, the war scare of 1983 (recalled here by John Prados), the long face-off between the U.S.S.R. and the West “took on,” in the words of the historian John Lewis Gaddis, a certain stability, even predictability, after 1962.

In 1958, Moscow threatened once again to drive the Western Powers out of Berlin and to integrate the entire city into the Soviet-dominated East German state. The fact of the matter, of course, was that the tender testicles of the West had become the loose sphincter of the East—an opening through which thousands of East Germans were fleeing every year. The Berlin Wall that went up in 1961 to stanch the flow was in many ways as cruel as the Berlin Blockade, but it also turned out to be just as double-edged, since it purchased “security” at the price of continued economic stagnation and political oppression. In 1951, Mayor Reuter of West Berlin, which was now a separate political entity and part of the West German state, dedicated a monument in front of Tempelhof Airport to commemorate the airlift of 1948–49.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

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

And what of a far more sinister alternative: that, just as World War I exceeded in duration and savagery anything in Shackleton’s imagination (and that an even more destructive war followed two decades later), today’s most nightmarish scenarios about the future may prove to be not only true, but exceeded. Fooled by Optimism The unbridled optimism of the Victorians died a slow death in the fields of Flanders and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and any lingering spirit dissipated at a time when the specter of nuclear holocaust haunted mankind instead. But it made a comeback after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the swift implosion of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc over the next two years. Nothing exemplified the supreme victory of Western ideals in almost all spheres of life better than US political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s seminal 1989 essay “The End of History”, best known for its bold forecast about the future of humanity: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.5 It is certainly true that doomsday predictions like Malthusian overpopulation and Y2K have a terrible track record.

His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”.11 Only by achieving the political aim of liberalism can its philosophical project of promoting individual liberty be realized. The need to strike the right balance between democracy and liberalism is problematic and in practice only very few countries have gotten it right. The triumph of democracy over communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in the emergence of dozens of newly democratic regimes that were decidedly illiberal in nature, given their weak protection of property rights, discretional application of the rule of law, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, and flaunting of constitutional protections on executive power.

. … But to go beyond this minimalist definition and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a comprehensive catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights turns the word democracy into a badge of honor rather than a descriptive category.12 Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become painfully obvious that there is no guarantee that the transition from autocracy to electoral democracy is enough to nurture the forces of liberalism, even in the longer run. Democracy, after all, suffers from the political version of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, which has it that tolerating the intolerant can lead to the latter imposing their intolerance13: autocrats can use democracy to gain power and impose autocracy, even if slightly disguised from outright dictatorship.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

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

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

An adventurous publisher had commissioned a Chinese translation of The File, my book about reading my Stasi file and tracking down those who had spied on me for the East German secret police behind the Berlin Wall. (Ancient European history, you understand. Nothing at all to do with today’s China.) The book had not yet appeared, but the publisher encouraged me to give some pre-publication interviews, including a live ‘micro interview’ on the then vibrant Sina Weibo microblogging site. The online interview was announced in advance and netizens could post questions on a dedicated page. One was: ‘The Berlin Wall has already fallen. Is it possible that the Great Firewall of China will fall as well? If so, under what circumstances?’

I start from the history of dramatic transformations—technological, commercial, cultural and political—that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century, and with particular intensity since 1989. That year saw no less than four developments that would prove seminal for free speech in the twenty-first century: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the World Wide Web, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the strange survival of Communist Party rule in China. History’s horse has not stopped galloping since, and I am always conscious of Walter Raleigh’s injunction that ‘who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie, shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth’.4 Nonetheless, I maintain that the basic character of the challenges we face in this world of neighbours is now clear.

Roosevelt’s 1941 speech enumerating four freedoms—of expression and of worship, from want and from fear—she effectively added a fifth, the freedom to connect. ‘We stand’, she said, ‘for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas’. Internet blocking firewalls should come down, as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.82 The United States has long used respect for freedom of expression and worship as key criteria in rating other states. In 2012, a State Department spokesperson admonished India, the world’s largest democracy, for blocking websites and social media platforms which the Indian government argued were helping to foment intercommunal violence.83 The US government also developed a small programme to fund technologies that would help circumvent internet-blocking firewalls built by authoritarian regimes such as Iran and China.


pages: 719 words: 209,224

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Hastily, new rules for travel were drafted by the government, and the plan was to announce them November 10, but inadvertently the decision was read aloud at a government press conference at the end of the day November 9. 13 News reports vaguely suggested that East Germans could get visas to leave the country immediately through border crossings, touching off a frenzy of excitement. Rumors spread that all travel restrictions were being lifted. Thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall in the evening. The guards, who had no instructions, just opened the gates, and the Berlin Wall was breached twenty-eight years after it was first erected. The long division of Europe was over. In Washington, reporters were summoned to the Oval Office at 3:34 P.M. Bush was nervously twisting a pen in his hands. He later recalled feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

"I am not an emotional kind of guy," Bush said.14 In Moscow, Chernyaev wrote in his diary the next day, November 10, "The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over." After the fall of the wall, even more threatening storms were on the horizon for Gorbachev. The Soviet economy plummeted in 1989; there were acute shortages of goods, along with a grain crisis and declining oil production. Perestroika had not produced better living standards. At a Politburo meeting on the day the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev was preoccupied not with Eastern Europe, but the possibility that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, as internal republics began to consider breaking away.

If the orders came, Soviet factory directors were ready to produce bacteria by the ton that could sicken and kill millions of people. The book explores the origins and expansion of this illicit, sprawling endeavor, for which Russia has yet to give a full accounting. Much of the writing about the end of the Cold War stops at the moment the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, or when the Soviet flag was lowered on the Kremlin in December 1991. This book attempts to go further. It begins with the peak of tensions in the early 1980s, leads us through the remarkable events of the Reagan and Gorbachev years and then shows how the Soviet collapse gave way to a race against time, an urgent search for the nuclear and biological hazards that were left behind.


pages: 193 words: 48,066

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

January 2013 John Pinder Simon Usherwood Abbreviations ACP African, Caribbean, Pacific countries AFSJ area of freedom, security, and justice ALDE Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Benelux Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg BRIC Brazil, Russia, India, and China CAP common agricultural policy CFCs chlorofluorocarbons CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy CIS Commonwealth of Independent States CJHA Cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs Comecon Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Coreper Committee of Permanent Representatives CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy EAGGF European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund EC European Community ECB European Central Bank ECJ European Court of Justice (formal title, Court of Justice) Ecofin Council of Economic and Finance Ministers Ecosoc Economic and Social Committee ECR European Conservatives and Reformists ECSC European Coal and Steel Community ecu European Currency Unit (forerunner of euro) EDC European Defence Community EDF European Development Fund EEA European Economic Area EEC European Economic Community EFA European Free Alliance EFD Europe of Freedom and Democracy EFSF European Financial Stability Fund Efta European Free Trade Association ELDR European Liberals, Democrats, and Reformists EMS European Monetary System Emu Economic and Monetary Union ENP European Neighbourhood Policy EPC European Political Cooperation EPP–ED European People’s Party and European Democrats ERDF European Regional Development Fund ERM Exchange Rate Mechanism ESCB European System of Central Banks ESDP European Security and Defence Policy ESF European Social Fund ESM European Stability Mechanism ETS Emissions Trading Scheme EU European Union Euratom European Atomic Energy Community Gatt General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of WTO) GDP Gross Domestic Product GNI Gross National Income GNP Gross National Product GSP Generalized System of Preferences GUE/NGL European United Left/Nordic Green Left IGC Intergovernmental Conference Ind Independent MEP Member of the European Parliament Nato North Atlantic Treaty Organization NTBs non-tariff barriers OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OLP Ordinary Legislative Procedure OMC Open method of coordination OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe PES Party of European Socialists PHARE Poland and Hungary: aid for economic reconstruction (extended to other Central and East European countries) QMV qualified majority voting (in the Council) SEA Single European Act SGP Stability and Growth Pact TACIS Technical Assistance to the CIS TEC Treaty establishing the European Community TEU Treaty on European Union TFEU Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union TSCG Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union UN United Nations UNFCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate Change VAT value-added tax WEU Western European Union WTO World Trade Organization List of boxes 1 The Treaties 2 Structural funds and objectives 3 States’ net budgetary payments or receipts 4 Employment policy 5 Cotonou Convention, 2000–2020 6 EU agreements and links in the Third World, other than Cotonou and ENP List of charts 1 The Union’s institutions 2 Number of MEPs from each state, 2014 3 Party groups in the Parliament in 2012 4 Institutions of economic and monetary policy 5 Share of budget spent on CAP, 1970–2010 6 Breakdown of budget expenditure, 2012 7 Sources of revenue, 2011 8 Shares of world trade of EU, US, China, Japan, and others, 2010 9 How the EU is represented for Common Foreign and Security Policy 10 Direction of EU trade in goods by region, 2010 11 Shares of official development aid from EU, US, Japan, and others, 2011 12 Development aid from EU and member states by destination, 2010 List of illustrations 1 Winston Churchill at The Hague Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 2 Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman © Robert Cohen/AGIP/Rue des Archives, Paris 3 The Schuman Declaration Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, Lausanne 4 Edward Heath signing the Treaty of Accession Photo by Douglas Miller/Keystone/Getty Images 5 Jacques Delors Credit © European Union, 2013 6 Altiero Spinelli voting for his Draft Treaty Photo: European Parliament 7 European Council, 1979 Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 8 Council of Ministers Credit © European Union, 2013 9 European Parliament in session Photo: European Parliament 10 The first meeting of the Commission with President José Manuel Barroso, 2004 Credit © European Union, 2013 11 Court of Justice sitting Credit © European Union, 2013 12 Euro notes and coins Banknotes draft design © EWI 13 Kohl and Mitterrand at Verdun © Bettmann/Corbis 14 The Berlin Wall comes down Photo © Richard Gardner 15 The G8 Summit at Camp David, May 2012 Credit © European Union, 2013 The publisher and the authors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity. List of maps 1 Growth of the EU, 1957–2013 2 Applicants for accession 3 The architecture of Europe, 2013 4 The EU’s neighbourhood Chapter 1 What the EU is for The European Union of today is the result of a process that began over half a century ago with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community.

The simplest case was the German Democratic Republic, as the Soviet-controlled part of Germany had called itself. The GDR became part of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990; and the Community made the necessary technical adjustments at speed so that the enlarged Germany could assume the German membership without delay. 14. The Berlin Wall comes down For the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, extensive aid and development packages were put together under the Commission’s leadership. Projects such as PHARE sought to provide assistance with economic and political restructuring for the emergent democracies, spending roughly €600 million per year between 1990 and 2003, when it was wound up.

De Gaulle still demurs. 1 July 1968 Customs union completed 18 months ahead of schedule. 1–2 December 1969 Hague Summit agrees arrangements for financing CAP, and resumption of accession negotiations. 1970s 22 April 1970 Amending Treaty signed, giving Community all revenue from common external tariff and agricultural import levies plus share of value-added tax, and European Parliament some powers over budget. 27 October 1970 Council establishes ‘EPC’ procedures for foreign policy cooperation. 22 March 1971 Council adopts plan to achieve Emu by 1980, soon derailed by international monetary turbulence. 22 January 1972 Accession Treaties of Denmark, Ireland, Norway, UK signed (but Norwegians reject theirs in referendum). 1 January 1973 Denmark, Ireland, UK join Community. 9–10 December 1974 Paris Summit decides to hold meetings three times a year as European Council and gives go-ahead for direct elections to European Parliament. 28 February 1975 Community and 46 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries sign Lomé Convention. 18 March 1975 European Regional Development Fund established. 22 July 1975 Amending Treaty signed, giving European Parliament more budgetary powers and setting up Court of Auditors. 4–5 December 1978 European Council establishes European Monetary System with Exchange Rate Mechanism based on ecu. 7, 10 June 1979 First direct elections to European Parliament. 1980s 1 January 1981 Greece becomes tenth member of Community. 14 February 1984 Draft Treaty on European Union, inspired by Spinelli, passed by big majority in European Parliament. 25–6 June 1984 Fontainebleau European Council agrees on rebate to reduce UK’s net contribution to Community budget. 7 January 1985 New Commission takes office, Delors President. 14 June 1985 Schengen Agreement eliminating border controls signed by Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands. 28–9 June 1985 European Council approves Commission project to complete single market by 1992; considers proposals from Parliament’s Draft Treaty; initiates IGC for Treaty amendment. 1 January 1986 Spain, Portugal accede, membership now 12. 17, 28 February 1986 Single European Act signed. 1 July 1987 Single European Act enters into force. 1 July 1988 Interinstitutional Agreement between Parliament, Council, Commission on budgetary discipline and procedure enters into force. 24 October 1988 Court of First Instance established. 9 November 1989 Fall of Berlin Wall. German Democratic Republic opens borders. 8–9 December 1989 European Council initiates IGC on Emu; all save UK adopt charter of workers’ social rights. 1990s 28 April 1990 European Council agrees policy on German unification and relations with Central and East European states. 29 May 1990 Agreement signed to establish European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 19 June 1990 Second Schengen Agreement signed. 20 June 1990 EEC and Efta start negotiations to create European Economic Area (EEA). 25–6 June 1990 European Council decides to call IGC on political union, parallel with that on Emu. 3 October 1990 Unification of Germany and de facto enlargement of Community. 14–15 December 1990 European Council launches IGCs on Emu and political union. 9–10 December 1991 European Council agrees TEU (Maastricht Treaty). 16 December 1991 ‘Europe Agreements’ with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia signed; those with Czech Republic and Slovakia (successors to Czechoslovakia), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia follow at intervals. 7 February 1992 Maastricht Treaty signed. 2 May 1992 Agreement on EEA signed. 2 June 1992 Danish referendum rejects Maastricht Treaty. 20 September 1992 French referendum narrowly approves Maastricht Treaty. 6 December 1992 Swiss referendum rejects joining EEA; attempt to join EU shelved. 11–12 December 1992 European Council offers Denmark special arrangements to facilitate Treaty ratification; endorses Delors package of budgetary proposals; agrees to start accession negotiations with Austria, Norway, Sweden, Finland. 31 December 1992 Bulk of single market legislation completed on time. 18 May 1993 Second Danish referendum accepts Maastricht Treaty. 21–2 June 1993 Copenhagen European Council declares associated Central and East European states can join when they fulfil the political and economic conditions. 1 November 1993 Maastricht Treaty enters into force. 28 November 1994 Norwegian referendum rejects accession. 1 January 1995 Austria, Finland, Sweden join, membership now 15. 12 July 1995 European Parliament appoints first Union Ombudsman. 26 July 1995 Member states sign Europol Convention. 31 December 1995 EC–Turkey customs union enters into force. 29 March 1996 IGC to revise Maastricht Treaty begins. 2 October 1997 Amsterdam Treaty signed. 12 March 1998 Accession negotiations open with Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia. 3 May 1998 Council decides 11 states ready to adopt euro on 1 January 1999. 1 June 1998 European Central Bank established. 24–5 October 1998 European Council agrees measures of defence cooperation. 31 December 1998 Council fixes irrevocable conversion rates between euro and currencies of participating states. 1 January 1999 Euro becomes official currency of Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain. 15 March 1999 Commission resigns following report by independent committee on allegations of mismanagement and fraud. 1 May 1999 Amsterdam Treaty enters into force. 10–11 December 1999 European Council decides on accession negotiations with six more states; recognizes Turkey as applicant; initiates IGC for Treaty revision. 2000s 15 January 2000 Accession negotiations open with Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Slovakia. 20 June 2000 Lisbon European Council agrees measures for flexibility in EU economy. 28 September 2000 Danish voters reject membership of euro in referendum. 7–10 December 2000 European Council concludes negotiations for Nice Treaty and solemnly proclaims the Charter of Fundamental Rights. 1 January 2001 Greece becomes 12th member of the Eurozone. 7 June 2001 Irish voters reject Treaty of Nice in a referendum. 14–15 December 2001 Laeken European Council agrees declaration on future of Union, opening way for a wholesale reform process. 1 January 2002 Euro notes and coins enter into circulation. 28 February 2002 Convention on the Future of the EU opens in Brussels. 19 October 2002 Irish voters approve Treaty of Nice in a second referendum. 12–13 December 2002 Copenhagen European Council concludes accession negotiations with ten countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. 1 February 2003 Treaty of Nice enters into force. 14 September 2003 Swedish voters reject membership of euro in a referendum. 4 October 2003 IGC opens to consider treaty reform on basis of Convention’s draft EU constitution. 1 May 2004 Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia join the Union, making 25 member states. 29 June 2004 Barroso nominated new Commission President. 29 October 2004 Heads of State and Government and the EU Foreign Ministers sign the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. 29 May, 1 June 2005 French and Dutch voters reject Constitutional Treaty in referendums. 3 October 2005 Accession negotiations open with Turkey and Croatia. 1 January 2007 Bulgaria and Romania become the 26th and 27th member states of the Union.


Girlfriend in a coma by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, kremlinology

The photos sit on a stack beside flowers from the mayor as well as from various studios and film production companies wishing to purchase rights to her life story. On top of it all, the world itself has changed. Karen must try and absorb seventeen years of global changes. That can wait. And she thinks she'll go crazy if one more person tells her that the Berlin Wall came down and AIDS exists in the world. One week later, Wendy still can't comprehend Karen's return to the living and her complete retention of all her brain power. Wendy knows the medical statistics. To others, Karen's awakening is a lottery win - a prize behind Door Number 3, a pair of snowmobiles.

Wendy is concerned about swamping Karen with too much information or too much novelty. As a doctor, she can limit certain things. Richard has been coming in with the annual volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and teaching Karen about the new years leading up to 1997. He is already at 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AIDS quilt - Karen must be so amazed at this. And then there's crack. Cloning. Life on Mars. Velcro. Charles and Diana. MAC cosmetics. Imagine learning so much stuff at once. Karen and Pam have spent some hours sifting through style magazines together; Wendy beamed with pleasure at the sight - so much like the old days.

I told her, imagine walking a million miles . . . in heels, and she kind of got it." "Hey, Karen, don't shit me. That's crap. I could have told you that. There's other stuff. You know there is. How does it feel? I mean, seventeen years. Spill. And if you don't spill I'll spend the next hour telling you about the Berlin Wall coming down and AIDS." Only Hamilton can speak to her like this. Brat. He's always been able to go way off the edge with Karen. She likes him for this. "Well, okay, Hamilton. As one bullshitter to another. Very well." The Jeep is on the highway now, headed west toward Horseshoe Bay. The day is becoming pale blue and clean and cold.


pages: 291 words: 85,908

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

How had this poor patient, in many ways so typical of Russians of his generation, an everyman almost, come to be in this mortal struggle and at the centre of a major international crisis? His story is in many ways an allegory. Certainly it guides us through decades of distrust and espionage between Russia and its Western rivals. It was a battle that never stopped after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, simply paused for a year or two, then resumed, growing more intense and merciless with the passage of time. For Skripal, that conflict had produced a personal reckoning twenty-two years before the poisoning, in an altogether happier time and place. PART ONE AGENT 1 THE PITCH It is high summer in Madrid, 1996.

At home, in many of the USSR’s republics, from the Baltic coast to the Caucasus mountains, the Kremlin’s liberal policies allowed an upsurge of nationalism and protest. To the officers at GRU headquarters it was all very worrying. This Gorbachev was loved in the West precisely, they felt, because he was giving everything away. The whole socialist bloc was crumbling. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, matters just seemed to accelerate. Friendly governments collapsed across Eastern Europe and in London or Washington the intelligence analysts began to pick up rumblings in the military and party of a possible coup. That confrontation between Gorbachev and those who took it upon themselves to protect the achievements of socialism eventually came to a head in August 1991.

Jim noted that there was a 50 per cent drop in the number of SVR officers operating in the UK. Facing budget cuts the SVR had come to a deal with the Foreign Ministry, reducing the number of spooks, and with it the potential for embarrassment with the Western countries that befriended Boris Yeltsin’s democratic government. The fall of the Berlin Wall had led to some obvious possibilities for economies in the spy business. Western agencies no longer had to track the activities of the KGB’s fraternal Eastern Bloc services, from East Germany to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. They had become democracies, most dissolving the spying agencies that had become hated symbols of the old system of power.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It’s hard to identify the moment when the dispersal and decay of power, and the decline of the Weberian bureaucratic ideal, began—much less to do so in the precise way with which, say, the poet Philip Larkin pinpointed the advent of the sexual revolution: “Between the end of the Chatterley ban” and the Beatles’ first album.2 Still, November 9, 1989—the date the Berlin Wall fell—is not a bad place to start. Loosening half a continent from tyranny’s grip, unlocking borders, and opening new markets, the end of the Cold War and its animating ideological and existential struggle undermined the rationale for a vast national security state and the commitment of economic, political, and cultural resources that supported it.

As General William Odom, Ronald Reagan’s National Security Agency director, observed: “By creating a security umbrella over Europe and Asia, Americans lowered the business transaction costs in all these regions: North America, Western Europe and Northeast Asia all got richer as a result.”3 Now those lower transaction costs could be extended, and with them also the promise of greater economic freedom. Slightly more than a year after thousands of Germans took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, in December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border, sent the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol and a server via the Internet, thereby creating the World Wide Web. That invention, in turn, sparked a global communications revolution that has left no part of our lives untouched.

In almost every year until the early 1980s, at least one new country in Africa, the Caribbean, or Pacific achieved independence. The colonial empires were gone but the Soviet empire—both the formal structure of the Soviet Union, and the de facto empire of the Eastern Bloc—remained. That would soon change, too, thanks to another “tryst with destiny.” November 9, 1989, saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall and launched the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. In just four years, between 1990 and 1994, the United Nations added twenty-five members. Since then the flow has slowed but not completely stopped. East Timor joined the United Nations in 2002; Montenegro, in 2006. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became the world’s newest sovereign state.


The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career by Elizabeth Kruempelmann

Berlin Wall, business climate, corporate governance, different worldview, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, global village, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, young professional

To help you work through and reflect on your life abroad, it can be rewarding to share your experiences, pictures, and memories with other global citizens who also have exciting C U LT U R E P R E P : A M I N I - C O U R S E FOR THE C U LT U R A L L Y C H A L L E N G E D 55 Reverse Culture Shock by Elizabeth Kruempelmann (ekruempe@hotmail.com) I experienced reverse culture shock when I returned to the States after a year studying abroad in Denmark and Germany. My senses were overloaded the whole time I was abroad. In addition to my business studies and field trips, I traveled to fifteen countries, experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, learned two languages, and lived with a Danish family, Danish students, and a German family. My senses were stimulated almost every minute. When I returned home, there was simply nothing that stimulated my senses anymore. My mind had been programmed to speak foreign languages every day. Suddenly I had no outlet for all the words I was used to using regularly.

It’s one thing to learn about European business at an American university taught by American professors, and it is quite another thing to study it in a European capital, where you are taught by prominent experts who can arrange company visits and field studies in other European and Eastern European cities. Sharing your cultural perspective will no doubt lead to lively and enriching intellectual exchanges. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Eastern Europe opened its doors to the West, it was a historical turning point for Europe. During my study-abroad exchange in Denmark, my professors—many of whom experienced firsthand World War II, the building of the Wall, and the subsequent division of Europe into East and West—gave us their personal perspectives.

My Danish professors occasionally joined the students after class at the local pub, and one professor even invited the entire class to his house for tea. Being able to chat with the professors in a casual manner about topics both related and unrelated to our course was so educational. We discussed a variety of topics affecting Europe at the time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the economic and political issues facing the European Union. The learning opportunities that exist outside the classroom can sometimes be even more rewarding than those in the classroom. A P P R E C I AT E D I F F E R E N T C U LT U R E S During a learning-abroad program you will interact on a daily basis with your host family, other students, teachers, and a local community that may deal with daily matters much differently than you.


pages: 434 words: 114,583

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

A native of the Sudetenland, which had been part of Austria before World War I and became part of Czechoslovakia afterward, Porsche was already prominent in the fledgling auto industry. He had built a battery-powered car around the turn of the century and during World War I oversaw motorization of Austrian artillery at the Skoda automobile works in what is now the Czech Republic. (Many years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Volkswagen would acquire Skoda.) Between the wars, working mostly as an independent contractor, Porsche designed and built a series of innovative race cars for companies including Daimler-Benz and Auto-Union, which would later become part of Audi. Though he had never earned a university degree and was largely self-taught, Porsche’s reputation as an engineer was such that Josef Stalin tried to lure him to the Soviet Union to oversee vehicle construction there.

The improved motor still had a bit of a growl, but it was no longer prone to blowing clouds of black exhaust like the diesels of old. Volkswagen called the result TDI, or turbocharged direct injection. It took eleven years to perfect. Audi unveiled its first TDI model, an Audi 100 sedan, at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1989, a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Piëch was proud of the innovation, which used an onboard computer to manage the engine, then a novelty. The five-cylinder engine in the Audi 100 used two liters less fuel per 100 kilometers of driving than the competition, he bragged. At the same time, the car accelerated more quickly and ran more cleanly.

As is so often the case with makers of desirable, expensive sports cars, Porsche was not always profitable. Sports cars are luxury goods rather than necessities, and sales can plunge steeply during economic downturns or stock market crashes when potential buyers decide to cancel or postpone purchases. That was especially true before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Until the 1990s, when markets in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China began to open up, Porsche was dependent on Europe and the United States. When both suffered recessions in the early 1990s, Porsche sales plunged so precipitously that the company suffered three money-losing years in a row and was close to bankruptcy.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

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

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

Passell, ‘5 facts about unauthorized immigration in Europe’, Pew Research Center, 14 November 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/5-facts-about-unauthorized-immigration-in-europe/ 19 Germany had 1 million to 1.2 million, the UK between 800,000 and 1.2 million, Italy 500,000 to 700,000 and France 300,000 to 400,000. 20 Julie Hirschfeld Davies and Michael Shear, Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration, Simon & Schuster, 2019. 21 Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davies, ‘Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border’, New York Times, 1 October 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html 22 ‘Berlin Wall guards had ‘shoot to kill’ orders’, Mail Online, 12 August 2007. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-474885/Berlin-Wall-guards-shoot-kill-orders.html 23 Victoria Vernon and Klaus F. Zimmermann, ‘Walls and Fences: A Journey Through History and Economics’, GLO Discussion Paper 330, 2019. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/193640/1/GLO-DP-0330.pdf 24 ‘The Cost of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security’, American Immigration Council, 14 October 2019. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security 25 ‘Main Estimates Memorandum (2019/20) for the Home Office’. https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/home-affairs/Estimates-Memoranda-17-19/Home-Office-2019-20-Main-Estimate-Memorandum.pdf 26 Jorge Valero, ‘EU will spend more on border and migration control than on Africa’, EURACTIV, 6 August 2018. https://www.euractiv.com/section/africa/news/for-tomorrow-eu-will-spend-more-on-border-and-migration-control-than-on-africa/ 27 Nicolaj Nielsen, ‘EU and Italy put aside €285m to boost Libyan coast guard’, EUobserver, 29 November 2017. https://euobserver.com/migration/140067 28 Jorge Valero, ‘EU will spend more on border and migration control than on Africa’, EURACTIV, 6 August 2018, Table 2.1.1. https://www.euractiv.com/section/africa/news/for-tomorrow-eu-will-spend-more-on-border-and-migration-control-than-on-africa/ 29 ‘Smuggling of migrants’, Migration Data Portal.

In the meantime the Pakistani parents of Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, moved to the UK, and his father also became a bus driver.5 Among the final arrivals in 1972–73, before the door slammed shut, were South Asian refugees expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin’s brutal dictatorship. They included Rumi Verjee, now a Liberal Democrat lord, who made his fortune by franchising Domino’s Pizza in the UK. Across Europe Migration to Western Europe took off again in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many moved from east to west – including ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and nearly a million refugees from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Among them were the Bosnian parents of Zlatan Ibrahimović, the star Swedish striker.

In Japan the median age is already forty-eight and without migration it will rise to fifty-five by 2040.25 Without migration, Germany’s median age would hit fifty in 2040, while the UK’s would be forty-five and the US’s forty-three.26 Even if, as is likely, more people continue working into their late sixties and even their seventies out of choice or necessity, thereby alleviating the demographic decline of the workforce, only the arrival of newcomers can inject youthful dynamism into the workforce, since even an unlikely baby boom would not yield additional local workers until the 2040s. Local rejuvenation The Children of Golzow is a famous documentary series in Germany. Starting in 1961 an East German film crew filmed eighteen residents of the town at regular intervals from childhood to adulthood. The series continued even after the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited. But since then the population of Golzow, which lies near the country’s eastern border with Poland, has dwindled. ‘The big collective farm here closed. People lost their jobs. Younger folks started moving to the cities, and suddenly there were empty houses,’ explains Gaby Thomas, the director of the primary school that featured in the series.27 Eventually, a lack of children threatened the school with closure.


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Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

“We need a real change in consciousness”—a Marxist throwback to the notion of false consciousness—“and a new stakeholder culture.”36 This cut little ice with the ex-Marxist Gärtner. In a riposte, he noted the East German dictator Walter Ulbricht’s infamous assertion: “Nobody has the intention to build a wall” two months before the Berlin Wall went up. “Nobody has the intention to erect dictatorship,” Leggewie insists, but then argues for democracy-by-plebiscite, which would be dictatorial for people with dissenting opinions. The eco-transformation was all about the administration of “one world” and the rationing of carbon dioxide and other necessities of life through a world government, Gärtner charged.37 The renewed debate had been sparked by prepublicity surrounding the WBGU’s 2011 flagship report.

The New York Times reported that the mock trial drew strong parallels between Auschwitz and Hiroshima, belabored the United States for its purportedly aggressive nuclear weapons posture and, in the main, had little critical to say about the Soviet Union. The event, in the view of some, was shot through with the Greens’ left-wing nationalism that casts West Germany as victimized by the United States and hobbled by its NATO connection.43 It was different on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Bahro recounts what happened when Kelly and her companion, Gert Bastian, an ex-NATO general who had quit to head the Peace Movement’s Generals for Peace and Disarmament, and other Green activists were arrested in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. As soon as the East Berlin authorities realized what was happening, they began to apologize.

“I had not read a single book on renewable energy. I just did my own thinking and I wrote a chapter suggesting a new SDI, the Solar Development Initiative,” Scheer replied.21 Unsurprisingly Scheer found little to celebrate in the ending of the Cold War. In A Solar Manifesto, published four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Scheer condemned the leaders of the West for “their self-deceiving euphoria of victory.”22 Even so, Scheer managed to profit from this apparent reverse. Intended as a postreunification boost to small-scale hydro schemes, the 1991 Electricity Feed-In Act had Scheer’s fingerprints all over it. It rewarded the most inefficient generating technologies with a sliding scale of guaranteed prices for privately generated electricity (99 pfennigs [60¢] per kWh for solar PV down to 15 pfennigs [9¢] per kWh for small hydro schemes).


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Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Fierce Dancing filled in the blanks, it told the stories of the alternative cultures – pagans, new age travellers, punks and drop-outs – that had coalesced around this scene and contributed to its vibrancy. It told tales of women who gardened vegetable plots in no knickers, tepee valleys in the depths of Wales, and how to make poppy tea. It was, in that most adolescent sense, a revelation. And to an adolescent growing up in the consumerist nineties, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years into the rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party where alternative ideas about how to live seemed only to exist to sell ice cream and health drinks, it was also an escape. I’d often wondered what had happened to all the hippies. My favourite film at that time was Easy Rider.

A flying saucer spiked on a giant needle, it is the perfect vision of Soviet futurism. Twenty yards from the door at which it looks like my journey will end prematurely, a flock of municipal exhibition stands have come to rest on Alexanderplatz, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Black and white photos of GDR rebels – crouched over printing presses pumping out samizdat, or else in small groups, smoking – look nonchalantly into the lens of posterity. Who took these photos? Which of their fellow freedom fighters knew we would want to look back on this congregation of young minds which changed the course of history?

The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldnt the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if youre hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?…Would you rather have privacy or terrorists? The dialogue reflects a shift in Cory’s own thinking, but in the opposite direction. As he’s grown up he’s had to confront some of his youthful beliefs about the power of technology to make the world more free. The year the Berlin Wall came down Cory was 17 and, as he writes in the prologue to Little Brother, “communications tools were being used to bring information – and revolution – to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen.” But for the 17-year-olds of today, computers are no longer benign.


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The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, edge city, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Honoré de Balzac, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

Bachman To EDIT BORNSTEIN, AVNER RICHARD GOREN, LOBELL, R I C H A R D AND V A R D A N O W I T Z , AND H A R R Y W A L L B E F O R E T H E N A M E S OF J U S T A N D CAN HAVE PLACE, THERE MUST BE SOME COERCIVE —Thomas Hobbes, UNJUST POWER. LEVIATHAN PREFACE The years that follow an epochal military and political victory such as the fall of the Berlin Wall are lonely times for realists. The victors naturally assume that their struggle carries deep significance, of a kind that cannot fail to redeem the world. In­ deed, the harder and longer the struggle, the greater its mean­ ing in the mind of the winning side, and the greater the benefits it sees for humanity.

The only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within West Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside world are in various ways becom­ ing more impenetrable. But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November 1989,1 happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, re­ vealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert.

A Theory of International Relations, 177,178 Atatiirk, Kemal, 38 Athens, ancient, 60-61, 73, 76, 94-96 Atlanta, Olympic Games in, 84-85 Atlantic Monthly, The, 3, 59,105, 111, 119,127 Aung San Suu Kyi, 78-79 Aurelian, 113 Austria, 131, 138,141 authoritarianism, 60-61, 64, 70, 72-79, 80 in China, 64-65, 71 new, 72-79 Roman, 111-17 Azerbaijan, 28, 67 Azeri Turks, 28, 50 B Baghdad, 102 Baker, James, 127 balance of power, 103 Balkans, 18, 29,43,47, 65,124, 138-41,178 U.S. intervention in, 139-40 war, 29-30, 99-103,139 Ball, George, 144 Bangladesh, 20, 24, 53 Barnevik, Percy, 82 BBC, 6 Begin, Menachem, 152 Beijing, 27 Beirut, 62,151-52 Bellow, Saul, 54,172 Benin, 14,16 Berlin, Isaiah, 72-73 Berlin Wall, fall of, 57 Bhutto, Benazir, 52, 74 birth rates, 51, 69,123; see also population growth Bismarck, Otto von, 70 Bombay, 27 borders, 18 and cultural conflict, 26-30 erosion, 7-8,40,130 and mapmaking, 37-43 in West Africa, 12-16,40, 42, 57 Bosnia, 22, 29, 44, 47, 79, 80,105,107, 180 democracy in, 63 mass murder in, 99-103 U.S. intervention in, 139-40 Brandeis, Louis, 83 Brazil, 19, 21, 83,179 democracy in, 64 Buchanan, Pat, 119 Bulgaria, 182 Burke, Edmund, 116,135-36 Burma, 78-79,107 Burton, Sir Richard Francis, 16,17, 108 Burundi, 123 Buttimer, Anne, Geography and the Human Spirit, 50 C Cairo, 36, 53 Calcutta, 27, 36 Cambodia, 79, 80, 96,134 mass murder in, 99-101 Nixon/Kissinger policy in, 144, 145-52 Cameroon, 14 Canada, 56, 77,107 Caracalla, Emperor, 114 Carlucci, Frank, 139 Carnegie, Andrew, 88 Carr, E.


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

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

All this was an extraordinary experience for peoples who had been prevented from determining their collective destinies for generations. They were finally citizens. In the United States the picture was very different. Though Ronald Reagan publicly supported pro-democracy groups like Solidarity in Poland and dramatically called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, at home he had been elected by people who could no longer quite see the point of arguing about the common good and engaging politically to achieve it. A new outlook on life had been gaining ground in the United States, one in which the needs and desires of individuals were given near-absolute priority over those of society.

When the bond of citizenship is badly cast or has been allowed to weaken, there is a natural tendency for subpolitical attachments to become paramount in people’s minds. We see this in every failed American effort to export democracy abroad. And we are also seeing it in Eastern Europe today, a particularly tragic development. Within a few years after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, democratic institutions were established there. But not a sense of shared citizenship, which is the work of generations. Democracies without democrats do not last. They decay, into oligarchy, theocracy, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, authoritarian one-party rule, or some combination of these.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

“Wages, Capital and Top Incomes: The Factor Income Composition of Top Incomes in the USA, 1960–2005.” Unpublished ms., November version. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2013. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper, no. 6719, December. Available at http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6719. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2015. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Economic Review, Advance Access published August 12, 2015, doi: 10.1093/wber/lhv039. Landes, David. 1961. “Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism.”

Reading about global inequality is nothing less than reading about the economic history of the world. This book opens with the description and analysis of the most significant changes in income distributions that have occurred globally since 1988, using data from household surveys. The year 1988 is a convenient starting point because it coincides almost exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and reintegration of the then-communist economies into the world economic system. This event was preceded, just a few years earlier, by a similar reintegration of China. These two political changes are not unrelated to the increased availability of household surveys, which are the key source from which we can glean information about changes in global inequality.

(People are ranked by after-tax household per capita income expressed in dollars of equal purchasing power; for details of how income comparisons between countries are made, see Excursus 1.1.)1 The vertical axis shows the cumulative growth in real income (income adjusted for inflation and differences in price levels between the countries) between 1988 and 2008. This twenty-year period coincides almost exactly with the years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the global financial crisis. It covers the period that may be called “high globalization,” an era that has brought into the ambit of the interdependent world economy first China, with a population of more than one billion people, and then the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with about half a billion people.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

By November 1, the East Germans had removed their border controls with Czechoslovakia, which a few days later removed its border with West Germany. At that point, the East German government figured that it would not make much difference if East Germans could travel directly to West Berlin. The announcement of the policy change on November 9, 1989, encouraged hundreds of thousands of would-be emigrants to gather on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Once again, the military refused to fire, and the wall was breached. By December, the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany had begun negotiating with the opposition and had officially abandoned Marxist-Leninism. The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe succeeded in large part because the Soviet Union lacked both the resources and the will to intervene.

Crushing living standards to support the military was possible—Stalin had done it, after all—but it would have required domestic repression on a scale that Mikhail Gorbachev, who had ascended to the top of the party’s leadership in 1985, was uninterested in, and probably incapable of, imposing. Instead, Gorbachev’s priorities were softening the authoritarianism of his regime and repairing relations with the West. This gave the Central and Eastern Europeans their window of opportunity.3 Germany Restored When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, it was not immediately obvious that the two Germanys would reunite as quickly as they did. The biggest hurdle was diplomatic: the division of Germany had prevented the finalization of the peace treaty to officially end World War II. Reunification, however, would have established “a government adequate for the purpose” of negotiating a settlement with the original Allies.

The incumbent Socialist Unity Party quickly rebranded into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which promised a gentler form of leftism. It was led by a reformist leader who opposed the authoritarian repression of his predecessors. Party leaders hoped that they could do well enough in free elections to have a legitimate claim to rule. Things did not work out that way. On November 28, less than three weeks after the Berlin Wall was breached, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl presented the Bundestag with a ten-point plan for closer integration between the two Germanys. Most important was point number five, which stated that the West was prepared “to develop confederative structures between both states in Germany, with the aim of creating a federation” if East Germany were willing to become a democracy.


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Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

With a straight face Kaplan, who is Jewish, replied, “To me you will have to say ”Happy Hanukkah.”“Why would I have to say ‘Happy Honecker’?” asked the official, puzzled. The Americans burst out laughing at the official’s assumption that Kaplan is referring to Erich Honecker, who fled to Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier. The mistake is understandable. The disgraced East German leader is in the news again this morning. The seventy-nine-year-old communist hard-liner was given compassionate asylum in Moscow by Gorbachev, who privately regards him as an “asshole” but who felt he should protect an old comrade.

At a Foreign Ministry briefing Gerasimov called this the Frank Sinatra doctrine—they could do it their way. It led to a series of counterrevolutions throughout 1989, in which one communist regime after another in Eastern Europe was ousted. They began in Poland and spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Berlin Wall fell in November, leading to German reunification a year later. Aware that if Yeltsin won a contested seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies, he would have a popular mandate, the Soviet leader set a trap for his most strident critic. He fixed the rules so that government ministers could only stand for election if they resigned their posts.

The warm relationship with his counterparts abroad is most important to the Soviet president. It is a measure of his international standing, a recognition of what he has achieved in reforming the Soviet Union, and an assurance of global approval for lessening world tensions, reversing the nuclear arms race, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall, and letting Eastern European countries have their freedom. Chernyaev knocks on the door of the resting room. It takes Gorbachev five minutes to compose himself and come out. He looks fresh and fit, but his eyes are teary. Grachev notes a slight redness, caused either by lack of sleep or perhaps the shedding of a few tears provoked by the tension of the final days.


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

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

Even before the USSR collapsed East German scientists got sobering glimpses of the price they were going to pay for decades of isolation from their more advanced West German peers. In 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain weakened enough to allow some 400,000 Germans from the East to visit the West, and 1 percent of her scientists relocated westward. Those scientists who went west told colleagues back home that they found their skills woefully backward. In particular, the almost complete lack of computer skills and knowledge of computer-driven research tools put the Easterners twenty years behind.155 And after the fall of the Berlin Wall the West German scientists were shocked to see how completely the Communist Party controlled Eastern science, allowing dogma to carry greater weight than such seemingly irrefutable foundations as the law of physics.156 Czechoslovakia awoke from its 1990 Velvet Revolution to the realization that most of its fifteen thousand scientists had been cowed or jailed after the Soviet invasion of 1968.

Noril’sk was at the extreme end of a Soviet ecological legacy that could be felt from East Berlin all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In Bohemia, the Czech Republic, fifty years of strip mining and coal smelting had devastated what once was the preferred vacation site of the Hapsburgs and aristocracy all over Central Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave West Germans a shocking look at the industrial filth and putrid air of their eastern countrymen. The Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were suffering from an insane irrigation scheme begun by Lenin, draining the vast, landlocked Aral Sea to provide water for cotton fields, resulting in elevated throat cancer due to environmental dust.64 The visual and physical filth was pervasive.

By 1991, according to the World Health Organization, only 60 percent of Russia’s children under five years of age had received the three doses of diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccines necessary to ensure immunity—even though WHO experts contended a 95 percent rate was needed to prevent epidemics. The antivaccine sentiment had even reached Germany, on both sides of the Berlin Wall, where diphtheria vaccination was incomplete or absent altogether for nearly a quarter of the adult population in 1997.94 And that was only one part of the story, statistics showed. Russian measles vaccine coverage was only 78 percent in 1991; its polio coverage a mere 71 percent; and virtually no girls were vaccinated against rubella.95 The diphtheria epidemic first surfaced in the USSR in 1987, when the number of confirmed cases reached 2,000.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

The acceleration then takes place in the 2000s rather than the mid-­ 1990s.16 Since this represents a more recent phenomenon, maybe it has not registered for everyone yet. See table 2 in the appendix to this chapter. Using a different database, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (“Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719, Washington, DC, 2013) found the same drop in inequality in the 2000s, although less pronounced than in table 2. Two recent draft papers reach the same conclusion. The first one, by Miguel Niño-­Zarazay, Laurence Roopez, and Finn Tarp, “Global Interpersonal Inequality: Trends and Measurement” (WIDER Working Paper 2014/004) based on GDP per capita normalized data finds that the drop in global inequality may have started around 1980.

The defining institutional change in the last quarter of the twentieth century was undoubtedly the deregulation of markets and the process of economic liberalization, launched at the end of the 1970s in the United States by the Reagan administration and in the United Kingdom by the Thatcher government. This would later spread to the rest of the world, with a significant acceleration after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These reforms sought to relax what were seen as the overly strict regulations that states had placed on markets in the aftermath of the finan- 92 Chapter 3 cial crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War, and to liberate individual initiative from what were seen as stifling levels of taxation and regulation.

Index 9/11 attacks, 139 Abacha, 151 Abu Dhabi, 127 Africa: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and, 156; evolution of inequality and, 46t, 54–55; fairer globalization and, 147, 151, 154–56, 179, 183; global inequality and, 16, 21, 23, 30–31, 34, 36; globalization and, 122–23, 126–27; population growth and, 183; rise in inequality and, 90, 109, 111–12, 185 African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), 155 agriculture, 12, 82, 84, 122–23, 127–28, 155 AIDS, 156 Alesina, Alberto, 134 Anand, Sudhir, 13n4 Argentina, 46t, 110, 172 artists, 86–87 Asian dragons, 34, 82 Bangladesh, 30, 46t, 54 Belgium, 46t, 53, 101–2, 169 Berlin Wall, 91 Big Bang, 95 Bolivia, 16, 24 Bolsa Familia, 166 bonuses, 87, 174 Bottom Billion, The (Collier), 23 Brazil, 110, 186; evolution of inequality and, 46t, 55, 59, 70; fairer globalization and, 150, 154, 166–68, 173; Gini coeffi- cient of, 22; global inequality and, 21–23; globalization and, 127, 133 Buffett, Warren, 5–6, 159–60 Cameroon, 46t, 54 Canada, 46t, 51f capital: developed/developing countries and, 5; evolution of inequality and, 55–58, 60, 73; fairer globalization and, 158–62, 167, 171, 175, 182; GDP measurement and, 13–15, 20–21, 23, 26, 27f, 29–30, 39, 41–45, 56–57, 94, 123, 127, 165–66, 176; globalization and, 117, 125–26, 132, 137; human, 74, 167, 175; labor and, 3–4, 55– 58, 60, 158, 161n7, 185; liberalization and, 96; mobility of, 3, 73–74, 93, 98–99, 115, 160, 162, 182, 185; rise in inequality and, 74, 76–80, 84–85, 89, 93, 95–99, 103, 109, 114–15; taxes and, 187, 189 (see also taxes) Card, David, 105–6 Caruso, Enrico, 86 Checchi, Daniele, 107 China: evolution of inequality and, 47, 53, 57–60; fairer globalization and, 150, 154, 165–66, 172, 178; geographical disequilibria and, 83; global inequality and, 16; globalization and, 120– 22, 128; Huajian and, 155; Human Development Report and, 25; international trade and, 75; Kuznets hypothesis and, 192 China (cont.) 113; protectionism and, 178; Revolution of, 26; rise in inequality and, 2, 11n2, 17, 25, 30, 36, 38, 46t, 75, 82–83, 112–13; standard of living and, 16, 120– 22; taxes and, 165 Cold War, 149, 153 Collier, Paul, 23 Colombia, 133 commodity prices, 147, 182 competition: Asian dragons and, 34, 82; deindustrialization and, 75–82; effect of new players and, 75–76; emerging economies and, 178, 187–88; fairer globalization and, 155, 169, 173, 176–79, 182; globalization and, 117–18, 130; markets and, 76– 77, 79–82, 84, 86, 94–98, 102, 104, 115–18, 130, 155, 169, 173, 176–79, 182, 186–88; offshoring and, 81–82; rents and, 102; rise in inequality and, 76– 77, 79–82, 84, 86, 94–96, 98, 102, 104, 115–16; Southern perspective on, 82–85; United Kingdom and, 78–79; United States and, 78–79; wage ladder effects and, 78–79 conditional cash transfers, 165–66 consumers: fairer globalization and, 177–78; spending of, 10, 12–13, 61; subsidies and, 109–10 consumption: evolution of inequality and, 42t, 44t; expenditure per capita and, 13, 15, 42t, 44t; fairer globalization and, 159, 177; globalization and, 137–39; growth and, 13–15, 42t, 44t, 80, 137–39, 159, 177; protection- Index ism and, 7, 147, 154, 157, 176– 79; rise in inequality and, 80 convergence: evolution of inequality and, 65, 69; fairer globalization and, 146–47, 157; globalization and, 120–22, 125; growth and, 16; income and, 16; poverty reduction and, 147–48; standard of living and, 7, 147–48 credit: default swaps and, 139; evolution of inequality and, 61; fairer globalization and, 164–65, 172, 180; globalization and, 131–32, 137–40; rise in inequality and, 96; taxes and, 164 credit cards, 165 criminal activity, 133–34, 152 crises: evolution of inequality and, 48, 50, 54, 57, 73–74; fairer globalization and, 163, 176; Glass-­ Steagall Act and, 174n15; global inequality and, 20, 38–41; globalization and, 119–22, 125, 135–39, 142; recent, 48, 110, 135, 142, 163, 188; rise in inequality and, 92, 94, 96, 99, 109–11; “too big to fail” concept and, 174–75 Current Population Survey, 21 debit cards, 165 deindustrialization, 1, 102, 188; effects on developed countries, 75–82; exports and, 76, 82; globalization and, 120; international trade and, 75–76, 78–79; manufacturing and, 75–82, 84, 123; North vs.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

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

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

The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). Then, as the ‘short twentieth century’1 came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Anglosphere was reinvented once more, becoming a potent way of imagining Britain's future as a global, deregulated and privatised economy outside the EU. In this guise it forms an important part of the story of how Britain came to take the historic decision, in the summer of 2016, to leave the EU.

In her address to the English-Speaking Union in 1999 she unequivocally endorsed Conquest's thinking, remarking that ‘such an international alliance … would redefine the political landscape’ and, in the long term, transform ‘politically backward areas [by] creating the conditions for a genuine world community’.44 Like him, she drew a sharp contrast between the dynamism and cultural community associated with the Anglosphere, on the one hand, and the EU, on the other, which lacked the deeper set of shared values that had for so long sustained the Anglo-American and Anglosphere ideals. With tongue slightly in cheek, she reminded her audience that ‘God separated Britain from mainland Europe, and it was for a purpose.’45 She also revisited the vision developed by Churchill of Anglo-America as bedrock for the Western order in the post-war world. But now, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Cold War – both victories that she unequivocally claimed for the English-speaking peoples – Thatcher offered considerable encouragement to those pursuing the Anglosphere as a geo-political and economic alternative to European integration. Thatcher's public commitment to these ideas represented a notable shift in her own outlook and was prompted by her sharp turn against the EU.

Bennett, ‘The emerging Anglosphere’, Orbis, 46/1 (2002). 50  John O'Sullivan, ‘A British-led Anglosphere in world politics’, The Telegraph, 29 December 2007. 51  Hannan, How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters. 6 The Eurosceptic Anglosphere Emerges In the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proponents of the Anglosphere were required to reorientate their ambitions in the wake of some profound shifts in the global economy and the political environments in which they were operating. In the 1990s, American capitalist democracy was indisputably dominant, ideologically and economically.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Scarlett saw how the grimly effective simplicity of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had struck with numbing abruptness within the U.S. intelligence community. He wrote that what clearly emerged from the disaster was “a devastating pointer to U.S. intelligence failure.” Yet the signs had been there: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the First Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the collapse of Soviet Communism, the slide into anarchy in the Balkans, the emergence of al-Qaeda, the revolt of militants against the regimes in power across the Muslim world, and the rise of religious ideology into a powerful cohesive force that was daily expanding not only among the urban poor but to middle-class professionals.

The conclusion was that though Maxwell worked as a Mossad informer, he was primarily motivated to promote himself as a major dealmaker in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, like many other British businessmen and politicians, Maxwell was placed on the surveillance list that MI6 shared with MI5. While the collapse of the Berlin Wall had caught many analysts, including those in MI6, by surprise, McColl was not one of them. Neither did he share the view that the intelligence world would become an easier place in which to operate now that the threat of a superpower confrontation had vanished. With an already burnished career, McColl was recalled to London to continue his progress along the path that would eventually lead him to the top.

The NSA covers east of the mountains, including Japan and China, as well as North and South America and the Caribbean. Australia and New Zealand monitor the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. This global-eavesdropping network ensures there are no gaps in coverage. On their workstation screens at Fort Meade, people had watched the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and listened to President Mikhail Gorbachev say that Russia still had “its proper place as a superpower.” For his listeners it was sufficient reason for them to continue spying on an old enemy. At GCHQ the annual budget was increased to £600 million, making it by far the largest slice of the British intelligence funding, and it also received money to work on NSA black projects from funds hidden inside the costs of other U.S. defense projects.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. —Evolutionary theory We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy. —Georgi Arbatov, Soviet expert on the United States, speaking at the end of the Cold War It all seems so obvious now, but on the historic day when the Berlin Wall was cracked open—November 11, 1989—no one would have guessed that America was about to make the most dangerous mistake a country can make: We were about to misread our environment. We should have remembered Oscar Wilde’s admonition: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

All four—globalization, the IT revolution, out-of-control deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change—are occurring incrementally. Some of their most troubling features are difficult to detect, at least until they have reached crisis proportions. Save for the occasional category-5 hurricane or major oil spill, these challenges offer up no Hitler or Pearl Harbor to shock the nation into action. They provide no Berlin Wall to symbolize the threat to America and the world, no Sputnik circling the Earth proclaiming with every cricket-like chirp of its orbiting signal that we are falling behind in a crucial arena of geopolitical competition. We don’t see the rushing river of dollars we send abroad every month—about $28 billion—to sustain our oil addiction.

Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain on May 4, 1979. She and Ronald Reagan, who took office as president of the United States in 1981, implemented free-market-friendly economic policies that helped to pave the way for the expansion of globalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This increased economic activity the world over, massively increasing the number of people who could afford cars, motor scooters, electric appliances, and international travel. Less noticed but just as important, in 1979, three years after Mao Tse-tung’s death, China’s communist government permitted small farmers to raise their own crops on individual plots and to sell the surplus for their own profit.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

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

“Before we go,” he said, “take a look at this.” He brought me over to three slabs of freestanding pieces of concrete. I’d noticed them when we’d come in, but hadn’t particularly cared for the mural. Public art gives me a bad case of the shivers. “This is the Berlin Wall,” said Thomas Cromwell. “¿Qué es?” I asked. “These are parts of the Berlin Wall.” “I’ll be,” I said, running my fingers across the concrete. I’d witnessed the thing when it stood in Berlin, as a young girl on a continental tour with Daddy, Mother, and Dahlia. My father insisted that his daughters touch the wall, despite neither of us understanding its import.

Goes Gold OCTOBER 1993: Adeline Receives a Postcard DECEMBER 1993: Dorian Corey JANUARY 1994: Baby Attends the Launch for Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time FEBRUARY 1994: Baby Sees Schindler’s List FEBRUARY 1994: Karen Spencer MARCH 1994: Baby Adopts the King of France APRIL 1994: Baby’s New Novel MAY 1994: Baby Sees a Ghost JUNE 1994: Baby Turns In His Manuscript AUGUST 1994: Reunion AUGUST 1994: Reunion, Part Two NEW YEAR’S EVE 1994: Baby and Adeline Watch Television APRIL 1995: Baby and Adeline Go to Norman Mailer’s House APRIL 1995: Trouble in Club Land MAY 1995: Adeline Has Lunch with Thomas Cromwell, Touches the Berlin Wall (Again) JUNE 1995: Dinner at Tom and Aubrey’s NOVEMBER 1995: Suzanne Comes to New York City MARCH 1996: Baby Explains How the World Works APRIL 1996: Peter Gatien Fires Michael Alig APRIL 1996: Baby and Adeline Go to the Mars Bar APRIL 1996: Michael Musto Breaks a Story MAY 1996: Baby and Parker Play Pool JUNE 1996: Baby Looks for Michael SEPTEMBER 1996: Baby and Adeline See Freaks SEPTEMBER 1996: Baby Does an Event at the Union Square Barnes & Noble OCTOBER 1996: Baby Goes on a Book Tour NOVEMBER 1996: Baby Goes to Honey Trap DECEMBER 1996: Michael Alig Is Arrested DECEMBER 1996: Adeline Breaks the News DECEMBER 1996: Baby Attempts a New Book CHRISTMAS DAY 1996 About the Author SEPTEMBER 1986 Baby’s Parents Murder Each Other So Baby Goes to New York I moved to New York not long after my mother killed my father, or was it my father who murdered my mother?

JULY 1993 Daddy Was in KGB Gets a Good Review A bright moment occurred when the Bay Guardian featured Daddy Was in KGB as “Demo Tape O’ The Week.” Минерва rushed into the apartment, her pale face flushed with ruddy color. It was the first time in our friendship where she’d displayed unbridled enthusiasm. She seemed positively American. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the evaporation of Communism, it wasn’t a question of “if?” but of “when?” and “where?” I’m happy to report that the when is now and the where is here. Daddy Was in the KGB, a S.F. punk outfit made up of four women who’ve escaped the former Soviet States, offers a headcrunching, genre-bending response to the last few years of realpolitik.


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deskilling, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, language acquisition, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, theory of mind, Tobin tax, Turing test

Nor are they likely to be subjected to the results of a 1994 Gallup poll, considered to be the first independent and scientific survey, published in the Miami Spanish-language press but apparently not elsewhere: that 88 per cent said they were ‘proud of being Cuban’ and 58 per cent that ‘the revolution’s successes outstrip its failures’, 69 per cent identified themselves as ‘revolutionaries’ (but only 21 per cent as ‘Communist’ or ‘socialist’), 76 per cent said they were ‘satisfied with their personal life’, and 3 per cent said that ‘political problems’ were the key problems facing the country. If such Communist atrocities were to be known, it might be aecessary to nuke Havana instead of simply trying to kill as many people as possible from starvation and disease to bring ‘democracy’. That became the new pretext for strangling Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall, the ideological institutions not missing a beat as they shifted gears. No longer was Cuba an agent of the Kremlin, bent on taking over Latin America and conquering the United States, trembling in terror. The lies of 30 years can be quietly shelved: terror and economic warfare have always been an attempt to bring democracy, in the revised standard version.

Many times, in fact, though the US has sometimes been able to mobilise El Salvador, Romania, and a few others to the cause of justice and freedom; and in the Security Council, Britain is fairly reliable, taking second place in vetoes (France a distant third) since the 1960s, when Moscow’s dominance became intolerable to true democrats.4 As Kennedy’s ‘monolithic and ruthless conspiracy’ engaged in world conquest faded from the scene in the 1980s, the search was on for new aggressors threatening our borders and our lives. Libya, disliked and defenceless, served as a particularly useful punching bag for courageous Reaganites. Other candidates include crazed Arabs generally, international terrorists, or whoever else can be conjured up. When George Bush celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by invading Panama, it was not in defence against Communism; rather, the demon Noriega, captured, tried, and condemned for his crimes, almost all committed while he was on the CIA payroll. At this moment, half of US military aid goes to Colombia, the hemisphere’s leading human rights violator, with a shocking record of atrocities.

But the primary threat is ‘Third World weapons proliferation’, Air Force Director of Science and Technology General Richard Paul informed Jane’s. We must maintain military spending and strengthen the ‘defense industrial base’ because of ‘the growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts’, the Bush Administration had explained to Congress while watching the Berlin Wall collapse, taking with it the most efficient pretext for ‘subsidy’. No one who has kept their eyes on the ‘security system’ will be surprised to learn that both threats are to be enhanced. Some of the funding for the emergency Pentagon supplement is to be drawn from programs to help dismantle and safeguard the nuclear arsenals of the former USSR.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Small wonder that the Great Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.”15 The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of blood and terror. The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere.

The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, encompassing the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship—Ronald Reagan’s favorite Latin American regime. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” of the Hoover Institution scholars, who is now revered for his achievements. The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin Wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy of liberation theology, the culmination of a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.” The victors in the war against the Church declared their responsibility with pride.

Contrary to fifty years of deceit, it was quietly conceded that the main concern in this region was not the Russians, but rather what is called “radical nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism not under U.S. control.3 All of this has evident bearing on the received standard version, but it passed unnoticed—or, perhaps, therefore it passed unnoticed. Other important events took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War. One was in El Salvador, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid—apart from Israel and Egypt, a separate category—and with one of the worst human rights records anywhere. That is a familiar and very close correlation. The Salvadoran high command ordered the Atlacatl Battalion to invade the Jesuit university and murder six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, including the rector, Fr.


pages: 371 words: 101,792

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Berlin had been a divided city, living under the guns of the Red Army. For the pilots, Berlin had the camaraderie of a fighter squadron, a men’s social club, a fraternity house. It was an airline within an airline. The pilots flew together and skied together and drank together. They lent each other money and rotated girlfriends. Their cohesiveness was due, in part, to the shared uniqueness of their outpost, Berlin. They were settlers in a strange land. And they knew that what they did had a purpose. Every day they saw the reasons for their presence—the Berlin Wall that split the city, MiG fighters skulking in the corridors, Red Army tanks maneuvering in the countryside.

Without an infusion of cash, the airline wouldn’t last long enough for the Heathrow sale to be consummated. Something else had to go. Quickly. So Tom Plaskett reached up on the shelf and seized another Pan Am property. For this one, history had already supplied a buyer. In the autumn of 1989 the Berlin Wall tumbled. The following year, to the astonishment of the world, the reunification of Germany proceeded at the speed of a Blitzkrieg. It was because of the partition of Germany that Pan Am’s Internal German Service had begun after World War II. For forty years the isolated city had been connected to the free world, via the three air corridors, by Pan American airplanes.

They wanted to argue that, damnit, Pan Am shouldn’t be selling out to Lufthansa. They wanted to believe that Pan Am, by God’s will and Allied decree and manifest destiny, had a right to be in Berlin forever. But they knew better. History had dealt them a joker. Every day they flew over the meandering scar in the earth that used to be the Berlin Wall. They had seen the throat-rasping, eye-wetting zeal of Germans reuniting with Germans. The Cold War was indisputably over. Like it or not, it was time for the Ausländer to pack up their flight kits and go home. By the time the party broke up, it was past three in the morning. Everyone was properly soused, and anyway, the Kindl was gone.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Yet with twists and turns, and despite some spectacular setbacks, the “great democratic revolution” that Tocqueville described indeed continued, sometimes flaring up with disturbing results, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Tocqueville was one of the first in a long line of modern writers who have believed that democracy in some sense represented a logical culmination of human affairs: for Francis Fukuyama, writing in 1989, the year that jubilant Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy marked “the end of history,” with an American exclamation point. But history hasn’t evolved in quite the way that these theorists anticipated. Tocqueville expected democracy to produce greater equality—yet democratic states conjoined with market societies have recurrently produced growing inequality.

In 1981, she joined the faculty of Stanford University, subsequently serving in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush, where she had her first real experience in government as part of the foreign policy team that oversaw the start of democratic transitions in Eastern and Central European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She was, in other words, like Samuel Huntington before her, just the kind of liberal technocrat that the direct democrats in Occupy Wall Street regarded as complicit in ongoing American war crimes. The cover of Rice’s book features a famous black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the head of a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965—a high point of the American civil rights movement, which Rice covers in the first chapter of her book.

And these are just some of the reasons that it is hard to meet the manifold challenges to realizing democratic ideals in large and complex modern societies. * * * IN THE VIEW of Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who helped guide his nation through its deliberately nonviolent transition to free institutions after the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the very difficulties facing modern liberal democracies will episodically lead to a temptation: people will conclude that political life, viewed realistically, “is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion, and that morality has no place in it.” This literally de-moralized view of politics would mean, according to Havel, losing “the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility—with no guns, no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing.”


pages: 251 words: 69,245

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The most infamous of them is the U.S.-Mexican border fence that is supposed to run for seven hundred miles. It is, at times, a twenty-foot cement wall, reinforced by barbed-wire obstacles and equipped with numerous cameras and sensors. The Mexican Wall should, when fully constructed, be seven times as long as the Berlin Wall and twice as high. Nevertheless, it is estimated that more than 200,000 Mexicans enter the United States illegally every year,4 and that at least 400-500 die trying to cross the border.5 The European Union cannot erect a fence across the Mediterranean but is using hundreds of speedboats to interdict access to its shores by desperate Africans and Maghrebis.

It could be that our interpretation is too harsh, or that Rawls, faced with the facts of global inequality that were not widely known or appreciated when he wrote The Law of Peoples, might have reconsidered his position. But his writings do not allow us to make this conclusion. Vignette 3.9 Geopolitics in Light of (or Enlightened by) Economics Between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a rather comfortable intellectual division of the world held sway. There were, as we all knew, three worlds on this planet. There was the first world of rich capitalist economies. Not all of them were at the time democracies, but gradually became so (e.g., with political liberalizations in Greece, Spain, Portugal); not all of them were Western: Japan seemed a permanent big exception.

For Italy, see Banca d’Italia, Relazione annuale sul 2008, May 29, 2009, chap. 11, table 11.4, p. 128, available at http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/relann/rel08/rel08it/. 3 See David Blanchflower and Chris Shadforth, “Fear, Unemployment, and Migration,” Economic Journal (February 2009): table 17, p. F157. 4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, based on the estimated increase in Mexican illegal immigrants between 2000 and 2005 (1.3 million). 5 The total number of people killed while trying to cross the Berlin Wall was around two hundred during its twenty-seven-year existence. On an annual basis, the number of Mexican deaths is thus fifty times greater. 6 BBC, July 2, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6228236.stm. Vignette 2.5 1 Several hundred Algerian and Tunisian nationals are thought to be imprisoned in Libyan jails. 2 BBC, March 31, 2009; Radio France Inter, March 16, 2009. 3 Ironically, one may recall that in the nineteenth century many Maltese, Sicilians, and Corsicans freely moved over and settled in Tunisia. 4 The Algerian daily El Watan, March 5, 2009. 5 Agence France Presse, March 31, 2009.


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What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The Globe and Mail, November 21, 2014. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economic-insight/taxi-trouble-disruptive-technology-claims-another-unadapting-victim/article21675184/. Hornig, Frank. “Darth Vader vs. Death Strip: Berlin Wall Sinks into Cold War Disneyland.” Spiegel Online, August 8, 2011, sec. International. http://www .spiegel.de/international/spiegel/darth-vader-vs-death-strip-berlin-wall-sinks-into-cold-war-disneyland-a-778941.html. Huet, Ellen. “Apps Let Users Hire House Cleaners, Handymen without Talking.” SFGate, February 11, 2014. http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Apps-let-users-hire-house-cleaners-handymen-5219729.php. ———.

Their contribution to Berlin as a city is ignored.” Another source of dispute was “the collection of international modernist architects brought in by the multinationals (largely in opposition to local architects) to dominate the Potsdamer Platz.” Berliners were caught between the frying pan of a globalized aesthetic (the “Disneyfication of the Berlin Wall” 45) and the fire of a “parochial nationalism,” with the potential for “a virulent rejection of foreigners and immigrants.” 46 Capital “must wade into the culture wars” if it is to pursue its desire for the monopoly rents that are at stake “through interventions in the field of culture, history, heritage, aesthetics, and meanings.” 47 Open Data is a digital commons that is being distorted.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

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

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

Milanović has combined the two inequality trends of the past thirty years—declining inequality worldwide, increasing inequality within rich countries—into a single graph which pleasingly takes the shape of an elephant (figure 9-5). This “growth incidence curve” sorts the world’s population into twenty numerical bins or quantiles, from poorest to richest, and plots how much each bin gained or lost in real income per capita between 1988 (just before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2008 (just before the Great Recession). Figure 9-5: Income gains, 1988–2008 Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 1.3. The cliché about globalization is that it creates winners and losers, and the elephant curve displays them as peaks and valleys. It reveals that the winners include most of humanity.

Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.21 Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into pointless wars. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more countries gave democracy a chance (chapter 14). While the categorical statement that no two democracies have ever gone to war is dubious, the data support a graded version of the Democratic Peace theory, in which pairs of countries that are more democratic are less likely to confront each other in militarized disputes.22 The Long Peace was also helped along by some realpolitik.

Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe (Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975, Portugal in 1976), Latin America (including Argentina in 1983, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1990), and Asia (including Taiwan and the Philippines around 1986, South Korea around 1987, and Indonesia in 1998). The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the nations of Eastern Europe to establish democratic governments, and communism imploded in the Soviet Union in 1991, clearing space for Russia and most of the other republics to make the transition. Some African countries threw off their strongmen, and the last European colonies to gain independence, mostly in the Caribbean and Oceania, opted for democracy as their first form of government.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

A long list of Maxwell’s ventures follows: academic journals, newspapers, new and exciting technological ventures such as CD-ROM, along with more traditional forms of publishing: ‘The adult books have an interesting backlist which includes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.’ But the emphasis is firmly on the future – on businesses like the Berlitz language school. ‘We’ve seen a lot of occurrences over the past year such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of freedom in Eastern Europe that are going to cause a need for Berlitz’s services.’ The world stands on the brink of a new era – an era of greater tolerance and internationalism. Already the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has declared that history as we knew it has ceased to exist.

Already the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has declared that history as we knew it has ceased to exist. In the great ideological battle of the twentieth century, liberal democracies have triumphed, and no one – at least no one in their right mind – could ever again embrace any other form of government. ‘Everything has changed more in the last year than anybody dared hope. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Iron Curtain has been replaced by open doors and windows. Market forces are winning over military force.’ Who could possibly have foreseen such upheavals? Only one person, it seems. ‘Robert Maxwell, a statesman as much as a businessman, committed his life to providing greater openness, particularly in Eastern Europe.

After all, the Sunday Times Rich List for 1989–90 had estimated Maxwell’s fortune at between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion pounds. What’s more, he’d done something that counted just as much as any number of bank statements, accounts or written guarantees. He had given them his word. 23. Crossing the Line In the summer of 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Maxwell flew to the city in his private jet for a series of meetings. As far as he was concerned, the fall of the Wall had all sorts of implications, personal and professional. More than forty years earlier, post-war Berlin had been the making of him; he’d emerged from the ruins of the city bearing the building blocks of what would become his publishing empire.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The ideas of influential economists, like John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, were subsumed into political agendas to shape the money economy. 7. Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys For a quarter of a century, the Berlin Wall symbolized the difference between the free markets of the West and the socialist economies of the East. On June 12, 1987, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Berlin, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued a challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Tear down this wall!” On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. At the fall of the Wall, when asked “Who won?”, Western political scientists cited the triumph of capitalism over socialism.

In 1929, the New York Daily Mirror wrote: “The prevailing bull market is just America’s bet that she won’t stop expanding.”6 In 1936, Wilhelm Röpke looked back at the roaring 1920s: “with production and trade increasing month by month throughout the world, the moment actually seemed in sight when social problems would be solved by prosperity for all.”7 At the time, the 1920s were also regarded as a period of remarkable social progress. Historically, increasing population, new markets, productivity increases, and industrial innovation drove growth. As the world grew older, growth slowed but “when the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”8 After the Berlin Wall fell, the reintegration of Eastern Europe, China, and India into global trade provided low-cost labor supplying cheap goods and services and creating new markets for products. But demand for improved living standards needed even greater growth. Chinese novelist Ma Jian saw this in his native country: “As society changes, new words and terms keep popping up such as sauna, private car ownership, property developer, mortgage, and personal installment loan...no one talks about the Tiananmen protests...or...official corruption.”9 Financial engineering replaced real engineering as the engine for growth.

Frank, 26 Bauman, Zegmunt, 44, 312 Beach Boys, The, 157 Bean, Charles, 50 Bear Stearns, 162, 191, 204, 249, 316, 318, 326, 338 Asset Management, 191 Beasley, Jane, 62 Beat the Market, 121 Beatles, The, 157, 166 Beatrice, 141 Beckham, David, 339 Beerbohm, Max, 253 beggar-thy-neighbor policies, 349 behavioral economists, 125-126 bell-shaped normal distribution curves, 117 Beller, Ron, 321 benchmarking exercises, 315 benefits, employee, 47 Benna, Ted, 48 Berdymukhamedov, Gurbanguly, 299 Bergdorf Goodman, 330 Bergerac, Michel, 147 Berkshares program, 36 Berkshire Hathaway, 261, 322. See also Warren Buffet Berle, Adolf, 54 Berlin Wall, fall of, 101, 295 Bernanke, Ben, 170, 182, 203, 303, 338, 366 debt, 267 Great Moderation, 277 on 60 Minutes, 343 September, 2008, 342 Bernstein, Peter, 26, 129, 208 Besley, Tim, 278 Best, George, 88 beta (market returns), 241 Beveridge Report, 47 Beveridge, Sir William, 47 Beyond Belief, 338 Bhagavad Gita, 339 Bhide, Amar, 312 BHP Billiton, 59 bias, 243 Bieber, Matthew, 198 Bierce, Ambrose, 326 Big Short, The, 198 Biggs, Barton, 99 Bild, 358 Billboard Top 100 Chart, 124 Billings, Josh, 233 billionaire drivel, 327 bills of exchange, 32 bimetallism, 26 bio-fuels, 334 Bird, John, 91, 320 Black Swan, The, 95, 126 Black Wednesday, 240 Black, Fischer, 121, 127 black-box trading, 242 Black-Scholes models, 120-122, 277 Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) option, 121 Blackrock, 170 Blackstone, 167, 325 Blackstone Group, The, 154, 318 Blair, Tony, 81 Blankfein, Lloyd, 239, 364 Blinder, Alan, 129 Blomkvist, Mikhael, 360 Bloomberg TV, 92 Bloomberg, Michael, 164 Bloomsbury group, 29 Blue Force, 264 Blumberg, Alex, 185 Boao Forum, 324 boards of directors, knowledge of business operations, 292-293 BOAT (Best of All Time), 228 Boesky, Ivan, 147, 244 Bogle, Jack, 123 Bohr, Niels, 101, 257 Boiler Room, 185 Bonanza, 31 Bond, James, 26 Bonderman, David, 154, 164, 318 bonds, 169 adjustable rate, 213 failure of securitization, 204-205 high opportunity, 143 insurance, 176 junk, 143, 145-146 Milken’s mobsters, 146-147 municipal, 211-214 PAC (planned amortization class), 178 ratings, 143, 282-285 securitization, 173 TAC (target amortization class), 178 TOBs (tender option bonds), 222 U.S.


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

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

In the forty-seven-page treaty, accompanied by seven hundred pages of protocols, the two presidents would agree not just to curb the arms race but also to begin reversing it.2 The confrontation between the world’s two most powerful countries, which began soon after World War II and had brought the planet to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, was now all but over. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification under way, and Mikhail Gorbachev adopting the “Sinatra doctrine,” which allowed Moscow’s East European clients to “do it their way” and eventually leave the Kremlin’s embrace, the conflict at the core of the Cold War was resolved. Soviet troops began to leave East Germany and other countries of the region.

Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs that in the months leading up to the coup the administration was following the approach summarized by Brent Scowcroft at a national security briefing for the president on May 31, 1991: “Our goal is to keep Gorby in power for as long as possible, while doing what we can to help head him in the right direction—and doing what is best for us in foreign policy.” Now that Gorbachev was out of power, the task was not to forfeit what had been achieved during his tenure. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had led to the reunification of the two German states and symbolized the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Could the old walls dividing East and West be rebuilt by the new leaders in the Kremlin? No one knew. On August 19, 1991, the same day George Bush dictated his warm and compassionate virtual letter to Gorbachev, he also dictated the following into his tape recorder: “I think what we must do is see that the progress made under Gorbachev is not turned around.

Paving the road to Madrid had begun eight months earlier in Paris. European heads of state met there in November 1990 with the leaders of the United States and Canada for what was dubbed the peace conference of the Cold War. They took advantage of recent developments in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain to approve the Charter of Paris for a New Europe—a document that bridged the East-West divide in institutional and ideological terms, laying solid foundations for the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.2 James Baker believed that it was there and then that the Cold War had indeed come to an end.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

The country had been hit hard as it emerged from the cave-dwelling existence of socialist economics into the blinding sun of free market capitalism. Under Communism, factories had survived, thanks to massive state subsidies, while the Soviet trading bloc ensured their shoddy products a guaranteed sale on East European markets. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bulgaria’s markets crumbled with it. With industry in near terminal crisis, agriculture, the economy’s traditional mainstay, assumed ever-greater importance, but this sector too ran into trouble. The European Union was unwilling to increase its minuscule imports of Bulgarian agricultural produce, as this would undermine its protectionist racket masquerading grandly as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Invariably young and frightened, deprived of their passports, unable to speak the local language, and ostracized in any event as prostitutes, the women were entirely dependent on their tormentors. The Belchev case was a rarity because he was actually busted, the racket broken up, and the women freed (astonishingly, Belchev continued to manage three brothels from his prison cell using a mobile phone his lawyer smuggled in to him). But elsewhere before the dust from the Berlin Wall had even settled, gangsters and chancers were laying the cables of a huge network of trafficking in women that reached into every corner of Europe. Bulgarian gangs quickly assumed a pivotal role in this industry due to their country’s strategic position. Every border offered a lucrative trade. South to Greece represented the quickest route into the European Union—once across that border, the women could be transported anywhere in the EU (excepting Britain and Ireland) without having to pass a single police control.

The appearance of dynamic young economies in Eastern Europe put this problem in a yet starker perspective as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others proved willing to put in longer hours for less money as they sought to make up for half a century of consumer misery under Communism. Growth rates in Eastern Europe began shooting up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany was busy outsourcing its industrial base throughout Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, while the European Union accession program meant that huge sums in regional development funds were fighting poverty and assisting in the development of democratic institutions in Eastern Europe.


Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, congestion charging, demand response, Donald Shoup, iterative process, jitney, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, Silicon Valley, transit-oriented development, urban planning

The elimination of this technologically required connection, which interrupts what is otherwise a logical linear pattern of rapid transit, is one of the justifications for the proposed BART extension to San Jose.c A technologically required connection is sometimes the ghost of a political one. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, authorities quickly reconnected the rail rapid transit network, restoring lines that had existed before the 1961 division of the city. Bus lines, too, were easily recombined. But during the years of division, West Berlin had ripped out its streetcars and replaced them with buses, while East Germany had kept its streetcars in place.

But during the years of division, West Berlin had ripped out its streetcars and replaced them with buses, while East Germany had kept its streetcars in place. Streetcar lines that once crossed the path of the wall, and which were severed when the wall was built, are still severed today because part of the line is still a streetcar and part is a bus. Today, you can still experience the Berlin Wall as an obstacle if you’re traveling on local services. What was once a politically required connection remains as a technologically required one. b c The only limitation on this would be that reliability tends to fall as transit lines get too long. No opinion about this project should be inferred from my use of it as an example. 176 | HUMAN TRANSIT FROM CONNECTIONS TO URBAN FORM If you want to serve a complex and diverse city with many destinations and you value frequency and simplicity, the geometry of public transit will force you to require connections.

Acceleration/deceleration delays, 102 Access, as outcome of transit, 13–14, 19–20 Access radii, 60, 60f Accessing, 34, 35 Adelaide, Australia, 90–91 Aesthetics, 25 Agencies, defined, 14 Airlines, connections and, 147, 165 Airport shuttles, 57, 57f, 148 Alexanderplatz (Berlin), 178 Alighting dwell, 102–103 Allocation. See Service allocation Automatic Train Control systems, 102–103 Automation, 102–103, 225–226 Averaging, 112 Barriers, chokepoints and, 50–52, 51f BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), 79, 94–96, 95f, 139, 175 Base-first thinking, 77–79, 77f, 83–84, 223 Berlin Wall, 175 B-Line (Vancouver), 67 Boarding/alighting dwell, 102–103 Boulevard transit, 68, 205–214 Boundaries, connections and, 174–175 Box errors, 41–43 Branching, 93–96, 199–202 Branding, 90–93 Breaks, 58 Budgets, Ridership Goal and, 119, 128–129 Bus Rapid Transit, 65, 104 Businesses, comparison to, 119 Calthorpe, Peter, 193, 196 Caltrain (San Francisco peninsula), 79–80 Canberra, Australia.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The Silk Roads allow us to understand the past not as a series of periods and regions that are isolated and distinct, but to see the rhythms of history in which the world has been connected for millennia as being part of a bigger, inclusive global past. If I had written The Silk Roads twenty-five years ago, it would have been equally topical. In the early 1990s, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, prompting major upheaval not only in Russia but in all the fifteen constituent republics that subsequently became independent. The early 1990s too marked the First Gulf War that was so closely linked to the subsequent intervention in Iraq at the start of the twenty-first century.

Then there is Russia, where a new chapter of relations with the west has opened, despite the continued leadership of President Putin and an inner circle that has led the country for two decades. Military intervention in Ukraine, alleged interference in elections in the US and the UK and accusations of the attempted assassination of a former intelligence officer have led to the worst moment in Russia’s relations with the west since the fall of the Berlin Wall – and, as we shall see, have laid the basis for a reconfiguration of Moscow to the south and to the east. In the heart of the world, the continued problems in Afghanistan, the breakdown of Syria as a result of years of civil war and the tortuous process of rebuilding Iraq fill few with confidence, despite the considerable financial, military and strategic expense that has gone into trying to improve the situation in each one.

Peter Frankopan Oxford, September 2018 Index Abbas, Mahmoud here Abbasi, Shahid Khaqan here Abdrakhmanov, Kairat here Abdulkodirzoda, Saidmukarram here Ablyazov, Mukhtar here Abramovich, Roman here Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership here Afghanistan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here China and here US policy and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also TAPI pipeline Africa China and here, here, here, here US policy and here, here African Standby Force here Agni-V missiles here Ahmed, Abiy here Airbus here airline pilots, shortage of here Albright, Madeleine here Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) here Altmaier, Peter here aluminium prices here Angola here Aral Sea here Araqi, Hamidreza here Armenia here, here, here artificial intelligence here, here, here, here Ashgabat agreement here Asian Development Bank here, here Asif, Khawaja here al-Assad, Bashar here, here Astana International Financial Centre here Australia here, here, here, here, here, here Azerbaijan here, here, here, here Bahgeri, Mohammad here Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway here Balochistan, murder of schoolteachers here Bambawale, Gautam here Bangalore here Bangladesh here Bannon, Steve here Beishembiev, Erik here Belarus here, here Berdymukhamedov, Gurbanguly here Berlin Wall, fall of here, here big data here bin Laden family here Black Death here Boeing here, here, here Bolton, John here, here Boucher, Richard A. here boxing, banned in Tajikistan here Brahmaputra River hydrology here Brexit here, here, here, here, here Britain First here Brunson, Andrew here Bryant, Kobe here Byroade, Henry here Cambodia here, here, here, here ‘carrier-killer’ missiles here Carter, General Sir Nick here CASA-1000 power project here Caspian Sea here, here, here, here, here Çavuşoğlu, Mevlüt here, here, here Chabahar port here Chen Xiaodong here Cheng Quanguo here China access to IT here ageing population here and artificial intelligence here Belt and Road Initiative, development here Belt and Road Initiative, reservations here, here economic weakness here, here economic development here, here end of One Child policy here energy projects here environmental problems here, here and European Union here football, in Han-dynasty here ‘great wall of iron’ here intellectual property theft here, here joins WTO here maritime expansion here, here, here, here military exercises here and overseas debt levels here relations with India here, here, here relations with Iran here, here, here relations with Pakistan here relations with Russia here, here relations with Saudi Arabia here retail market here rivalry with US here, here, here science programme here security concerns here seeks global leadership role here sensitivity over Taiwan here Siberian land purchases here telecoms here urbanisation here, here US corporations and here China Development Bank here China–Pakistan Economic Corridor here, here, here Chinese army here climate change here, here, here, here, here Clinton, Bill here Clinton, Hillary here Coats, Dan here Cohn, Gary here Collins, Michael here Columbus, Christopher here commercial courts here Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMSCA) here Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) here Congo here Crimea, annexation of here, here, here, here, here cryptocurrencies here, here Davidson, Admiral Philip D. here Dawood, Abdul Razak here de Klerk, F.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

I ended up being named Piotr, the first of several renegotiations of my name. * Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down.

Srdja, along with many political scientists, sees these movements as part of a greater historical process: successive ‘waves of democratisation’, with democracy defined as a mix of multi-party elections, plural media and independent institutions such as the judiciary. The first wave was the overthrow of authoritarian rule in South America, South Asia and South Africa in the late twentieth century, and the end of Soviet power in Eastern Europe – the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Singing Revolution in the Baltic States, with their unforgettable images of millions pouring peacefully onto the streets in one great sea of anti-Soviet sentiment. The colour revolutions, argues Srdja, were the next wave, the Arab Spring the one after, swelled by the rise of social media. Srdja sees himself as the connection between the first and later waves.

Press the remote and there was Václav Havel, now free from prison and the president of Czechoslovakia, waving from a balcony to a great swell of cheering crowds in Prague; press it again and statues of Lenin were being pulled down throughout Central Europe, swaying in mid-air on chains hanging from cranes, like burnished bronze trapeze artists; press once more and people were clambering over the Berlin Wall, bashing away at the concrete with hammers, something they would have been shot for a few weeks ago. Igor’s own writing moved away from first-person impressionism: the unmitigated ‘I’ had begun to feel self-indulgent without the heavy breath of authoritarianism bearing down on him. Instead, he drew on anthropology, zoology, ways of reimagining and redefining groups, identities, interconnections.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

The cult of Stalin, whose very name was venerated in the USSR as a “symbol of the coming victory of communism,” was observed across the region, along with very similar cults of local party leaders.19 Millions of people took part in state-orchestrated parades and celebrations of communist power. At the time, the phrase “Iron Curtain” seemed much more than a metaphor: walls, fences, and barbed wire literally separated Eastern Europe from the West. By 1961, the year in which the Berlin Wall was built, it seemed as if these barriers could last forever. The speed with which this transformation took place was, in retrospect, nothing short of astonishing. In the Soviet Union itself, the evolution of a totalitarian state had taken two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint.

Jazz would become legal after the death of Stalin, at least in some places. Rules on leisure clothing would relax, and eventually Eastern Europe would have its own rock bands too. As one historian notes, the battle against Western pop music was “fought and lost” in East Germany even before the Berlin Wall was built—and it had been “fought and lost” everywhere else too.22 For adults who had to hold down jobs and maintain families in the era of High Stalinism, flamboyant clothing was never a practical form of protest, though a few professions did allow it. Marta Stebnicka, an actress who spent much of her career in Kraków, put a great deal of effort into designing interesting hats for herself in the 1950s.23 Leopold Tyrmand, the Polish jazz critic with the narrow ties and the colored socks, was an adult style icon too.

In accordance with these changes, the Soviet authorities also began to enforce stricter controls, sending Red Army troops to patrol their border and build ditches, fences, and barriers. Berlin remained the exception. Although the city lay inside the Soviet zone, it was not easy to set up an enforceable “border” within it (though the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 would eventually prove that it was possible). More importantly, the USSR did not at first want the city’s division to become official. The Soviet authorities preferred Berlin to remain unified, albeit anchored securely in the East. This anomaly quickly created another odd dynamic, as East Germans began flocking to East Berlin in order to cross the border into West Berlin, and to make their way from there to West Germany by train or air.


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The name he whispered, Armengol, turned out to be President Obiang’s brother. Yet it still felt safe for me: police states like this have low crime rates because the criminals are afraid, too. I was able to walk unmolested after midnight through Malabo’s silent backstreets, listening to my cassette Walkman. But it was quite eerie. The Berlin Wall had fallen less than four years earlier, and it was a time of sweeping political change in Africa, as old certainties provided by three rival power systems were shifting. The first of the three, promoted by the 29 P o i s o n e d We l l s Soviet Union, gained prominence in large parts of the continent primarily because its revolutionary nature was useful to anticolonial struggles.

“These mandarin . . . strands of power had become tightly intertwined in a network that has been dubbed ‘France Inc.,’” wrote Ignatius. “The ruling clans needed each other—and they protected each other.”14 Normally Bidermann’s case would have been quietly dropped. But Joly was an outsider, and French politics was in flux after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The French left and right, as well as the foreign and domestic secret services, were engaged in giant, tentacular struggles, which were generating press leaks and anonymous tip-offs for the magistrates. Elf was being privatized then, too, and the new head of the company lodged a formal complaint with the magistrates against his predecessor, hoping to mark a clean break with Elf ’s dirty past.15 French president Jacques Chirac, who took power in 1995, also wanted to tarnish the image of his predecessor, François Mitterrand, and his people were adding to the leaks.

Though nearly 70, he was handsome and sprightly, and wore a collarless brown suit and a thick, loose, chain bracelet. After the pleasantries, he began his story, a Shakespearean tragedy with many human actors, and one huge, shadowy non-human lurking offstage, influencing everyone. “Oil? Yes,” he said. “It is behind all these problems.” His tale began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “Marxism was a pretext—a religion,” he said. “They ruled Congo with it, but not always in the people’s interests. It failed in the Soviet Union, and failed here, too.” By 1990 political pressure was rising from the streets like heat haze, and president Dénis Sassou Nguesso, a Freemason who had been in power since 1979, was forced to accept big changes.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

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

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

Many events that first appear to be sudden and external – what mainstream economists often describe as ‘exogenous shocks’ – are far better understood as arising from endogenous change. In the words of the political economist Orit Gal, ‘complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system’.11 From this perspective, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the imminent collapse of the Greenland ice sheet have much in common. All three are reported in the news as sudden events but are actually visible tipping points that result from slowly accumulated pressure in the system – be it the gradual build-up of political protest in Eastern Europe, the build-up of sub-prime mortgages in a bank’s asset portfolio, or the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Pearce, J. (2015) ‘Quantifying the value of open source hardware development’, Modern Economy, 6, pp. 1–11. 84. Bauwens, M. (2012) Blueprint for P2P Society: The Partner State and Ethical Society, http://www.shareable.net/blog/blueprint-for-p2p-society-the-partner-state-ethical-economy 85. Lakner, C. and Milanovic, B. (2015) ‘Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, The World Bank Economic Review, pp. 1–30. 86. OECD (2014) Detailed Final 2013 Aid Figures Released by OECD/DAC. http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/final2013oda.htm 87. OECD (2015) ‘Non-ODA flows to developing countries: remittances’, available at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/beyond-oda-remittances.htm 88.

Kuznets, S. (1955) ‘Economic growth and income inequality’, American Economic Review, 45: 1, pp. 1–28. Lacy, P. and Rutqvist, J. (2015) Waste to Wealth: the circular economy advantage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakner, C. and Milanovic, B. (2015) ‘Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Economic Review, 1–30. Lakoff, G. (2014) The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leach, M., Raworth, K. and Rockström, J. (2013) Between Social and Planetary Boundaries: Navigating Pathways in the Safe and Just Space for Humanity, World Social Science Report.


pages: 428 words: 117,419

Cyclopedia by William Fotheringham

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed-gear, flag carrier, gentleman farmer, intermodal, Kickstarter, Northern Rock, safety bicycle, éminence grise

If, after reading it, you want to try something new, go to a race, or buy a book or DVD that you might not have known about, it will have served its purpose. Enjoy the ride. William Fotheringham, July 2010 A ABDUZHAPAROV, Djamolidin (b. Uzbekistan, 1964) Squat, tree-trunk thighed sprinter from Uzbekistan who was one of the biggest stars to emerge from the Eastern bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Abdu’ first came to prominence in the British MILK RACE, winning three stages in 1986, but it was in the 1991 TOUR DE FRANCE where his unique style grabbed world headlines: he put his head down low over the front wheel—a style later adopted to great effect by MARK CAVENDISH—and zigzagged up the finish straight, terrifying opponents and onlookers.

There were official guidelines, but coaches had a fair degree of flexibility in setting their own criteria; riders’ Stasi files would be checked—to see whether a potential athlete had West German connections, for example—but coaches might push better athletes with undesirable backgrounds higher up selection lists to ensure they got in the team anyway. The screening systems were later adapted for use by the cycling teams of Australia and GREAT BRITAIN. The sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 left the sports centers across Eastern Europe short of money, and a vast number of talented amateurs came on the market: they flooded into cycling. The sprinter DJAMOLIDIN ABDUZHAPAROV made the biggest impact alongside Olaf Ludwig, Andrei Tchmil, and Zenon Jaskuta, who in 1993 was the first Pole to make it to the Tour podium.

The golden era of French cycling can be accurately dated: it began when Henri Desgrange brought national teams into the Tour in 1930, opening the way for riders like André Leducq, Antonin Magne, and Jean Robic, and it closed with BERNARD HINAULT’s fifth win in 1986. What ended it? The Tour grew quickly in the 1980s and 1990s, and French cyclists couldn’t keep up. With the talent of the entire cycling world eligible to ride the race after the arrival of Australians and Americans and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there was less room for the home riders. Hence the fact that there has been no young star to succeed Hinault or LAURENT FIGNON, both men of the 1980s. French Cycle Racing at a Glance = Biggest race: Tour de France Legendary racing hills: l’Alpe d’Huez, Mont Ventoux, Le Puy-de-Dôme, Col du Galibier Biggest star: Raymond Poulidor, closely followed by Bernard Hinault First Tour stage win: MAURICE GARIN, Lyon, 1903 Tour overall wins since 1985: none France has given cycling: the Professor (Laurent Fignon), stage racing, the hour record, PARIS–ROUBAIX, the sportive concept, Richard Virenque, Peugeot, Festina, the Bastille Day paradox French cycling was traumatized by the Festina DRUG scandal of 1998 that centered on the nation’s leading team and its national hero, Richard Virenque, but also hit other teams including Casino and Française des Jeux; a more stringent attitude to doping gained ground and the Tour came under greater scrutiny from newspapers such as Le Monde.


pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

He became a confidant of Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, he dined with Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was a guest in the Connecticut home of Henry Kissinger. Perched on the thirtieth floor of one of Deutsche’s skyscrapers, the fifty-nine-year-old Herrhausen looked down on the rest of the German financial capital. In November 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared to vindicate much of Herrhausen’s liberal free-market ideology, a leading German newspaper, Der Spiegel, gushed: “Hardly ever before has one person ruled the economic scene the way Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen does at the present time. The banker is all-powerful.” Herrhausen then made a play for even more power.

The impact threw the car several yards into the air, smashing its windows, and blasting off its doors, trunk, and hood. The copper projectile severed Herrhausen’s legs. Before fire trucks or ambulances arrived, he bled to death in the backseat. The assassination shocked Germany, which had been in a celebratory mood following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chancellor Kohl, visiting a Düsseldorf trade fair, cried. “It is a threat to our democracy,” the future finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble told the German parliament. Some 10,000 business and government leaders from around the world showed up for Herrhausen’s funeral. The site of the bombing became a shrine of flowers and burning candles.

Three months after the assassination, the bank’s shares were up by 30 percent, a resounding vote of confidence in the company’s future. Herrhausen’s successor was Hilmar Kopper. Like Herrhausen, Kopper believed that the bank’s future lay outside Germany. (He referred disparagingly to German bankers as “chaste souls.”) With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, Deutsche opened branches in East Germany and then Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague. Within a few years, it had half a dozen outposts in the former Soviet Union. That was all well and good, but the Morgan Grenfell acquisition had proved underwhelming. Its architects had hoped it would launch Deutsche Bank into the Wall Street elite; that hadn’t happened.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Walls and walling performances, as Wendy Brown asserts, “do not simply respond to existing nationalism or racism. Rather, they activate and mobilize them.”16 Walls thus solidify the idea of a homogenous nation-state, emphasizing difference and separation from those deemed undesirable. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventy walls now exist in our barbwired and walled world.17 Securitization has also turned the border into a dystopic testing ground, constituting a five-hundred-billion-dollar border security industry18 that flaunts virtual walling through intrusive electronic surveillance technologies, automated decision-making, predictive data analytics, facial recognition software, and biometric systems tested on migrants and refugees by blood-sucking leeches like Amazon, Palantir, Elbit Systems, and European Dynamics.

Nopper and Mariame Kaba elucidate, “Spectacle as the route to empathy means the atrocities itemized need to happen more often or get worse, to become more atrocious each round in hopes of being registered.”15 Scenes of border death maintain structures of racial violence and, as statistics of deaths pile up, we cannot evade an interrogation of the source of this violence shaped through imperial, racialized, and spatialized control. Imperial Containment An intricate system of border security underpins Fortress Europe, on which the EU plans to spend $38.4 billion between 2021 and 2027.16 The EU has already devoted billions of euros to surveillance, patrols, and over one thousand kilometers of walls—the equivalent of six Berlin Walls.17 Physical walls, however, are not the EU’s primary mode of deterrence. The Dublin Regulation mandates that refugees seek asylum in their first country of arrival, enforced through the Eurodac fingerprint database and a biometric “smart borders” system. The Schengen Agreement is a double project of professedly opening up internal borders while strengthening external borders, and the entry of several southern countries into the Schengen Zone was delayed until they could better securitize their external borders.

Nopper and Mariame Kaba, “Itemizing Atrocity,” Jacobin Magazine, August 15, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/itemizing-atrocity/. 16.Charlotte Gifford, “The True Cost of the EU’s Border Security Boom,” World Finance, January 21, 2020, www.worldfinance.com/featured/the-true-cost-of-the-eus-border-security-boom. 17.Daniel Trilling, Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe (London: Picador, 2019); Jon Stone, “The EU Has Built 1,000km of Border Walls since Fall of Berlin Wall,” Independent, November 9, 2018, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-border-wall-berlin-migration-human-rights-immigration-borders-a8624706.html. 18.Stephen Scheel, “‘The Secret Is to Look Good on Paper’: Appropriating Mobility within and against a Machine of Illegalization,” in The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, Nicholas De Genova, ed.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

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

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

Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck. It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this part of Goldwater’s critique had seemed particularly anachronistic. The lesson here is that nothing is gone forever, especially when it comes to the devouring ambition of despotic men. As Goldwater wrote in that chapter: Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.

The Soviet Union was in a glorious free fall, shedding republics seemingly by the day, and Eastern Europe was squinting out into the light of liberation for the first time in forty years. Free markets and free minds were sweeping the world. Freedom was breaking out in the Southern Hemisphere as well. The country where I was sitting that morning was itself only days old. In November 1989, the same week the Berlin Wall fell, Namibia had held its first election as an independent nation, freed from the apartheid administration of South Africa. This came to pass without a shot fired and in no small part because of leadership from the United States, through the United Nations. Just days earlier, an awe-inspiring document had been drafted only blocks away from where I sat in Windhoek—a new democracy’s founding constitution, the inspiration for which had been the marvel of free people everywhere and those who aspire to be free, the United States Constitution.


pages: 131 words: 41,052

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard

Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, global reserve currency, Global Witness, invisible hand, knowledge economy, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension reform, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, shareholder value, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

In his acceptance speech he talked of the European Union as the most successful peace process in history: ‘The European visionaries demonstrated that difference is not a threat, difference is natural…The answer to difference is to respect it…The peoples of Europe created institutions which respected their diversity – a Council of Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament – but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest.’14 This diversity also has the unexpected effect of making the European Union stick to its principles. An example illustrates this well. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was no agreement on which former Communist countries to let into the club. Because Europe’s leaders failed to agree on the final borders of the European Union they decided to make entry open to anyone who met the ‘Copenhagen Criteria of democracy, the rule of law, and economic liberalism.

As the world becomes richer and moves beyond satisfying basic needs such as hunger and health, the European way of life will become irresistible. CHAPTER 7 The European Rescue of National Democracy1 If there is one image that symbolizes democracy around the world, it was the sight of East German students clambering onto the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989, hacking it to pieces with pickaxes as the soldiers looked on in awe. Within two years these students were citizens of the European Union in a reunited Germany. The EU sucked in the former communist republics, bringing democracy and prosperity in its wake. And yet today, many accuse the European Union of destroying our democracy even as it spreads it across the Continent.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

We tend to remember them as a prosperous, optimistic decade that happened to end with the internet boom and bust. But many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds. We’ve long since forgotten the global context for the 18 months of dot-com mania at decade’s end. The ’90s started with a burst of euphoria when the Berlin Wall came down in November ’89. It was short-lived. By mid-1990, the United States was in recession. Technically the downturn ended in March ’91, but recovery was slow and unemployment continued to rise until July ’92. Manufacturing never fully rebounded. The shift to a service economy was protracted and painful. 1992 through the end of 1994 was a time of general malaise.

Abound Solar Accenture advertising, 3.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 Afghanistan Airbnb airline industry Allen, Paul Amazon, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 12.1 Amundsen, Roald Andreessen, Horowitz Andreessen, Marc Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) antitrust Apollo Program Apple, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 14.1 branding of monopoly profits of Aristotle Army Corps of Engineers AT&T Aztecs Baby Boomers Bacon, Francis Bangladesh Barnes & Noble Beijing Bell Labs Berlin Wall Better Place Bezos, Jeff, 5.1, 6.1 big data Bill of Rights, U.S. bin Laden, Osama biotechnology biotech startups, 6.1, 6.2 board of directors Bostrom, Nick Box, 9.1, 11.1 Boyle, Robert branding Branson, Richard Brin, Sergey bubbles financial, 2.1, 8.1 see also specific bubbles Buffett, Warren bureaucracy, prf.1, 1.1, 9.1 Bush, George H.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

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

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

We have the technology, the power, and the competitive threat to prompt a new beginning. But it won’t be easy. Since the 1960s, government in the West has tried a variety of cures—from a genuine attempt at revolution under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the quack cures of the modern populists. It has had moments of Trajan-like triumph—especially the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even when it was lecturing the rest of the world about the inevitability of globalization in the 1990s, the Western state never regained the confidence at home it had in the 1960s. The public sector has lagged ever further behind the private sector. And gradually the East has begun to catch up.

The number of employee days lost to strikes fell from 29.5 million in 1979 to under 2 million in 1986. The top rate of tax fell from 98 percent in 1979 to 40 percent.8 And in a wave of “privatisations” she set free forty-six state-owned companies, including British Gas and British Telecom, as well as selling council houses to their occupants.9 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 created a mood of euphoria across the West. The Anglo-American hymn of deregulation, globalization, and privatization rang out across the world. Bill Clinton declared the age of big government to be over, and Tony Blair ditched “Clause Four,” which had committed the Labor Party to nationalization.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defense of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe—under Russian leadership—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust. President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a “major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009.

In effect, Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbor, India. The first was in 1947, shortly after partition, and was fought over Kashmir, which in 1948 ended up divided along the Line of Control (also known as Asia’s Berlin Wall); however, both India and Pakistan continue to claim sovereignty. Nearly twenty years later, Pakistan miscalculated the strength of the Indian military because of India’s poor performance in the 1962 India-China war. Tensions between India and China had risen due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, which in turn had led India to give refuge to the Dalai Lama.

See also names of specific countries artificial borders in, 6, 109, 115–20, 136 and China, 60–61, 84, 119, 122, 125, 126–31 civil wars and ethnic conflicts, 116–20, 123–29 climate and terrain, 110–14, 115, 120–22, 129, 131–32 colonial period, 115–20, 123, 125 and Cuba, 125–26 energy resources, 60, 121, 122–23, 125–27, 131–32 Homo sapiens origins, 110, 112, 118 independence movement, 116 Islamists, 117, 121, 123–25, 128–29 isolation of, 6, 110–11, 114–15 languages, 113–14, 118, 131–32 natural resources, 60, 114, 118–23, 125–29, 131–32 rivers, 109, 113–14, 115, 120–22, 131–32 and Russia, 34, 125–26 size, 111–13 and the United States, 84 aircraft carrier battle groups, 7, 38–39 Aksai Chin, 36–37, 46 Alaska, 8–9, 16–17, 72, 174, 240–41, 243, 246 Alawites, 144–45, 160 Albania, 3–4, 14, 20–21, 86–87, 91, 98 albedo effect, 247 Aldrin, Buzz, 262 Alexander the Great, 5, 139 Algeria, 136 Ali (son of Muhammad), 137, 138, 144 Alps, 86–87, 89, 91 al-Qaeda, 4–5, 146–47, 151, 182, 183, 185, 188 Amazon rainforest, 118, 215, 231 Amazon River, 215, 218, 231–32 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 66–67 Amman, 133, 141, 142, 153, 156 Amundsen, Roald, 244–45 Anatolian Plain, 161 Andaman Sea, 168–69 Andes Mountains, 215, 218–19 Angola, 60, 109, 112, 116, 118, 119–20, 125–28, 130 Antarctic, 238–39 Appalachian Mountains, 62–63, 65, 66–68 Aqaba, 153 Arabian Desert, 135 Arabian Sea, 133, 168–69, 171, 176, 179, 181 Arab Spring, 43, 164–67 Arctic/Arctic Circle, 8–9, 240–41, 242–57 climate and terrain, 243 energy resources, 6–7, 34, 72, 242, 248–49, 251, 254, 255–57 expeditions, 243–45 global warming effects, 242, 245–48, 246, 255, 261 icebreakers, 253–54 New Great Game, 255–57 and Russia, 6, 15, 16, 19, 243, 249, 250–57 sovereignty disputes, 250–57 and the United States, 243, 249, 253–54 Arctic Council, 249, 255–56 Arctic Ocean, 240–41, 243, 250, 254 Arctic Sea, 8–9, 15 Argentina, 215, 217, 220, 221, 229, 232, 233–34, 235–38 Arizona, 62–63, 71, 222 Armenia, 8–9, 20, 29, 31, 86–87, 133, 141, 158 Armitage, Richard, 183 Arunachal Pradesh, 46, 189–90 Assad, Bashar al-, 145 Assad, Hafez al-, 145 Assam, 176, 178, 190 Atacama Desert, 215 Atatürk, 162, 164 Atlantic Ocean, 62–63, 86–87, 109, 110–11, 114, 215, 246 Australia, 5, 76, 79 Austria, 32, 86–87, 91 Azerbaijan, 8–9, 18, 20, 29, 133, 141 Baffin Island, 240–41 Baghdad, 150 Bahamas, 62–63 Bahrain, 7, 78, 82–83, 133 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 226 Balkan states, 3–4, 97–98 Baltic Sea, 8–9, 12, 23, 28, 32, 86–87, 96, 107 Baltic States, 8–9, 14, 16, 18, 20–21, 27–29, 31, 86–87, 200 Baluchistan, 168–69, 171, 175, 176, 177, 187 Bangladesh, 36–37, 60, 168–69, 171–74, 176, 260–61 Banks Island, 240–41 Barents Sea, 8–9, 240–41, 246, 250–51 Bashir, Omar al-, 128 Basra, 139, 141 Bay of Bengal, 36–37, 60, 168–69, 171–72, 176, 192, 260 Bedouins, 142 Beijing, 36–37 Belarus, 8–9, 20, 32, 86–87 Belearic Islands, 86–87 Belgium, 86–87, 118 Belize, 221, 223, 226 Benghazi, 116–17 Bering Sea, 8–9, 11–12, 245, 254 Bering Strait, 8–9, 16–17, 219, 240–41, 244 Berlin Wall, 14 Bert, Melissa, 252 Bessarabia, 30 Bhutan, 36–37, 168–69, 171, 176, 190 Bhutto, Benazir, 183 bin Laden, Osama, 185, 188 Bismarck, Otto von, 85, 97–98 Bjarnason, Björn, 253 Black Sea, 8–9, 15, 16, 23, 30, 32, 86–87, 90, 91, 133, 163 Boko Haram/Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi, 123–25 Bolivar, Simón, 220 Bolivia, 215, 220–21 Borneo, 55 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 3, 86–87, 91 Bosporus, 22, 23, 163–64 Botswana, 109, 130 Brahmaputra River, 172 Brasilia, 232 Brazil, 83, 215, 217, 218, 220, 229, 231–35, 236 Brazilian Shield, 232–33 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa), 235 Brunei, 55, 58 Buenos Aires, 233, 236 Bulgaria, 14, 20–21, 29, 32, 86–87, 90, 91, 98, 133 Burma, 36–37, 42, 46, 60, 78, 168–69, 171, 172, 176, 190, 191, 209 Burundi, 109, 119, 120, 131 Bush, George W., 4, 187 Byrnes, James, 199 California, 62–63, 67, 69, 70–72, 222 Cambodia, 55 Cameroon, 109, 124, 125 Canada and Arctic/Arctic Circle, 240–41, 243, 246, 251, 254–55 and the United States, 62–63, 65, 66 Canadian Shield, 65 Canute, King, 260–61 Cape Horn, 215, 218 Cape of Good Hope, 109, 111, 130 Caribbean Sea, 59–60, 72–73, 83, 215, 226 Carpathian Mountains, 8–9, 12, 16, 29, 30, 86–87, 91, 96, 107 Carter, Ash, 58–59 Caspian Sea, 8–9, 15, 16, 133, 141, 158, 177 Catherine the Great, 15–16, 25–26 Caucasus, 15, 16, 29, 31 Celebes Sea, 55 Central African Republic, 109, 112, 119 Central America, 215, 218, 221–22, 226, 226–31.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Historians have used this label to refer to the dominance of the United States in international affairs since the end of World War II. In important ways this period of stability (more than peace) occurred because the United States managed to dominate global industry, finance, and culture. Some would say that the collapse of the Berlin Wall marked the peak of the Pax Americana, and that the internet is just an extension of America’s ability to wire up economic, political, and cultural life in other countries for its own benefit. Device networks now provide more of that structure than cultural exports. Today, governments and the technology industry have been closely collaborating on foreign policy.

Since the end of the Cold War, pundits and policy makers have thrown around a variety of terms to help frame current events. Do we live in a unipolar world, where the United States gets to be dominant? Or is it better to think of our political world as a multi-polar one, with many different kinds of political actors busy projecting different kinds of power? The collapses of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991 are two events that clearly mark a transition point in global politics. But a transition to what? Lots of people have tried to describe the new world order. Many have argued that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the new world order became one in which major political and security crises would be over economic issues rather than ideological differences.

We don’t have enough large datasets about Arab Spring–like events to run statistical models. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to learn from the real events that happened. In fact, for many in the social sciences, tracing how real events unfolded is the best way to understand political change. The richest explanations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, as sociologist Steve Pfaff crafts them, come from such process tracing.2 We do, however, know enough to make some educated guesses about what will happen next. And, indeed, our experiences during the internet interregnum reveal five premises for how the internet of things will have an impact on global politics.


pages: 300 words: 84,762

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

1960s counterculture, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan

Hans Liepmann, a mathematician and scientist, submitted the first transistor—developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories—to mark the beginning of the electronic age. Historian David McCullough submitted a borrower’s card from the Boston Public Library, the first public library to let readers take books home. President Ronald Reagan submitted a piece of the Berlin Wall to represent one country’s choice of democracy over communism. Filmmaker Ken Burns submitted an original recording of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.” Ernest Green, an African-American student caught on September 2, 1957, in a confrontation between Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and armed national guardsmen about his admission to an all-white public school, submitted his diploma from Little Rock Central High School.

President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at the event, and ten thousand people lined the streets near the National Mall to watch. “It was, after all, the transistor that launched the Information Age and enabled man to walk on the moon,” said Mrs. Clinton. “It was Satchmo’s trumpet that heralded the rise of jazz and of American music all over the world. And it was a broken block of concrete covered in graffiti from the Berlin Wall that announced the triumph of democracy over dictatorship.” Bill Clinton expressed his hopes for the future. “There is not a better moment to reflect on our hopes and dreams, and the gifts we want to leave to our children,” he said. Another man was on the platform that day: Maurice Hilleman. Few in attendance recognized him.

Sabin Lifetime Achievement Award Alexander, Jennifer Altman, Lawrence American Academy of Pediatrics American Medical Association American Nurses’ Association American Philosophical Society American Public Health Association And the Band Played On Andrewes, Christopher animal cells, in vaccine manufacture See also specific animals animalcules anthrax antibiotics antibodies antitoxin, diphtheria antivaccine activism Aries Rising Press Armed Forces Epidemiological Board Armstrong, Louis Asian flu Atomic Energy Commission Australia antigen Austrian, Charles Robert Austrian, Robert autism controversy bacteria, distinguished from viruses bacterial infection See also specific infection Baker, John Barr, Richard Barry, Anita Beijerinck, Martinus Bell Telephone Laboratories Bell, Joe Benoit strain Berlin Wall bioethical issues. See fetal tissue bird flu. See influenza birth defects Blair, Mrs. William McCormick Blair, Tony blood in AIDS in vaccine development Blumberg, Baruch Bookchin, Debbie Boston Children’s Hospital Boston Lying-In Hospital Boston Public Library Boyer, Herbert Bradley, Ed Bristol Award Brown, Harold Buchenwald Buchta, Richard Burmeister, Ben Burnet, Macfarlane Burns, Ken Burton, Dan Buynak, Eugene Calment, Jeanne cancer cervical in chickens genetic studies in hepatitis B and immortality of cells vaccine for viruses and Cantwell, Art Jr.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Whoever is blamed, the idea of usurpation is central to this message, which fringe political figures have been promoting for decades (and indeed regularly throughout the West’s modern history). But it took an elephant to make the usurpation story go mainstream. FIGURE 2.1. Income growth, 1988–2008, for each 5 per cent global income group and top 1 per cent. Source: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (July 2016): 203–232, https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1093/wber/lhv039. This elephant first appeared a few years after the global financial crisis, in a statistical graphic developed by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (Figure 2.1).

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH William Wordsworth’s admiring verses about the 1789 French Revolution still reverberated exactly two hundred years after he wrote them, during another world-historical event. For those—like me—who came of age around 1989, those lines could just as well have been written about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, and the return to the West of the half of Europe that had been locked up behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. At the time it was possible to dream of a new world, where the three pillars of the Western liberal order would be adopted by all countries and borders between nations would gradually fade away.

Adbusters (magazine), 148 age, voter behaviour linked to, 41–42 Airbnb, 69, 113 Alaska, 119–20, 203 Alternative for Germany, 15, 41, 45, 192 Amazon, 113, 129, 180–81, 197, 267n16 Amazonian rain forest, 223 American Finance Association, 155 antiglobalisation, 21, 72, 222 antisystem proponents, 6–7, 10, 18, 62–63, 192 Asian tiger economies, 6 austerity measures, 43, 45–46, 134, 137, 144–45 Austria, 38 authoritarianism, 7, 14, 26, 42, 49 automation. See technology Autor, David, 77, 78, 71 Autor-Dorn-Hanson methodology, 78, 81 balance-of-payments crises, 218–20 Bank for International Settlements, 64, 155 Bank of Japan, 165 bankruptcy, 159–60 Bartik, Timothy, 203–4 Belgium, 172, 270n6 Berlin Wall, collapse of, 211 Big Data, 224 Blackpool, England, 193–94 Blair, Tony, 117 Blanchard, Olivier, 145 blue-collar aristocracy, 18, 22, 33 Brazil, 223 Bretton Woods era, 162 Brexit: business investment affected by, 102–3; empowerment sought by supporters of, 111; immigration as issue in, 214; income inequality as factor in support of, 31; political shock of, 7, 18; voter support for, 41, 45–46, 192–93 Britain: effect of global financial crisis on, 67–68; import regulations in, 222–23; social order upset in, 7; voter behaviour in, 31.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Over the long term, therefore, think of our planet's surface as ever changing, of continents moving and the crust shaking, of oceans and seas opening and closing, of land lost by subduction and gained by eruption. And this is only one dimension of the ceaseless transformation of Earth that began 4.6 billion years ago. OCEANS PAST AND FUTURE The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to much introspection—not only political, but also philosophical and scientific—and gave rise to a spate of books signaling the onset of a new era. Their titles were often misleading, such as The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, but none more so than one by John Horgan (1996) called The End of Science, which argued that all the great questions of science had been answered and that what remained, essentially, was a filling of the gaps.

This involves marking the boundary on the ground in some way, to ensure that it is observable, to control movement, or even to defend the national territory. This process, the demarcation of the boundary, affects a small percentage of the global framework, but it is usually contentious where it does. Extreme examples of demarcated boundaries past and present include the Berlin Wall, the DMZ between North and South Korea, the fence along stretches of the United States-Mexican border, and the "Security Wall" between Israel and the West Bank. More often, demarcation is accomplished by concrete markers, posts, or other signals that alert travelers that they are crossing an international boundary (the informal rule is that any such marker must be visible on the ground from both of its neighbors, so that any transgressor cannot claim to have wandered across the border inadvertently).

See Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania Bangladesh, India Islam in, 161, 162, 164, 168 population, 99, 103 Barcelona, Spain, 220 bar-graph scale, 26 Basayev, Shamil, 242, 247 Bashir, Abu Bakar, 177 Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) of Spain, 161 Basques in Spain as devolutionary force, 218, 220 Islam compared to, 152 Israeli/Palestinian conflict compared to, 163 origins, 198 terrorism, 207, 222 Basu, Asish, 61 Beijing (formerly Peking), China, 37, 135, 138-39 Belarus borders and boundaries, 120-21 and European Union, 218, 225, 226, 230 and Russia, 205, 231, 234, 253, 254 Belgium colonialism, 162-63, 262, 263, 265 devolutionary pressure, 206 289 and European Economic Community, 210 government, 110 social divisions, 220 Belize, 180 Benelux countries. See Belgium; Luxembourg; Netherlands Benin, 185 Berlin Conference, 111, 263 Berlin Wall, 57, 120 Beslan school terrorist attack (2004), 160, 248, 250, 256 bin Laden, Usama in Afghanistan, 157 al-Qaeda leadership, 159, 160, 161-62, 188 {see also al-Qaeda network) background, 155-56 in Pakistan, 177 religious and political motives, 163 and United States, 196 biodiversity, 63, 65, 102-3 biogeography, 11, 52, 64 birds, 62 Black Sea, 75, 76, 201, 204, 236 Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 112, 266, 268 Bolivia, 180 Bolsheviks, 241 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 80-81, 125 borders and boundaries, 108-24.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

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

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

But it’s also true that the discipline can come alive in the hands of the right person, and I was fortunate to work and study with many of them: Gary Becker, Bob Willis, Ken Rogoff, Robert Willig, Christina Paxson, Duncan Snidal, Alan Krueger, Paul Portney, Sam Peltzman, Don Coursey, Paul Volcker. My hope is that this book will help to transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm to many new readers and students. naked economics CHAPTER 1 The Power of Markets: Who feeds Paris? In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was toppling, Douglas Ivester, head of Coca-Cola Europe (and later CEO), made a snap decision. He sent his sales force to Berlin and told them to start passing out Coke. Free. In some cases, the Coca-Cola representatives were literally passing bottles of soda through holes in the Wall. He recalls walking around Alexanderplatz in East Berlin at the time of the upheaval, trying to gauge whether there was any recognition of the Coke brand.

But it was a brilliant business decision made faster than any government body could ever hope to act. By 1995, per capita consumption of Coca-Cola in the former East Germany had risen to the level in West Germany, which was already a strong market. In a sense, it was Adam Smith’s invisible hand passing Coca-Cola through the Berlin Wall. Coke representatives weren’t undertaking any great humanitarian gesture as they passed beverages to the newly liberated East Germans. Nor were they making a bold statement about the future of communism. They were looking after business—expanding their global market, boosting profits, and making shareholders happy.

The old slogan “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” made a wonderful folk song; as an economic system, it has led to everything from inefficiency to mass starvation. In any system that does not rely on markets, personal incentives are usually divorced from productivity. Firms and workers are not rewarded for innovation and hard work, nor are they punished for sloth and inefficiency. How bad can it get? Economists reckon that by the time the Berlin Wall crumbled, some East German car factories were actually destroying value. Because the manufacturing process was so inefficient and the end product was so shoddy, the plants were producing cars worth less than the inputs used to make them. Basically, they took perfectly good steel and ruined it! These kinds of inefficiencies can also exist in nominally capitalist countries where large sectors of the economy are owned and operated by the state, such as India.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The original MITI vision that Taichi Sakaiya had articulated—of creating a new knowledge-based industry with strong export potential—seemed to be on the cusp of realization. But by then the renewable mandate was passing to another country. FEEDING INTO GERMANY It was drilled into the East German guards at the Berlin Wall that their prime mission, above all else, was to keep their fellow citizens from crossing from communist East Berlin into democratic West Berlin. Over the course of 1989 they had become increasingly jumpy. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was weakening, and the Berlin Wall was the front line in the East-West stand-off. Any East German attempting to breach the wall risked being shot dead on the spot by the border guards. But on the night of November 9, 1989, after an ambiguous message by the East German leadership during a televised press conference, hundreds of thousands of East Berliners surged toward the wall, expecting it to come down, demanding that it be opened.

“NOT SO FAST” In the morning on August 2, Washington, D.C., time, President George H. W. Bush met with his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room at the White House. The mood was grim. The peace and stability so many around the world had hoped for was now suddenly and unexpectedly threatened. Just eight months earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen, signaling the end of the Cold War. The key nations still had their hands full trying to peacefully wind down that four-and-a-half-decade confrontation. With the annexation of Kuwait, Iraq would be in a position to assert its sway over the Persian Gulf, which at the time held two thirds of the world’s reserves.

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt signed the first Soviet gas deal in 1970 as a key element in his Ostpolitik, aimed at reducing Cold War tensions, normalizing relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and creating some common interest between East and West. “Economics,” as Brandt put it, was “an especially important part of our policy.” He specifically, if indirectly, wanted to reestablish contact with communist East Germany, which had been cut off completely by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The dependence flowed in both directions; this gas trade, for the Soviets, became a major—and crucial—source of hard currency earnings.10 Over the years that followed, the gas business would be built up and managed by a handful of Western European transport and distribution companies joined together by 25-year contracts with the gas export arm of the Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

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

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

Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House, 1998), 585. For his portrayal of the vicissitudes of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin space programs, see chap. 15, “Downsizing Infinity,” 551–90. 64.For a minute-by-minute account of Nov. 9, 1989, see, e.g., Laurence Dodds, “Berlin Wall: How the Wall Came Down, As It Happened 25 Years Ago,” Telegraph, Nov. 9, 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/history/11219434/Berlin-Wall-How-the-Wall-came-down-as-it-happened-25-years-ago-live.html (accessed Feb. 27, 2017). 65.Igor Filatochev and Roy Bradshaw, “The Soviet Hyperinflation: Its Origins and Impact Throughout the Former Republics,” Soviet Studies 44:5 (1992), 739–59; Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006, 10th ed.

Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton, KBR, and their brethren prospered; returns on one global aerospace and defense index rose nearly 90 percent, compared with a 60 percent rise for global equities.11 At the mention of the words “terrorism” or “homeland security,” liberal Democrats made common cause with conservative Republicans. With the winding-down of the Cold War, the aerospace industry had undergone unrelenting shrinkage and consolidation. Seventy-five aerospace companies were in operation on the day Reagan was elected, merging into sixty-one by the time the Berlin Wall fell, and finally into just five titans—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics—by the time the Twin Towers crumbled into toxic dust. Some 600,000 scientific and technical jobs had vanished in just a dozen of those years, along with incalculable quantities of experience and intellectual capital.12 Terrorism to the rescue—if not for American S & T workers, then certainly for American industrialists.

At twenty times the energy of any previous or planned collider in the world, the SSC would be an engineering marvel, assuring American leadership in particle physics for decades to come. And with an initial price tag of $4.4 billion, it would be the most expensive accelerator ever built.46 Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down; two years after that, the Soviet Union dissolved. Cold War funding enthusiasm evaporated. By February 1993 the US General Accounting Office had prepared a document for Congress titled simply “Super Collider Is Over Budget and Behind Schedule.”47 In June 1993, project managers were called in front of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, not to defend the value of the collider in terms of its contributions to the frontier of physics but, much more important to the members of the subcommittee, to defend it against detailed charges of mismanagement.48 In peacetime, cost overruns and poor administration were seen as fatal blows to the project rather than as the normal speed bumps of creating something never before created.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

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

Spanish offers the useful distinction between La physical and jurisprudential border with 230 million individual its Linea, the LA FRONTERA'S SIAMESE TWINS 27 crossings each year, and La Frontera, the distinctive, 2000-mile- long zone of daily cultural and economic interchange it with an estimated of course, 8 million inhabitants/^ All borders, are historically specific institutions, and La defines, Linea, even in its pre- sent Berlin Wall-Uke configuration, has never been intended to On stop labor from migrating al otro lado. tions like a dam, creating a reservoir of can side of the border that can be tapped on aqueduct managed by polleros, the contrary, it func- labor-power on the Mexi- demand via the secret iguanas and coyotes (as smugglers of workers and goods are locally known) for the farms of south Texas, the hotels of Las Vegas and the sweatshops of Los Angeles.

South Pasadena, on the other hand, looks like Hardy's hometown - big Midwestern-style family homes on tree-lined streets - incongruously inserted into the urban fabric. Most importantly least $100,000 higher Some years ago city fathers its quiet Los Angeles median home values are at than El Sereno's. when South Pasadena was still lilly white, the decided that the twain must never meet and engi- neered the barricading of busy Van Horne the old Berlin Wall, but to those on its Street. It "bad side" may it not be insultingly stigmatizes their neighborhood as a violent slum. Serenos were especially incensed sure in the name when South Pasadena justified the street clo- of "preventing drive -by shootings." Since older Chicanos tell bitter stories Pasadena police, it is many of harassment by the South not surprising that they regard the barricade THE THIRD BORDER 63 with the same fondness that Black southerners once felt about segregated drinking fountains.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Eyeballing the crowd, we guessed that more than two-thirds of the attendees were under thirty-five years old. The next-largest demographic was 1960s-era hippies who were now seventy or older. There were very few people like us, who came of age during the 1980s and ’90s, the years of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, their successors George H. W. Bush and John Major, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which socialism seemed pretty thoroughly refuted. All down the hallway, young people were selling T-shirts and other merchandise sporting such asinine slogans as “Solidarity,” “People over Profit,” and “Tax the Rich, A Lot.” There was an occasional “Smash Fascism” or “No More Cops” shirt that we could sympathize with, but for the most part it was crazy stuff like Communist cat calendars, which looked like they’d been printed on someone’s fifteen-year-old inkjet printer.

For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. 1984 (Orwell), 102 2008 financial crisis, 2 A Abkhazia, 113 Absher, Sam, 113 AccorHotels, 72, 77 After War (Coyne), 135 Airports Council International, 63 Alger, Horatio, 17 Allende, Salvator, 123 Anti-Hero IPA, 130 Arab Spring, 15 Argentina, 17 Argo (beer), 103 Armenia, 103 Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE), 119 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 100 Auburn University, 6 Ayn Rand Institute, 81, 100 Azerbaijan, 103 B badrijani, 116 Bahia (beer), 20, 26 Bangladesh, 3 Batumi, 107 Beijing, 71–72, 77, 80–83, 134, 150 Belarus, 99–100 Belgian beers, 5, 12, 64, 130 Belgium, 5 Bendukidze Free Market Center, 99, 117 Bendukidze, Kakha, 99, 106–108, 117 Bengals, 7 Berlin Wall, 120 Black Book of Communism, The, 89–90, 150 Black Lives Matter, 129 Black Sea, 103, 107 black-market prices, 37 BlazeTV, 141 Bolívar, Simón, 17, Bolívarian Socialism, 17 Bolshevik Revolution, 104, 139 Bolsheviks, 89–90, 93–94, 96, 115 Bosporus Straits, 103 Boston, 6–7, 15 bourgeoisie, 76, 88, 92 Broken Bridge, 67 Brook, Yaron, 81 Bruenig, Elizabeth, 140 Bucanero (beer), 35 Buchanan, James, 8–9 Bush, George H.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, to the extent that states can be persuaded to defer to the constraints and decisions of supranational authorities or legal frameworks, as the rulers of Spain and Portugal did in the fifteenth century, these factors can play significant roles in managing conflicts that would otherwise end in war. GERMANY VS. BRITAIN AND FRANCE 1990s–present Henry Kissinger has pointed to an ironic twist of fate: “Seventy years after having defeated German claims to dominating Europe, the victors are now pleading, largely for economic reasons, with Germany to lead Europe.”12 In 1989, after the Berlin Wall’s collapse, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher urged President George H. W. Bush to block the rush to reunification, warning that “the Germans will get in peace what Hitler could not get in war.”13 In fact, although the actions of a more powerful, united Germany have sometimes caused resentment, Germany’s ascent to predominance in Europe has occurred not just without war, but also in a context in which military conflict with its European neighbors has become virtually inconceivable.

Yet everyone, including the Germans themselves, seemed to agree that Germany would remain a junior partner. Having internalized the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime, Germans distrusted themselves, and readily accepted a subordinate role in European institutions. But in the final chapter of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall crumbled, the prospect of Germany’s reunification arose. West Germany’s European partners in particular were dead set against it. Prime Minister Thatcher and President François Mitterrand went repeatedly to President George H. W. Bush urging him to prevent unification. As the French ambassador to Germany argued publicly, unification “would give birth to a Europe dominated by Germany, which no one in the East or the West wants.”16 Nonetheless, President Bush and his national security team moved ahead.

It foresaw Soviet GNP overtaking that of the US by the mid-1980s.41 The twentieth century was defined by a cascade of world wars: the First, the Second, and the specter of a Third that could well have been the last. In that final contest, the adversaries believed the stakes were so high that each was prepared to risk the death of hundreds of millions of its own citizens to defeat the other. After a struggle of four decades, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down; in 1990, the Warsaw Pact collapsed; and on Christmas Day 1991, the Evil Empire imploded. The Cold War thus ended with a whimper rather than the final bang leaders on both sides rightly feared. This stands as a rare US victory in the years since World War II. How did the Cold War go so right when so many of America’s hot wars since 1945 have gone so wrong?


pages: 385 words: 128,358

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Everybody runs around with a view, but what leads to success is not having a view but coming up with a direct trade idea. And so I discovered through trading and research how you want to unlock really good trade ideas by having a fundamental view of the process and then comparing that to the perception in the market. That’s how you find a good trade. That year the Berlin Wall fell and the deutsche mark started rallying. It jumped up against all currencies, including the Swiss franc. It was up a lot and everybody was bullish, including Leitner.Then I saw the Swiss authorities respond with pretty aggressive rate hikes and the market didn’t really pay attention. The trend was their friend, so to speak.

It was a great trade, because the low yielding countries had low inflation and low interest rates and the high yielding countries had high inflation and high interest rates. The policy regime was designed to squeeze inflation out of the high yielders. So there was significant carry and the governments had the policy. But German inflation accelerated after the Berlin Wall fell, and German interest rates started going up a lot. Suddenly, the low interest rate countries like Germany started becoming high yield countries. At the same time, global deflation was building, the U.S. economy was weak, the Japanese bubble was bursting, and the property boom that had occurred in the United Kingdom and in several other countries was giving under the weight of high interest rates.There was pressure for lower rates in the high yielders and higher rates in the low yielders and the carry was being whittled away.

It’s no wonder returns have come down. What do you mean when you say “the old psyche”? When somebody said to “take a few weeks” to execute a trade, you didn’t have to be so attuned to the market all the time. Now, you have to be on top of it all the time and there’s so much more to watch. Before the Berlin Wall came down, there were only a few places large sums of capital could go. Now, a multitude of places like Brazil, Mexico, Russia,Turkey can absorb serious money. Money used to flow via bank loans, which is an insignificant game now. If there has been a real major change it’s that hedge funds have taken over the role of global financing.Where banks are methodical and slow, hedge funds are fast.


pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what Félix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it. Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico. El Padrino decided to subdivide his activity and assign various segments to traffickers the DEA hadn’t fixed their eyes on yet.

Širokov is eliminated in Budapest, along with two of his bodyguards. End of competition in the capital city on the Danube. Mogilevic doesn’t enjoy using such brutal means, however, and is always quite happy to leave the job to one of the groups he’s associated with. The Brainy Don prefers to speculate. As soon as the Berlin Wall shows signs of crumbling, he starts changing rubles into hard currency, into German marks. In 1994 Mogilevic manages to infiltrate Inkombank, a Russian banking colossus with a network of accounts in the biggest banks in the world (Bank of New York, Bank of China, UBS, and Deutsche Bank), and to take control of it: This allows him to have direct access to the world financial system and to recycle proceeds from his illegal businesses easily.

From an FBI report it appears that one of his lieutenants, who is stationed in Los Angeles, met with two New York Russians linked to the Genovese crime family to develop a plan for shipping toxic American medical waste to Ukraine, to the area of Chernobyl, probably with kickbacks to local decontamination authorities. The Don’s imagination knows no limits. It’s 1997, and Mogilevic has several tons of enriched uranium on hand, apparently one of many gifts from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warehouses are full of weapons; he just has to figure out how to be the first to claim them. The Brainy Don arranges a meeting at the Karlovy Vary spa; he loves that place. The buyers are seated across the table from him, distinguished Middle Eastern men. Everything seems to be going smoothly, but the Czech authorities blow the deal.


pages: 460 words: 130,053

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

On the first Monday in September, I hopped on the Piccadilly Line with butterflies in my stomach, ready to take on Eastern Europe at BCG. Only, as John had explained, there wasn’t any work in Eastern Europe—not yet, anyway. But then, in November of that year, as I sat in my tiny living room watching television with my Stanford buddies, the world shifted beneath my feet. The Berlin Wall had just come down. East and West Germans emerged with sledgehammers and chisels and began breaking it down chunk by chunk. We watched as history unfolded before our eyes. Within weeks, the Velvet Revolution took hold of Czechoslovakia, and the communist government there fell as well. The dominoes were falling; soon all of Eastern Europe would be free.

I had put all those impressive people in the proposal, and the Poles were getting only me? A first-year associate who knew absolutely nothing about buses, or business for that matter? I was appalled, but I kept my misgivings to myself. This was my dream assignment. I was just going to have to bite my tongue and make it work. In late October 1990, nearly a year after the Berlin Wall came down, John, Wolfgang, two other first-year associates, and I boarded a LOT1 Airlines flight bound for Warsaw. There, we were met by four men from the World Bank and two employees from Autosan, the troubled bus company we were supposed to help save from bankruptcy. After retrieving our luggage, we boarded one of Autosan’s buses and made our way to its headquarters in Sanok.

Abdallah, Ken, 80, 81, 82 Abu Ghraib, 359 adoption ban law, 357–62 Aeroflot, 1, 56, 368 Afghanistan, 356 Air France, 152 al-Assad, Bashar, 357 Alexeyeva, Lyudmila, 376 Alisov, Igor, 365, 369–70 Alitalia, 243 American Chamber of Commerce, Moscow, 144, 145 American Communist Party, 12–14, 26 American Express, 59 Amnesty International, 292 Amsterdam, 371 Anichin, Alexei, 314 Animal House (film), 18 Anselmini, Jean-Pierre, 41 AP, 182 “The Armed Forces of Corporate Governance Abuse,” 144–45 Armenia, 7, 260 Arthur Andersen, 51 Asea Brown Boveri, 92 Ashcroft, John, 306–7 Asian economic crisis (1997), 131–32 asset freezes and visa sanctions, 291, 293–94, 297, 298, 299–309, 327–29, 368, 373, 377 asset stripping, 144, 158–60, 165 Austria, 14, 312 Autosan, 30–39, 57 Azerbaijan, 7 Bahamas, 70 Bain & Company, 19–20, 24 Bangkok, 211 Bannister, Clive, 170 Barnevik, Percy, 92 Baucus, Max, 336 BBC, 50 Beck, Steven, 221, 274, 317, 364 beef importers, 334, 336 Beijing, 211 Belarus, 279 Belton, Catherine, 188, 203 Berezovsky, Boris, 91 Berlin Wall, fall of, 27, 29–30 billionaire psychology, 83 Blair, Tony, 186–89 Blokhin, Vasili Mikhailovich, 279–80 Bloomberg, 126, 187, 194 Boeing, 334, 336 bonds, 132 1998 financial crisis and aftermath, 131–38 Russian market, 132–38 bonuses, 47–48 Borschev, Valery, 287, 376 Boston Consulting Group, 19, 24–25, 41, 155 Browder and, 26–41, 155 Eastern European operations, 26–41 in London, 25, 26–27 Bouzada, Ariel, 121 Bowers, Chris, 5–6, 7, 9 Bowring, Bill, 170, 173 Brandeis University, 14 Brazil, 191 Brenton, Tony, 172–73, 174, 176, 178 Brezhnev, Leonid, 117 British Airways, 56, 180, 270 British Petroleum, 112, 113, 116, 125, 154 Brose, Chris, 307–9 Browder, Bill anti-corruption campaigns against oligarchs, 115–30, 144–48, 154–69, 181, 192–93 banned from Russia, 11–13, 169, 170–89, 193 begins Hermitage Fund, 76, 77–86, 88, 95–103 birth of, 15 bodyguards of, 127 at Boston Consulting Group, 26–41, 155 British citizenship of, 10 Cardin List and, 298–309 childhood of, 15–17 communist background of, 12–14, 26, 27 congressional testimony on Magnitsky case, 302–5 at Davos, 88–93 death of Magnitsky and, 276–78, 280–88, 327, 372–73, 376 detained at Sheremetyevo Airport, 2–11, 169–70 Elena and, 3–11, 145–54, 161–64, 170, 174–75, 187, 192–96, 209, 225, 269–70, 276–77, 282, 299, 341, 350–51, 355, 367 as a father, 1, 3, 8, 114, 174–75, 206–9, 272, 299, 316, 341–42, 344, 374 Gazprom theft and investigation, 154–62, 192–93 Hermitage lawyers as targets, 237–53, 254–68, 360 Interpol Red Notice for, 367–70, 374 investigation into stolen companies, 201–35, 252–53, 271–72 Karpov’s libel suit against, 344–45, 374 loses Russian visa, 170–89, 193–96 Magnitsky Act and, 305–9, 327–39, 340–50 Magnitsky case, see Magnitsky case at Maxwell Communications Corporation, 41–51 1998 financial crisis and aftermath, 131–46 in Poland, 27–39 police raids on Hermitage offices, 196–200, 203, 208–10, 216, 228, 230 Potanin vs., 115–30, 134–35 Putin and, 166–69, 175–77, 183–89, 236, 360–70, 375 Russian criminal cases against, 189, 190–200, 201–35, 236–53, 270–72, 323, 343–45, 360, 364–70 Russian raider attack, 213–27 Sabrina and, 84–86, 94–95, 102, 114, 117, 123, 134–37, 139–41, 174 at Salomon Brothers, 52–76, 77 Edmond Safra and, 72–76, 77–88, 93, 94, 98, 100–102, 112, 119–32, 138–39, 142 Sidanco and, 104–30, 134–35 tax-rebate fraud and, 231–37, 252–53, 257, 264, 271–72, 288, 301, 316–26, 328 threats against, 273–74, 314, 351–54, 363–70, 375 trial on tax evasion in abstentia, 364–70 at University of Chicago, 19 at Whiteman School, 15–17 Browder, David, 1, 3, 8, 114, 117, 135–41, 174, 175, 208, 209, 272, 273, 299, 316, 344 Browder, Earl, 12–13, 23–24 as head of American Communist Party, 12–14, 26, 27 Browder, Elena, 3–11, 145–54, 161–64, 170, 174–75, 187, 192–96, 206–9, 225, 269–70, 276–77, 282, 299, 341, 350–51, 355, 367 Browder, Eva, 14–15, 16–17, 135 Browder, Felix, 12, 13–15 Browder, Jessica, 175, 176, 207, 208, 209, 341–42 Browder, Raisa, 12, 13 Browder, Sabrina, 84–86, 94–95, 102, 114, 117, 123, 134–37, 139–41, 174 Browder, Thomas, 15 Browder, Veronica, 207, 209 Browder List, The (Russian TV special), 365 Bruder, Jason, 332–33 Brussels, 376–80 Bryanskih, Victor, 159 Budapest, 53, 88 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 350 Burkle, Ron, 80–81 and n, 82–84 BusinessWeek, 131, 160 Butyrka, 265–68, 276–78, 280 Canada, 340, 357 Cape Town, South Africa, 114–15, 117 Capital Constellation Tower, 312 capitalism, 12, 27, 62, 269 Russian transition to, 59–60, 87 Cardin, Ben, 263, 297, 335 and n, 338 Magnitsky case and, 298–309, 327–29, 341, 346, 353–55 Cardin List, 298–309 Caspian Sea, 226 Catholic Church, 364–65 cell phones, 48 Chaika, Yuri, 262 Chechnya, 288 Cheney, Dick, 306 Cherkasov, Ivan, 183–84, 196, 198, 201–27, 230–35, 252–53, 298 criminal case against, 201–27 Chicago, 9, 15, 17, 19, 24, 70 Chicago Tribune, 343 China, 2–3, 190 Chinese wall, 64 Chirikova, Evgenia, 329 Chubais, Anatoly, 91 Churchill, Winston, 228 CIA, 295, 359 Citibank, 209 Citigroup, 356 Clinton, Bill, 14 Clinton, Hillary, 297, 298, 333 Magnitsky case, 298–301, 304 Cold War, 356 Colorado, 15–17, 18 Committee to Protect Journalists, 303 communism, 26, 92, 96, 97, 269 American, 12–14, 26, 27 fall of, 2–3, 27, 29–30, 40, 59, 158, 291 Congress, US, 290, 302–9, 327–29 Magnitsky Act, 305–9, 327–39, 340–50 Magnitsky case and, 302–5, 327–55 Council of Europe, 261–62 Creditanstalt-Grant, 99 Credit Suisse, 208, 209, 319–26 C-SPAN, 348 Cullison, Alan, 148–49 Cyprus, 312, 320 Czechoslovakia, 27, 40 Velvet Revolution, 27 Daily Mirror, 42 Daily Telegraph, 44, 182, 369 databases, 158–59, 311–12 Davenport, Michael, 256–57 Davos, 88–93, 192–95 Delovoi Vtornik, 252 Department K, 203–5, 207, 227, 257, 258, 322 Depression, 12 derivatives, 66 Detroit, 28 Deutsche Bank, 199 DHL, 237–38 dilutive shares, 115–30, 144–45 Domodedovo Airport, 247–48 Dow Jones, 182 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 21, 52 Dubai, 196, 312, 321, 324 Dudukina, Irina, 283, 327–28 Duncan, Terry, 197 Dvorkovich, Arkady, 177, 180, 195 Eastern Europe, 24, 26, 27, 41 BCG operations in, 26–41 fall of communism, 2–3, 27, 29–30, 40 MCC operations in, 45–46 privatizations, 36–37, 41, 53–54 Salomon operations in, 52–54 See also specific countries Echo Moscow, 236 Economist, 69 electricity, 69, 165 Elista, 226 Elle magazine, 307 embezzlement, 144 Ernst & Young, 59 Estemirova, Natalia, 303 European Commission, 376 European Parliament, 377–80 Magnitsky resolution, 378–80 European Union (EU), 301 ExxonMobil, 154 fatalism, Russian, 298 Federal Border Service, 194, 195, 242 Federal Securities and Exchange Commission (FSEC), 127–29 Federation Council, 340–44 Financial Times, 2, 124–26, 129, 131, 138, 160, 181, 182, 203 Finn, Peter, 180–81 Firestone, Jamison, 197–200, 201, 213, 220, 222, 314, 315, 316–20 Firestone Duncan, 197–200, 202, 233, 237, 254, 258 Fleming, Robert, 78 Flemings, 78–79 Forbes, 2, 6, 80, 182, 340, 358 Foreign Affairs, 147, 148 Formosus, Pope, 365 France, 73, 74, 131, 151–53, 187, 201, 208, 209, 312, 377 Freeland, Chrystia, 124–26, 363–64 front-running, 183–84 FSB, 175, 178, 194, 195, 204–5, 223, 260, 274, 279n, 317, 321–23, 341, 369 Department K, 203–5, 207, 227, 257, 258, 322 Fulton, Philip, 274 Fyodorov, Boris, 90–91 Ganapolsky, Matvei, 236 Gasanov, Oktai, 248–49 Gazprom, 154–62, 165, 181, 192–93 oligarch theft and investigation, 154–62, 192–93 stealing analysis, 155–60 G8 Summit (2006), 186, 187, 188, 203 General Electric, 92 Geneva, 70, 83, 93, 218 Germany, 14 fall of Berlin Wall, 27, 29–30 Nazi, 14, 135, 280, 369 World War II, 280, 369 Ghost Writer, The (movie), 299 Glover, Juleanna, 306–7, 332, 334–36, 353, 354 Goldman Sachs, 19, 42 Golodets, Olga, 358 Great Britain, 1, 11, 52, 312, 314 Border Force, 368 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 171–72 government, 170–73, 186–89, 261 Magnitsky case and, 261 Greece, 139–40, 312 Greenacres, 80–82 Greene, Sylvia, 42 Gref, German, 175–78 Gregorian calendar, 117 Gremina, Elena, 347 Guantánamo, 359 GUM department store, 67 and n Gusinsky, Vladimir, 91 Harvard Business School, 354 Harvard University, 20 endowment, 122 Heathrow Airport, 1, 95, 126, 238, 251, 252 hedge funds, 69, 70n.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

While Putin’s precise Leningrad assignment has never been conclusively confirmed, he most certainly served as one of the many anonymous henchmen who kept Russia’s historic window to the West firmly shut in the pre-Gorbachev era, either monitoring foreigners, domestic dissidents, or both. An excellent student of German, Putin was sent to Dresden in 1985 to work in the KGB branch office across the street from the local headquarters of the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous secret police. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and crowds ransacked the Dresden Stasi building, the young Putin dutifully burned documents across the street. When protestors turned on the KGB office, the compact, steely-eyed Putin pulled a gun on them. The crowd backed down. With the collapse of Russia’s East Bloc empire, Putin returned to Leningrad and remained on the KGB payroll even as he landed an administrative job at his alma mater, Leningrad State University.

At one end of Century Avenue stands the last Soviet building: the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Radio and Broadcasting Tower, which is anchored by a plodding concrete tripod and punctuated by a series of bulbous pink spheres (the “pearls”). Conceived in 1988, a year before the Tiananmen Square protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tower, which opened in 1995, was built to broadcast television and radio programs. Symbolizing the state’s power to control the masses through propaganda, such towers were staples of East Bloc cities, and they dominated Communist-era skylines everywhere from Leningrad to East Berlin. That it took China’s leading city until 1995 to erect its TV tower bears witness to how stunted China was, even by East Bloc standards.

As the information age dawned, India levied tariffs on imported computer software that topped 100 percent and employed an army of 250,000 bureaucrats to oversee its mere 2.5 million telephones. Even so, for decades the nation’s economic problems had been partially masked by a favorable barter trade with a friendly Soviet Union that sought to project its influence into South Asia. But with the erstwhile superpower teetering after the fall of the Berlin Wall, India was nearly broke and the bankers who had sustained the country on credit were growing nervous. The Washington-based International Monetary Fund, spawned in the wake of World War II to oversee the financial system of the non-Communist world, agreed to provide a bailout—but only in return for major structural changes to the Indian economy.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Forgotten Books, 2008). 20. Greg Mitchell, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill (New York: Crown, 2016); Kristen Greishaber, “Secret Tunnels That Brought Freedom from Berlin’s Wall,” Independent, October 18, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/secret-tunnels-that-brought-freedom-from-berlins-wall-1804765.html. 21. Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic, 2014), 181. 22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed.

It asserts an alternative framework that transforms the opposing facts. We bide our time with counter-declarations and make life more tolerable, but only a synthetic alternative vision will transform raw surveillance capitalism in favor of a digital future that we can call home. I turn to the history of the Berlin Wall as an illustration of these two forms of disagreement. From 1961 through the early 1980s, courageous East Berliners carved seventy-one tunnels through the sandy soil beneath the city, affording several hundred people a means of escape to West Berlin.20 The tunnels are testament to the necessity of counter-declarations, but they did not bring down the wall or the power that sustained it.

The synthetic declaration gathered force over decades, but its full expression would have to wait until near midnight on November 9, 1989, when Harald Jäger, the senior officer on duty that night at the Bornholmer Street passage, gave the order to open the gates, and twenty thousand people surged across the wall into West Berlin. As one historian describes that event, “By the night of November 9, when the people appeared at the Berlin Wall and demanded to know of the border officials, Will you let us pass?, those people had become so certain of themselves, and the officials so unsure of themselves, that the answer was We will.”21 IV. Prophecy Nearly seventy years ago, the economic historian Karl Polanyi reflected on the ways in which industrial capitalism’s market dynamics would, if left unchecked, destroy the very things that it aimed to buy and sell: “The commodity fiction disregarded the fact that leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them.”22 In the absence of synthetic declaration, Polanyi’s prophecy appears headed for fulfillment, and this fact alone must put us on alert.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

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

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

They may have less inequality than the United States, but there are nonetheless huge gaps between what the majority of citizens make and what the most successful earn. Trying to eliminate those inequalities would wipe out economic progress. If we want a laboratory experiment to test that claim, we can do no better than the contrast between East Germany and West Germany. From the end of World War II until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany were separated not only by bricks and mortar shells but by economic doctrines. People who shared a history, a language, and an environment took radically different approaches toward human freedom—and achieved radically different results. While retaining various forms of wealth redistribution and economic interventionism, West Germany’s economy was relatively free after the war.

In the West, for instance, 41 percent of Germans owned cars in 1983; in the East, fewer than 20 percent did.44 But the only car available to most East Germans was the Trabant, a vehicle so pitiful that Germans used to joke you could double its value by filling up the gas tank. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the world learned that even the pathetic productivity claimed by the East Germans had been wildly exaggerated. When, in the early days of reunification, a desperate East Germany offered a free factory to one Italian company in hopes of attracting investment, it was turned down. “The restructuring costs were so great,” said the chairman of the Italian company, “it did not make sense for us to take over the East German operation, even though it was being offered to us free.”

Jonathan Hughes, The Vital Few (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 560. 40. Alan B. Krueger and Jorn-Steffen Pischke, “A Comparative Analysis of East and West German Labor Markets: Before and after Unification,” NBER Working Paper No. 4154, August 1992, http://www.nber.org/papers/w4154 (accessed May 4, 2015). 41. Ibid. 42. Norman Gelb, The Berlin Wall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988) pp. 51, 53. 43. “East Germany: They Have Given Up Hope,” Time, December 6, 1963, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,898090,00.html (accessed April 21, 2015). 44. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 498. 45.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Inspired by Friedman’s ideas, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and many other government leaders began to dismantle the government restrictions and regulations that had been built up over the preceding decades. China moved away from central planning and allowed markets to flourish—first in agricultural products and, eventually, in industrial goods. Latin America sharply reduced its trade barriers and privatized its state-owned firms. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was no doubt as to which direction the former command economies would take: toward free markets. But Friedman also produced a less felicitous legacy. In his zeal to promote the power of markets, he drew too sharp a distinction between the market and the state. In effect, he presented government as the enemy of the market.

INDEX Abdelal, Rawi, 269 Acemoglu, Daron, 183, 185, 199, 291n7 Admati, Anat, 270 African Center for Economic Transformation, 243 African National Congress (ANC), 187 Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS), 34, 226 agriculture: reform of, 187; subsidies for, 208, 220 AIIB (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank), 250 Akerlof, George, 169 Alesina, Alberto, 137 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 139 ANC (African National Congress), 187 Andrews, Matt, 198 antidumping, 228 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 46 Apple, 178; iPhone manufacture in China, 40–41 Arab Spring, 5, 107, 110 Ardagna, Silvia, 137 Argentina: convertibility law in, 70–71; financial crisis in, 71 Arrow-Debreu: model of general equilibrium, 156 Asia: financial crisis in 1999, 71 Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 250 Atkinson, Anthony, 270, 273 Austria: populist parties in, 7 authoritarianism, 103–104 autocracies: versus democracies, 95; liberal, 96 Autor, David, 125 Ayrault, Jean-Marc, 67–68 Bangladesh: microfinance in, 197 banks, 33–34, 178. See also financial crises; independent central, 128–129; insulation of, 64; reform of, 270; regulations, 209 Basu, Kaushik, 145 Berlin, Isaiah, 157 Berlin Wall, 131 Birdsall, Nancy, 237 Blackstone Group, 177 Block, Fred, 255 Blyth, Mark, 196 Bolivia: economic growth in, 251–252; structural reform in, 61 Borges, Jorge Luis, 147–148 Brazil: currency in, 105–106; Workers’ Party, 269 Bretton Woods, 27, 213, 273 Brexit, 7, 12, 76 141, 204, 223, 267 BRICS, 248–249, 250 Buffett, Warren, 122 Bush, George W.

, 73; Macron’s economic plans for, 73–75; politics in, 7; Socialist Party in, 269–270; stimulus plan proposal, 74; unemployment in, 73–74 Freedom House, 108 free market, 49, 133 Free to Choose, 131, 132 free trade, 3, 227–235; benefits of, 119–120; gold standard and, 6; versus imports, 120 “free trade agreements,” xi Frieden, Jeffry, 271 Friedman, Milton, 130–133 fundamentalism: trade and, 10–13 Gandhi, Indira, 56 Gandhi, Rajiv, 56 Gates, Bill, 122 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 1, 273 GDP (gross domestic product): in Greece, 54 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. See GATT genetically modified food and seeds (GMOs). See GMOs geography: effect on trade, 38–40 Germany: Berlin Wall, 131; economic reform in, 185–186; eurozone fiscal rules in, 75; populist parties in, 7; structural reform in, 62 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 35, 111 Ghana, 237, 243 Gilens, Martin, 170–171 “global commons,” 14 global economy, 222–238; conflicts with, 235–236; developing countries and, 247–250; future growth policies, 239–266; “global citizenship,” 238; global consciousness and, 236–238; “green growth” and, 257–260; growth in the developed world, 253–256; managing interface of, 225; mercantilism and, 235–236; nation-state and, 25; principles of governance, 222–227; prosperity and, 223–224; public investment in, 250–253; reforms for, 270–271; rights and privileges of democracy, 225–226; systems of governance, 222 global governance, 29–30; achievement of, 218–221; capital and, 213–218; cooperation with, 207; models of, 226; policies for, 206–210; trade policies for, 207–208 globalization, ix; advocates of, 224, 232; balance of, 13–14; benefits of, 3–4; compensation and, 203–206; discipline with, 220, 226–227; domestic politics and, 72; financial, 214; “global commons,” 220; immigration and, 268; leadership and, 219; maximum, 225; nation-state and, 24–27; “New Deal” for, 205; proponents of, 2; in the United States, 204–205 Glorious Revolution, 99 GMOs (genetically modified food and seeds), 35, 208, 220 Goldman Sachs, 247 gold standard, 271; end of, 213; free trade and, 6; in Great Britain, 48–50, 70; as parallel to the eurozone, 48 Gordon, Robert, 153 governance: global, 16, 29–30; of nation-states, 223; principles of global economic governance, 222–227; private, 30; systems of, 222 government: failure to address inequality, 209; financial crises and, 178; model of incentives for, 198; relationship to business, 254; structural reform and, 59; support for green industries, 257 Great Britain: economic reform in, 185; exit from the European Union, 7, 12, 76, 141, 204, 223, 267; Glorious Revolution, 99; gold standard in, 48–50, 70 Greece, 269; competition in, 42–43; democracy in, 69; economic policies in, 5; effect of austerity in, 69; gross domestic product in, 54; growth economy in, 57–60; impediments to financial recovery, 59; politics in, 5; structural reform in, 51–52, 53–54, 58–59; Syriza, 269; 2015 referendum in, 68; value of export promotion, 60 Groningen Growth and Development Center, 244 gross domestic product (GDP): in Greece, 54 Group of 20, 30, 219, 249; nation-state and, 23–24 growth acceleration: in China, 57; definition of, 55; in India, 56–57; in Mauritius, 57; from 1957 to 1992, 55–56 Gulen, Fethullah, 105 Gypsies, 100 Haber, Stephen, 175 Hamon, Benoit, 73 Hanson, Gordon, 125 Hausmann, Ricardo, 157 HDI (Human Development Index), 107 Hitler, Adolf, 156 Home Depot, 177 Human Development Index (HDI), 107 Hungary: democracy in, 5; illiberal democracy in, 98, 172 Huntington, Samuel, 109 hyperglobalization: balance of, 13–14; history of, 28; institutional functions, 27–28; launch of, 11; nation-state and, 27–29 “hyperglobalization”: in Europe, 4–8; in Turkey, 5 ideas.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

Hanssen sat back. “Does she speak Russian?” “Yes.” I wanted to lie, but how much did he already know? “Interesting,” Hanssen said, leaning back, his stare unmoving. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Allied Forces controlled the west side of Germany and built it into a country of peace, democracy, and prosperity; Russia, however, controlled the east. The machine-gun turrets on the east side of the Berlin Wall had faced inward, toward their own population. Russian socialization began as early as possible, and every child learned Russian as a second language. Juliana’s English schoolbook was filled with anti-Western propaganda.

Although churches speckled the countryside, the Socialist Party frowned upon religion and reached the barest accommodation with the dominant Protestant faith. Each house in Juliana’s village was a compound. High walls and wooden shutters blocked neighbors who might report to the local Stasi. The government stole acres of land from Juliana’s grandfather, and neighbors hesitated to accept her half-Polish mother. When the Berlin Wall finally came crashing down in 1989, and David Hasselhoff united the east and west in song, Juliana had just turned twelve. By 1994, under the “Two Plus Four” Treaty signed by East and West Germany and the four Allied Forces, all foreign troops had to depart the now-unified country. Russia shuffled more than 485,000 soldiers and dependents, along with thousands of tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, planes, and helicopters, back across the Russian border.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Social security systems designed to prevent a repeat of the terrible impoverishment of the 1930s became increasingly widespread, reducing the need for households to stuff cash under the mattress for unforeseen emergencies: they could thus spend more freely. With the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, countries that had been trapped in the economic equivalent of a deep-freeze were able to come in from the cold, creating new opportunities for trade and investment: trade between China and the US, for example, expanded massively. Women, sorely underrepresented in the workforce through lack of opportunity and lack of pay, suddenly found themselves in gainful employment thanks to sex discrimination legislation.

DON'T CRY FOR ME … The second half of the twentieth century was, thus, an unusual period replete with economic bounty. Many of the factors behind this persistent increase in Western living standards appear, however, to have been one-offs: we can only have one reopening of world trade, one substantial increase in consumer credit, one fall in the Berlin Wall. Yet we don't like to think in those terms. Our belief in ever rising prosperity is sacrosanct. It may also, unfortunately, be seriously misguided. We take for granted our future prosperity, counting our economic chickens long before they've hatched. We expect our pensions to be paid in full, even though we save very little.

De Tocqueville's view thus allows for the role of expectations and the impact on the political system if those expectations are not met. De Tocqueville's view of expectations and their impact on political stability captures many of the upheavals seen in the non-democratic world since the end of the 1980s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire and the Arab Spring. But de Tocqueville also has something useful to say about the problems now facing Western economies. Economic stagnation need not make anyone worse off but it certainly has left expectations unmet. Reductions in public spending plans, rises in education costs, increased retirement age, bigger pension contributions and lower stock-market returns are all part of the same story: stagnation prevents us from delivering on the promises we have made to ourselves.


pages: 321 words: 90,247

Lights Out in Wonderland by Dbc Pierre

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dark matter, haute cuisine, market design, Prenzlauer Berg, stem cell

I’m not too put off by this; he’s from a generation retired from clubbing, and realistically, in a city riddled with venues, I allow for the Pego to have moved since the early nineties, even to have changed its name. For now I direct the driver to my old stomping ground, Prenzlauer Berg, home of the original Pego Club. Once nuzzling the Berlin Wall, this area’s stark decrepitude was a beacon that brought adventurers flocking after the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990, around the time I toddled into town. Postapocalyptic grunge became the cradle for a club scene still famous today, and still owing its spirit and style to the no-man’s-land between East and West, between past and future.

I order a beer before he goes inside to tidy, leaving me with the pair of sandblasted faces. We hunch smoking, watching shadows play among the trees. “Is this still Prenzlauer Berg?” I eventually ask. “No, Mitte,” says the craggy man. “Though it depends what you’re thinking, because if you mean the Prenzlauer Berg of the famous Berlin Wall, then this is still considered it.” He raises his beer and points across the park: “A couple of blocks down is the wall. Those buildings at the edge were only for Stasi agents and other trusted officials. They could see the West from their apartments.” “But if it’s old Prenzlauer Berg you’re looking for,” says the comrade, “you’re a few years too late.

Rent office space? Put a children’s playground?” “Wasn’t a kindergarten built over Hitler’s bunker?” “Yeah, but that was deep underground. On top all you see is a mound of grass. This is a whole city block of ruins. Even after the wall fell nobody knew what to do with it. In fact the Berlin wall still runs down one side of it, untouched. I think it’s the only section still standing. A tradition just grew of avoiding the place. The city threw a fence around it and nature claimed it back. After sixty-five years it’s like Tarzan’s jungle in there, even has lianas growing. But underneath you’ll find foundations and rubble, and bunkers will be there, and tunnels, I guess.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

Gorbachev himself was not unconcerned by what was going on in the PRC: “I have a lot of admiration for the Great Wall,” he said to a group of journalists during his trip, “but walls are bound to fall sooner or later”. His words were bold, though perhaps not as audacious as those of the journalist who shot back, “Even the Berlin Wall?” Perhaps, was Gorbachev’s response. Fearing for Gorbachev’s safety, bodyguards from the 9th Section of the KGB decided to cut short his three-day stay in Beijing. He left for Shanghai, where the situation was calmer and the local leader, Jiang Zemin, had a better relationship with the city’s students.

In June 1989, Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi—or the MfS (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), to give it its official name—launched a programme for monitoring potential opponents, focusing particularly on Protestant circles, afraid that pacifists were being inspired by the Chinese protesters.37 Mielke feared that the movement in Tiananmen Square would trigger a wave of revolt behind the Iron Curtain. When the demonstrations did begin, Honecker decided to use the “Chinese method” of repression that had worked so well in Beijing. But nothing worked in Germany. The Berlin Wall came down, sounding the beginning of the end for communism in Eastern Europe. On 7 November 1989, Berliners marched through the streets of the divided capital with cries of “Die Mauer muß weg! The wall must go!” On 11 November, Defence Minister Heinz Kessler summoned his generals to prepare an offensive: “We must use the Chinese method!”

On 11 November, Defence Minister Heinz Kessler summoned his generals to prepare an offensive: “We must use the Chinese method!” In the shadow of the East Berlin reformers, the politician Hans Modrow and Markus Wolf, head of the secret services, who had plotted Honecker’s fall with the Soviets, realized that they had lost control of the situation. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German services were paralysed. As Mielke had feared, the demonstrators stormed Stasi headquarters and began seizing archives. The head of the Stasi in Beijing, a military attaché, defected. He refused to offer his services to the Guoanbu. He was expelled, and later returned as a businessmen working for a company headquartered in reunified Germany.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Like the bewildered Russians, they found it self-evident that things would work better if someone was in charge. In the 1960s, as the Whiz Kids rose to power in business and politics, there was genuine fear that Russian technological superiority would overtake the West.2 Only in the 1980s did it become evident how misplaced these fears had been, and only after the fall of the Berlin Wall was it clear just how dismal was the economic performance of the planned economies. Many people who seek to build ever more centralized business organizations, or to institute a global financial architecture, still do not really take the implications of this evidence on board. The economist Friedrich von Hayek gave a prescient explanation of planning’s failures.

Igor anthologies, literary anthropomorphization anti-inflammatory drugs Apple Apprentice, The arbitrage Archimedes architecture Aristotle Arrow, Kenneth art Art of the Deal, The (Trump) art experts artificial intelligence Asian financial crisis (1997) aspirin assets authority Autobiography (Mill) aviation industry Balboa, Vasco de Bankers Trust banking industry Barnevik, Percy Basel agreements (1987) basic goals Bear Stearns Beckham, David Bell, Alexander Graham bell curve Bengal Bentonville, Ark. Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall beta-blockers Black, James “blind watchmaker” Boeing Boeing 737 airliner Boeing 747 airliner Boeing 777 airliner Boesky, Ivan bonuses Borges, Jorge Luis Borodino, Battle of Boston Consulting Group brain damage brain teasers Brando, Marlon Brasília Brave New World (Huxley) Brin, Sergey British empire brokerage firms Bruck, Connie Brunelleschi, Filippo Buffett, Warren Built to Last (Collins and Porras) Burke, Edmund Burns, Robert Bush, George W.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

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

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

Table of Contents Title Page Preface Introduction 1 - Machupo 2 - Health Transition I II 3 - Monkey Kidneys and the Ebbing Tides I II III 4 - Into the Woods 5 - Yambuku I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X 6 - The American Bicentennial I II III IV V VI 7 - N’zara 8 - Revolution 9 - Microbe Magnets I II III 10 - Distant Thunder I II III 11 - Hatari: Vinidogodogo (Danger: A Very Little Thing) PRELUDE I II III IV 12 - Feminine Hygiene (As Debated, Mostly, by Men) 13 - The Revenge of the Germs, or Just Keep Inventing New Drugs I II III IV 14 - Thirdworldization I II III 15 - All in Good Haste 16 - Nature and Homo sapiens 17 - Searching for Solutions Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Index Notes Copyright Page Preface We always want to believe that history happened only to “them,” “in the past,” and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it. Many aspects of history are unanticipated and unforeseen, predictable only in retrospect: the fall of the Berlin Wall is a single recent example. Yet in one vital area, the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases, we can already predict the future—and it is threatening and dangerous to us all. The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases (most recently, hantavirus in the American West); epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas (for example, cholera in Latin America); diseases which become important through human technologies (as certain menstrual tampons favored toxic shock syndrome and water cooling towers provided an opportunity for Legionnaires’ Disease); and diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through manmade disruptions in local habitats.

And he adopted the rhetoric of critical environmentalists, saying, “Those who have a vested interest in the status quo will probably continue to stifle any meaningful change until enough citizens who are concerned about the ecological system are willing to speak out and urge their leaders to bring the earth back into balance.”5 At the macro level, then, a sense of global interconnectedness was developing over such issues as economic justice and development, environmental preservation, and, in a few instances, regulation. Though there were differences in perspective and semantics, the globalization of views on some issues was already emerging across ideological lines well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then it has sped up, although there is now considerable anxiety expressed outside the United States about American domination of the ideas, cultural views, technologies, and economics of globalization of such areas as environmentalism, communication, and development. It wasn’t until the emergence of the human immunodeficiency virus, however, that the limits of, and imperatives for, globalization of health became obvious in a context larger than mass vaccination and diarrhea control programs.

At the characters’ feet lay dead bodies. In a blame-counterblame campaign, the U.S. State Department widely distributed a detailed denial in 1987, charging the KGB had concocted the entire campaign in order to discredit American government credibility in developing countries.207 Years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet National Academy of Sciences would formally apologize for the accusation, acknowledging that it had been KGB-inspired. Another theory of deliberate recombination came from Los Angeles anti-vivisectionist Dr. Robert Strecker, who gained a large following in 1987 by again claiming, on the basis of a supposed BLV connection, that the CIA made the AIDS virus.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate the underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they would be saved nonetheless. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes.

Eastern Europe, 1948-56 Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, in a remarkable chess game, instigated a high Polish security official, Jozef Swiatlo, to use a controversial American, Noel Field, to spread paranoia amongst the security establishments of Eastern Europe, leading to countless purge trials, hundreds of thousands of imprisonments and at least hundreds of deaths.7 Germany, 1950s The CIA orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, terror-ism, dirty tricks and psychological warfare against East Germany. This was one of the factors which led to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The United States also created a secret civilian army in Germany, which drew up a list of 200 leading Social Democrats, 15 Communists and various others who were to be "put out of the way" if the Soviet Union invaded. This secret army had its counterparts all over Western Europe as part of "Operation Gladio", developed by the CIA and other intelligence services, and not answerable for its actions under the laws of any state.

When the Fiji coup took place, Rabuka and his supporters pointed to the Libyan "threat" as justifying the coup.51 There are more of such "coincidences" in this drama, including appearances in Fiji before the coup of the National Endowment for Democracy (q.v.) and its funding, some of the CIAs labor mafia, and units of the US military in the Pacific.52 The day after the coup, a Pentagon source, while denying US involvement, declared: "We're kinda delighted.. .All of a sudden our ships couldn't go to Fiji, and now all of a sudden they can."53 Panama, 1989 Less than two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States showed its joy that a new era of world peace was now possible by invading Panama, as Washington's mad bombers struck again. On December 20, 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City was wiped out; 15,000 people were left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting between US and Panamanian forces, 500-something natives dead was the official body count—i.e., what the United States and the new US-installed Panamanian government admitted to.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, 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, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

RADICAL MARKETS Introduction THE CRISIS OF THE LIBERAL ORDER The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY, 1936 The Berlin Wall fell when one of us was just starting preschool and the other was beginning his career, that moment was crucial in shaping our political identities. The “American way”—free markets, popular sovereignty, and global integration—had vanquished the Soviet “evil empire.” Since then those values—which we will call the liberal order—have dominated intellectual discussions.

These weaknesses in globalization have long been recognized by “antiglobalization” activists, though not always expressed in precise economic terms.14 As leftist Latin American journalist Eduardo Galeano put it, “We must not confuse globalization with ‘internationalism’ … One thing is the free movement of peoples, the other of money. This can be seen … (at) the border between Mexico and the United States which hardly exists as far as the flow of money and goods is concerned. Yet it stands as a kind of Berlin Wall … when it comes to stopping people from getting across.”15 Those promoting globalization, with their focus on capital rather than on ordinary people, failed to ensure that welfare gains would be widely shared. The Migration Imperative There is a consensus that the economic gain from further opening international trade in goods is minimal.

., 240 Amazon, 112, 230–31, 234, 239, 248, 288, 290–91 American Constitution, 86–87 American Federation of Musicians, 210 American Tobacco Company, 174 America OnLine (AOL), 210 Anderson, Chris, 212 antitrust: Clayton Act and, 176–77, 197, 311n25; landlords and, 201–2; monopolies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; social media and, 202 Apple, 117, 239, 289 Arginoussai Islands, 83 aristocracy, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36 Aristotle, 172 Arrow, Kenneth, 92, 303n17 Articles of Confederation, 88 artificial intelligence (AI), 202, 257, 287; Alexa and, 248; algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automated video editing and, 208; Cortana and, 219; data capacities and, 236; Deep Blue and, 213; democratization of, 219; diminishing returns and, 229–30; facial recognition and, 208, 216–19; factories for thinking machines and, 213–20; Google Assistant and, 219; human-produced data for, 208–9; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; Microsoft and, 219; neural networks and, 214–19; payment systems for, 224–30; recommendation systems and, 289–90; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; Siri and, 219, 248; technofeudalism and, 230–33; techno-optimists and, 254–55, 316n2; techno-pessimists and, 254–55, 316n2; worker replacement and, 223 Athens, 55, 83–84, 131 Atwood, Margaret, 18–19 auctions, xv–xxi, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57, 300n34 au pair program, 154–55, 161 Australia, 10, 12, 13, 159, 162 Austrian school, 2 Autor, David, 240 Azar, José, 185, 189, 310n24 Bahrain, 158 banking industry, 182–84, 183, 190 Bank of America, 183, 184 Becker, Gary, 147 Beckford, William, 95 behavioral finance, 180–81 Bénabou, Roland, 236–37 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 35, 95–96, 98, 132 Berle, Adolf, 177–78, 183, 193–94 Berlin Wall, 1, 140 Berners-Lee, Tim, 210 big data, 213, 226, 293 Bing, xxi BlackRock, 171, 181–84, 183, 187, 191 Brazil, xiii–xvii, 105, 135 Brin, Sergey, 211 broadcast spectrum, xxi, 50–51, 71 Bush, George W., 78 Cabral, Luís, 202 Cadappster app, 31 Caesar, Julius, 84 Canada, 10, 13, 159, 182 capitalism, xvi; basic structure of, 24–25; competition and, 17 (see also competition); corporate planning and, 39–40; cultural consequences of, 270, 273; Engels on, 239–40; freedom and, 34–39; George on, 36–37; growth and, 3 (see also growth, economic); industrial revolution, 36, 255; inequality and, 3 (see also inequality); labor and, 136–37, 143, 159, 165, 211, 224, 231, 239–40, 316n4; laissez-faire, 45; liberalism and, 3, 17, 22–27; markets and, 278, 288, 304n36; Marx on, 239–40; monopolies and, 22–23, 34–39, 44, 46–49, 132, 136, 173, 177, 179, 199, 258, 262; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; property and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; Radical Markets and, 169, 180–85, 203, 273; regulations and, 262; Schumpeter on, 47; shareholders and, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95; technology and, 34, 203, 316n4; wealth and, 45, 75, 78–79, 136, 143, 239, 273 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), xiii Capitalism for the People, A (Luigi), 203 Capra, Frank, 17 Carroll, Lewis, 176 central planning: computers and, 277–85, 288–93; consumers and, 19; democracy and, 89; governance and, 19–20, 39–42, 46–48, 62, 89, 277–85, 288–90, 293; healthcare and, 290–91; liberalism and, 19–20; markets and, 277–85, 288–93; property and, 39–42, 46–48, 62; recommendation systems and, 289–90; socialism and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281 Chetty, Raj, 11 Chiang Kai-shek, 46 China, 15, 46, 56, 133–34, 138 Christensen, Clayton, 202 Chrysler, 193 Citigroup, 183, 184, 191 Clarke, Edward, 99, 102, 105 Clayton Act, 176–77, 197, 311n25 Clemens, Michael, 162 Coase, Ronald, 40, 48–51, 299n26 Cold War, xix, 25, 288 collective bargaining, 240–41 collective decisions: democracy and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; manipulation of, 99; markets for, 97–105; public goods and, 98; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; Vickrey and, 99, 102, 105 colonialism, 8, 131 Coming of the Third Reich, The (Evans), 93 common ownership self-assessed tax (COST): broader application of, 273–76; cybersquatters and, 72; education and, 258–59; efficiency and, 256, 261; equality and, 258; globalization and, 269–70; growth and, 73, 256; human capital and, 258–61; immigrants and, 261, 269, 273; inequality and, 256–59; international trade and, 270; investment and, 258–59, 270; legal issues and, 275; markets and, 286; methodology of, 63–66; monopolies and, 256–61, 270, 300n43; objections to, 300n43; optimality and, 61, 73, 75–79, 317n18; personal possessions and, 301n47, 317n18; political effects of, 261–64; predatory outsiders and, 300n43; prices and, 62–63, 67–77, 256, 258, 263, 275, 300n43, 317n18; property and, 31, 61–79, 271–74, 300n43, 301n47; public goods and, 256; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 123–25, 194, 261–63, 273, 275, 286; Radical Markets and, 79, 123–26, 257–58, 271–72, 286; taxes and, 61–69, 73–76, 258–61, 275, 317n18; technology and, 71–72, 257–59; true market economy and, 72–75; voting and, 263; wealth and, 256–57, 261–64, 269–70, 275, 286 communism, 19–20, 46–47, 93–94, 125, 278 competition: antitrust policies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; auctions and, xv–xix, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57; bargaining and, 240–41, 299n26; democracy and, 109, 119–20; by design, 49–55; elitism and, 25–28; equilibrium and, 305n40; eternal vigilance and, 204; horizontal concentration and, 175; imperfect, 304n36; indexing and, 185–91, 302n63; innovation and, 202–3; investment and, 196–97; labor and, 145, 158, 162–63, 220, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245, 256, 266; laissez-faire and, 253; liberalism and, 6, 17, 20–28; lobbyists and, 262; monopolies and, 174; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 20–21, 41, 49–55, 79; perfect, 6, 25–28, 109; prices and, 20–22, 25, 173, 175, 180, 185–90, 193, 200–201, 204, 244; property and, 41, 49–55, 79; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 304n36; regulations and, 262; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; restoring, 191–92; Section 7 and, 196–97, 311n25; selfishness and, 109, 270–71; Smith on, 17; tragedy of the commons and, 44 complexity, 218–20, 226–28, 274–75, 279, 281, 284, 287, 313n15 “Computer and the Market, The” (Lange), 277 computers: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automation of labor and, 222–23, 251, 254; central planning and, 277–85, 288–93; data and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; Deep Blue, 213; distributed computing and, 282–86, 293; growth in poor countries and, 255; as intermediaries, 274; machine learning (ML) and, 214 (see also machine learning [ML]); markets and, 277, 280–93; Mises and, 281; Moore’s Law and, 286–87; Open-Trac and, 31–32; parallel processing and, 282–86; prices of, 21; recommendation systems and, 289–90 Condorcet, Marquis de, 4, 90–93, 303n15, 306n51 conspicuous consumption, 78 Consumer Reports magazine, 291 consumers: antitrust suits and, 175, 197–98; central planning and, 19; data from, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; drone delivery to, 220; as entrepreneurs, 256; goods and services for, 27, 92, 123, 130, 175, 280, 292; institutional investment and, 190–91; international culture for, 270; lobbyists and, 262; machine learning (ML) and, 238; monopolies and, 175, 186, 197–98; preferences of, 280, 288–93; prices and, 172 (see also prices); recommendation systems and, 289–90; robots and, 287; sharing economy and, 117; Soviet collapse and, 289; technology and, 287 cooperatives, 118, 126, 261, 267, 299n24 Corbyn, Jeremy, 12, 13 corruption, 3, 23, 27, 57, 93, 122, 126, 157, 262 Cortana, 219 cost-benefit analysis, 2, 244 “Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders” (Vickrey), xx–xxi Cramton, Peter, 52, 54–55, 57 crowdsourcing, 235 crytocurrencies, 117–18 cybersquatters, 72 data: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; big, 213, 226, 293; computers and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; consumer, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; diminishing returns and, 226, 229–30; distribution of complexity and, 228; as entertainment, 233–39, 248–49; Facebook and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; feedback and, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245; free, 209, 211, 220, 224, 231–35, 239; Google and, 28, 202, 207–13, 219–20, 224, 231–36, 241–42, 246; investment in, 212, 224, 232, 244; labeled, 217–21, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 237; labor movement for, 241–43; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; network effects and, 211, 236, 238, 243; neural networks and, 214–19; online services and, 211, 235; overfitting and, 217–18; payment systems for, 210–13, 224–30; photographs and, 64, 214–15, 217, 219–21, 227–28, 291; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; Radical Markets for, 246–49; reCAPTCHA and, 235–36; recommendation systems and, 289–90; rise of data work and, 209–13; sample complexity and, 217–18; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; social networks and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; technofeudalism and, 230–33; under-employment and, 256; value of, 243–45; venture capital and, 211, 224; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253; women’s work and, 209, 313n4 Declaration of Independence, 86 Deep Blue, 213 DeFoe, Daniel, 132 Demanding Work (Gray and Suri), 233 democracy: 1p1v system and, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 219; Athenians and, 55, 83–84, 131; auctions and, 97, 99; basic structure of, 24–25; central planning and, 89; check and balance systems and, 23, 25, 87, 92; collective decisions and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; collective mediocrity and, 96; competition and, 109, 119–20; Declaration of Independence and, 86; efficiency and, 92, 110, 126; elections and, 22, 80, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; elitism and, 89–91, 96, 124; Enlightenment and, 86, 95; Europe and, 90–96; France and, 90–95; governance and, 84, 117; gridlock and, 84, 88, 122–24, 261, 267; Hitler and, 93–94; House of Commons and, 84–85; House of Lords and, 85; impossibility theorem and, 92; inequality and, 123; Jury Theorem and, 90–92; liberalism and, 3–4, 25, 80, 86, 90; limits of, 85–86; majority rule and, 27, 83–89, 92–97, 100–101, 121, 306n51; markets and, 97–105, 262, 276; minorities and, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110; mixed constitution and, 84–85; multi-candidate, single-winner elections and, 119–20; origins of, 83–85; ownership and, 81–82, 89, 101, 105, 118, 124; public goods and, 28, 97–100, 107, 110, 120, 123, 126; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105–22; Radical Markets and, 82, 106, 123–26, 203; supermajorities and, 84–85, 88, 92; tyrannies and, 23, 25, 88, 96–100, 106, 108; United Kingdom and, 95–96; United States and, 86–90, 93, 95; voting and, 80–82, 85–93, 96, 99, 105, 108, 115–16, 119–20, 123–24, 303n14, 303n17, 303n20, 304n36, 305n39; wealth and, 83–84, 87, 95, 116 Demosthenes, 55 Denmark, 182 Department of Justice (DOJ), 176, 186, 191 deregulation, 3, 9, 24 Desmond, Matthew, 201–2 Dewey, John, 43 Dickens, Charles, 36 digital economy: data producers and, 208–9, 230–31; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; as entertainment, 233–39; facial recognition and, 208, 216, 218–19; free access and, 211; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; machine learning (ML) and, 208–9, 213–14, 217–21, 226–31, 234–35, 238, 247, 289, 291, 315n48; payment systems for, 210–13, 221–30, 243–45; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; rise of data work and, 209–13; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; spam and, 210, 245; technofeudalism and, 230–33; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253 diversification, 171–72, 180–81, 185, 191–92, 194–96, 310n22, 310n24 dot-com bubble, 211 double taxation, 65 Dupuit, Jules, 173 Durkheim, Émile, 297n23 Dworkin, Ronald, 305n40 dystopia, 18, 191, 273, 293 education, 114; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; data and, 229, 232, 248; elitism and, 260; equality in, 89; financing, 276; free compulsory, 23; immigrants and, 14, 143–44, 148; labor and, 140, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 170–71, 232, 248, 258–60; Mill on, 96; populist movements and, 14; Stolper-Samuelson Theorem and, 143 efficient capital markets hypothesis, 180 elections, 80; data and, 217–18; democracy and, 22, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; gridlock and, 124; Hitler and, 93; multi-candidate, single-winner, 119–20; polls and, 13, 111; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 115, 119–21, 268, 306n52; U.S. 2016, 93, 296n20 Elhauge, Einer, 176, 197 elitism: aristocracy and, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36; bourgeoisie and, 36; bureaucrats and, 267; democracy and, 89–91, 96, 124; education and, 260; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; financial deregulation and, 3; immigrants and, 146, 166; liberalism and, 3, 15–16, 25–28; minorities and, 12, 14–15, 19, 23–27, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110, 181, 194, 273, 303n14, 304n36; monarchies and, 85–86, 91, 95, 160 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, 121 eminent domain, 33, 62, 89 Empire State Building, 45 Engels, Friedrich, 78, 240 Enlightenment, 86, 95 entrepreneurs, xiv; immigrants and, 144–45, 159, 256; labor and, 129, 144–45, 159, 173, 177, 203, 209–12, 224, 226, 256; ownership and, 35, 39 equality: common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; education and, 89; immigrants and, 257; labor and, 147, 166, 239, 257; liberalism and, 4, 8, 24, 29; living standards and, 3, 11, 13, 133, 135, 148, 153, 254, 257; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 264; Radical Markets and, 262, 276; trickle down theories and, 9, 12 Espinosa, Alejandro, 30–32 Ethereum, 117 Europe, 177, 201; democracy and, 88, 90–95; European Union and, 15; fiefdoms in, 34; government utilities and, 48; income patterns in, 5; instability in, 88; labor and, 11, 130–31, 136–47, 165, 245; social democrats and, 24; unemployment rates in, 11 Evans, Richard, 93 Evicted (Desmond), 201–2 Ex Machina (film), 208 Facebook, xxi; advertising and, 50, 202; data and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; monetization by, 28; news service of, 289; Vickrey Commons and, 50 facial recognition, 208, 216–19 family reunification programs, 150, 152 farms, 17, 34–35, 37–38, 61, 72, 135, 142, 179, 283–85 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 50, 71 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 176, 186 feedback, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245 feudalism, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239 Fidelity, 171, 181–82, 184 financial crisis of 2008, 3, 121 Fitzgerald, F.


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

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

Air Force Academy, he said that ISIL terrorists would never be “strong enough to destroy Americans or our way of life,” in part “because we’re on the right side of history.” 57 But Clinton and Obama also used this triumphalist rhetoric in other contexts. This reflected their confidence, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, that history was moving ineluctably toward the spread of liberal democracy and free markets. In 1994, Clinton expressed optimism for the prospects of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, saying, “He believes in democracy. He’s on the right side of history.”

But the same providential faith that inspires hope among the powerless can prompt hubris among the powerful. This can be seen in the changing sensibility of liberalism in recent decades, as the moral urgency of the civil rights era gave way to a complacent triumphalism in the aftermath of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall led many in the West to assume that history had vindicated their model of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. Empowered by this assumption, they promoted a neoliberal version of globalization that included free-trade agreements, the deregulation of finance, and other measures to ease the flow of goods, capital, and people across national boundaries.

Aaron, Henry “Hank,” 223–24 ACT (test), 7 Adams, James Truslow, 225–26 Adelson, Sheldon, 139 affirmative action, 11 , 119 , 163 , 170 , 204 ; class-based, 171 Afghanistan, 200 African Americans, 82 , 95 , 102 , 203 , 204 ; civil rights movement and, 54 , 55 , 203 ; college admission and, 156 , 162 , 170 ; see also racism AIDS, 93 alcohol and drugs, 180 , 199–202 Alter, Jonathan, 89–90 America: American dream, 22 , 46 , 47 , 67 , 75–77 , 78 , 121 , 165 , 204 , 225–26 ; American exceptionalism, 57 , 68 , 77 ; “America the Beautiful,” 57–58 ; founders of, 28 ; frontier in, 158 , 159 ; as great because good, 49–50 , 51 , 54 , 58 ; life expectancy in, 199–200 ; in nineteenth century, 192–93 ; republican tradition in, 209 , 212 ; surveys of Americans’ viewpoints, 72–73 , 74 , 95 Anderson, Elizabeth, 146–47 , 148 , 151 anxiety and depression, 179 , 180 , 183 Apple, 136 Arab Spring, 53 aristocracy: American founders’ view of, 28 ; hereditary, 24 , 28 , 119–20 , 165 , 173 ; meritocracy versus, 113–15 , 173 ; spiritual, 40–41 ; of virtue and talent, 160 Aristotle, 28 , 90 , 145 , 209 , 212 Asian Americans, 102 Assad, Bashar al-, 53 athletes and sports, 71 , 123 , 124 , 125 ; college admissions and, 170–71 , 184 ; racism and, 223–24 ; and recognizing talent, 185–86 Atlantic, The , 158 Attlee, Clement, 100–101 Augustine, 38 Australia, 76 Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (Barofsky), 91 bank bailout, 21 , 44 , 90 , 91 Barofsky, Neil, 91 Bates, Katharine Lee, 57–58 Belgium, 95 , 98 Berlin Wall, 52–53 , 55 Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam), 90 Bevan, Aneurin, 100–101 Bevin, Ernest, 100 Biden, Joe, 83–84 Blair, Tony, 20–21 , 52 , 63 , 66 , 70 , 86 , 103 , 152 Blake, Yohan, 124 Blankfein, Lloyd, 45 “blessed,” use of word, 46 Bolt, Usain, 124 borders, national, 28 Bowler, Kate, 46 , 47 Brady, Tom, 185–86 Breaking Bad , 138–39 , 198 Brewster, Kingman, 175 Brexit, 17 , 20 , 26 , 70 , 71 , 87 , 102–103 , 108 , 119 , 213 Britain, 20–21 , 76 , 95 , 217 , 218 ; Attlee in, 100–101 ; Blair in, 20–21 , 52 , 63 , 66 , 70 , 86 , 103 , 152 ; Brexit and, 17 , 20 , 26 , 70 , 71 , 87 , 102–103 , 108 , 119 , 213 ; class system in, 116–17 ; coronavirus pandemic in, 215 ; Labour Party in, 20 , 22 , 66 , 86 , 97–98 , 100 , 102 , 116 , 117 , 134 , 152 ; May in, 70 ; Parliament in, 97–98 , 102 ; Thatcher in, 20 , 21 , 62–64 , 126 ; university education and government in, 97 , 100 Brooks, Mo, 47–48 Bryant, Howard, 223 Buffett, Warren, 220 bully pulpit, 106 Bush, George H.


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Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

He needed all the ammunition he could get for his Beltway battles to save the carrier program, under the torturous grilling of the likes of Arizona senator John S. McCain, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, or SASC, as it was commonly known in DC. A number of Pentagon officials and lawmakers wondered why the US needed to keep building and deploying the nuclear-powered behemoths. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US Navy emerged as the uncontested king of the seas. Why the need for an expensive aircraft carrier? Many powerful members of the House and the Senate saw the current Nimitz-class carriers designed during the Vietnam era as floating anachronisms and money sponges.

About a year later, fourteen union members, most of whom sat on the local grievance committee, wrote to the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) international headquarters in Pittsburgh, warning about a possible local collapse. Some said the local leadership focused on too much politicking and too little hard union business. Some workers even talked of bringing in the Teamsters. Then the Berlin Wall came down in a scene of jubilant celebration, signaling the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the US navy shipbuilding boom and guaranteed fat contracts for the Newport News shipyard, and casting doubt on the Tidewater steelworker workforce and union power. No longer would Newport News welders be putting finishing touches on attack subs.

Even driving in the rain could be interesting. The JFK job jazzed her. She had been a training officer for the carrier Ronald Reagan, one of her two favorite presidents—the other being John F. Kennedy. Reagan reigned as the president of her childhood years of the eighties—years she loved. She recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of the biggest events of her childhood. Reagan inspired her. Her affection for him rivaled that for her grandpa. Kennedy, on the other hand, she recognized as a navy advocate who did a lot for equal rights, something dear to her heart. Both presidents skillfully projected themselves on the screen, but they were quite different, not only as men, but also as carriers.


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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

The thriving business between India and Pakistan and many other pairs of antagonists is a reminder that borders are rarely the solid lines we see on maps but rather porous filters for exchange. In these and dozens of other cases, we increasingly work around our borders—and build straight across them—more than we bow to them.7 Ultimately, from the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall—and eventually the Cypriot Green Line and the Korean demilitarized zone—forces far more powerful than these barriers prevail. As Alexandra Novosseloff has written, “A wall ends its life as a tourist attraction.”8 In today’s world, territorial boundaries don’t even really capture the geography of borders: Airports may be far inland but contain borders within them, while cyber-security forces patrol technology infrastructures that stretch far across borders.

You can disrupt supply chains, but they will quickly find alternative pathways to fulfill their missions. It is as if they have a life of their own. Does this sound familiar? It should: The Internet is just the newest kind of infrastructure upon which more supply chains are built. The World Wide Web was born in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, which feels like an appropriate turning point to mark the shift from the Westphalian world to the supply chain world.*8 The seventeenth-century Thirty Years’ War represented a transition from the fragmented medieval disorder to the modern system of nation-states in which European monarchs agreed to respect each other’s territorial sovereignty.

At the Hmawbi Township bottling plant, twenty-five hundred people were immediately employed, with twenty-two thousand more being employed in distribution to over 100,000 vendors across the vast and rugged country. The company’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, compares Coke’s return to Myanmar after sixty years to the fall of the Berlin Wall.*2 A world of competitive connectivity makes a mockery of sanctions only genuinely backed by one power. Recent experience in Iran and North Korea demonstrates how difficult it will be to isolate countries: Even when the American sanctions noose was at its tightest, dozens of countries and companies from oil traders to banks continued to do large business with these so-called rogue states.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

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

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

The country seemed to have regained its confidence in this age of cheesy action films with Rocky, Rambo and John McClane beating up various Ruskis, Germans and Arab pantomime villains, not to mention Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun fighting the Ayatollah and Gaddafi. Conservative anti-communist writers such as P. J. O’Rourke could even be cool when writing about socialism and how fun-sucking the creed was. Being Right-wing might have almost seemed attractive. So while only hardline Leftists regret the Berlin Wall falling, it was something of a tactical setback for our side, too. It moved our opponents away from economic arguments, which they’re not very good at winning, towards social ones, which they are. The end of 1989 might have looked like the darkest moment for the Left, but it actually heralded the start of their greatest triumph.

We’ve been on the right side of all these issues.’1 Few would disagree with him, certainly not many university-educated people under the age of forty-five on either side of the Atlantic. For them Clooney is obviously on the right side of these issues, and since the fall of Berlin and even more so since the fall of the Berlin Wall liberals have won almost every single social argument there is to be won. While the Left has been defeated in many economic arguments since – although socialist policies remain popular in British opinion polls – the biggest losers in the period have been Right-wingers. Conservatives might whinge that people believe George Clooney’s narrative of history, but why wouldn’t they?

But that kind of analysis never happened: all that we remember is loads of Tories getting caught shagging or with an orange in their mouth in a stranglewank gone wrong. One of the big problems was that the Tories had been steadily losing what was now called the ‘culture war’, the battle of values. And so, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later, things actually got worse for the Right. 7 ARE WE THE BADDIES? There’s an episode of Peep Show in which Mark, the downtrodden cultural conservative who feels desperately out of touch with the modern world, befriends a new workmate who seems just like him.


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The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

For those in Eastern Europe under communist rule and Soviet occupation, the desire for independence—suppressed by violence several times since World War II—was rekindled. In early 1989, the formerly banned trade union, Solidarność, exacted a commitment from Poland’s communist government to hold elections, which it won overwhelmingly in June, creating an irreparable crack. Events accelerated. Czechoslovakia held its Velvet Revolution in November 1989; the Berlin Wall fell the same month. Romanians revolted in December. Hungary held free elections in spring 1990, and Bulgaria in June. Ukraine declared its independence that July, followed by Azerbaijan and Armenia. Georgia and the Central Asian republics announced their independence the next year. Albania voted its communists from office in 1992.

Yugoslavia was fracturing, heading into a series of ethnic wars. Civil war erupted in Tajikistan in 1992, the year fighting broke out in Transnistria, and between Georgia and the Abkhaz. During these years, an arms-pilferage drama unfolded across the Warsaw Pact. The events in the German Democratic Republic provided one example. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, pitching the country on a new course. During more than forty years of communist rule, East Germany had become an armed police state and well-stocked military front. The arsenals were large and varied, augmented by the secret production in the Wiesa rifle plant. The Nationale Volksarmee, or National People’s Army, was the most heavily armed organization.

The factory manager is quoted as saying production reached twenty-four thousand AK-47s a month. 8. Descriptions, and a limited selection of photographs from within the Artemovsk cache, were provided by several people who have been inside the caves. The author was denied entry. 9. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 302–3. 10 The account of Fechter’s killing at the Berlin Wall was assembled from German newspaper and academic accounts, as well as from records in the archive of the Stasi, the West Berlin police, and the Ministry of State Security. Von Schnitzler’s quotation is from the transcript of the program he hosted, Schwarze Kanal (Black Channel), on GDR-TV, August 27, 1962.


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The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

By this standard, both Buffett and Singleton intentionally ran highly unusual restaurants that over time attracted like-minded, long-term-oriented customer/shareholders. CHAPTER 3 The Turnaround Bill Anders and General Dynamics A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson In 1989, after nearly thirty years as the international symbol of Cold War tension and anxiety, the Berlin Wall came down, and, with its fall, the US defense industry’s longtime business model also crumbled. The industry had traditionally relied on selling the large weapons systems (missiles, bombers, and so forth) that were the backbone of US post–World War II military strategy. As the decades-long policy of Soviet containment became seemingly obsolete overnight, the industry was thrust into turmoil.

Fundamentally, Stonecipher, Tillerson, and their fellow outsider CEOs achieved extraordinary relative results by consistently zigging while their peers zagged; and as table 9-1 shows, in their zigging, they followed a virtually identical blueprint: they disdained dividends, made disciplined (occasionally large) acquisitions, used leverage selectively, bought back a lot of stock, minimized taxes, ran decentralized organizations, and focused on cash flow over reported net income. Again, what matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt, and these executives were dealt very different hands. Their circumstances varied widely—those facing Bill Anders after the fall of the Berlin Wall could not have been more different from those facing John Malone when he took over TCI during the cable television boom of the early 1970s. The key is optimizing within given circumstances. An analogy can be made to a high school football coach who every year has to adapt his strategy to the changing mix of players on his team (i.e., with a weak quarterback, he must run the ball), or to the head of a repertory theater company who must choose plays that fit her actors’ unique mix of talents.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Even after Abstract Expressionism had been superseded by later movements such as pop and op art, the avant-garde and the discourse that surrounded it continued to be useful to government, corporate, and art-world institutions interested in promoting any number of freedoms, including freedom from totalitarianism, individual freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom to consume, freedom from government regulation—even international free trade. 30 Art Corporate Patronage in the 1960s and the 11 Pop Artists Portfolios Far from subsiding, Cold War tensions escalated after the 1950s, with the need for cultural symbols of American freedom and superiority continuing to be a priority well into the 1960s and beyond. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 was soon followed by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1964 detonation of an atom bomb in China, and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Along with these developments came growing anxieties within government and corporate communities about the spread of communism and about the potential loss of U.S. foreign markets and capital investments.

These included the requirement that artists receiving NEA funding sign a written pledge that they would not make anything that could be considered “obscene,” ratification of an antiobscenity law regarding the use of NEA funds, increased congressional oversight of the Endowment’s activities, autocratic power for the presidentially appointed NEA chairman to overrule the recommendations of the peer panels, and the unprecedented application of that power in chairman Frohnmeyer’s repeated refusal to fund artists and projects recommended by those peer panels (including two by well-established artists Karen Finley and Mike Kelly) on the basis that their work was simply “too political.” It could be sheer coincidence that government support for freedom of expression in the arts was withdrawn for the first time in 1989, the year the Cold War was declared to be officially over. Although it would be hard to draw a direct line of causality between the fall of the Berlin Wall and court cases regarding U.S. obscenity laws taking place in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., it certainly seems that the 1989 triumph of liberal democracy over communism raised unforeseen problems for freedom of expression in the 46 Art United States; for without the mandate to pose as an international model of freedom, the most repressive forces of U.S. society—suppressed since the McCarthy era—could once again surface.

See also Time Warner Argentina, 64, 184 Arledge, Roone, 152 ARL–Super League merger, 145 ARPANET, 200–201 Artistic Free Enterprise, 29 Art-market crash, 48 Arts patronage, 16, 23, 31 Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 88 Association of National Advertising Managers, 88 AT&T, 42, 207–9 Atlantic and Pacific Tea company (A & P), 168 Audience as commodity, 12, 60, 75, 100, 137–41, 204–14, 230–33, 245 Authorship: contradictory foundations of, 238–43; liberal paradigm, 17 Avant-garde, 3, 16, 22–32, 34–35, 40–44, 46, 48, 50 Axé music, 111, 129 Bahia, 17, 110–12 Banks, 42–44, 48, 64 Barr, Alfred, 29, 48 Barthes, Roland, 75 Bay of Pigs, 31 Berger, Arthur Asa, 74–75 Berlin, 31, 46, 48, 50 Berlin Wall, 31, 46 Biddle, Livingston: NEA Chairman under Carter, 42–43 Black Dance, 17, 107–9, 123–28 Black Panthers, 239 Black Power, 109, 128 Blocos Afros, 109, 110, 111 Bodies, 2, 6, 9, 13–14, 18, 29, 37, 40, 42, 63, 108–27, 133, 214 Borsook, Paulina, 243 Boyle, James, 237, 245 Braden, Thomas W., 28 Brands and branding, 11, 64, 68, 86–91, 112–13, 135, 139, 141, 145, 150, 173–76, 182–83, 233, 245; sport events as brands, 150 Braverman, Harry, 133 Brazil, 17, 64, 109–12, 114, 184, 203 Break dancing, 119 Brewers Association of America, 63 Brown, James, 113, 120 BSkyB, 141, 144, 146 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 231 Bulworth, 245 Busch Agricultural Resources, 63 Bush, George H., 46 Business Committee for the Arts: founder David Rockefeller, 32, 34, 40 Business Week, 101, 135 Cablevision, 140, 145 Caldas, Luis, 111 Calloway, Cab, 113 Campbell, Colin, 237 Canada, 64, 184, 203 253 Index Capital, 5, 7, 11, 31, 48, 65, 85, 98, 109, 126–34, 140, 171–75, 190, 197–99, 206–18 Capitalism, 4, 5, 36, 63, 69, 90, 132–34, 139–40, 147, 163, 166, 168, 236–37, 243 Caracas, 35 Caribbean, 3, 119 Carlson, Walter, 37 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 27, 28, 35, 39, 52 Chanel No. 5, 87 Child care, 11, 243 Chile, 64 China, 31, 45, 65, 175–76 Christian Right, 51 Cisco Systems, 208–9 Civic Progress, 66–68, 77, 79 Cleveland, 46 Clinton, Bill, 47 CNN, 148, 233 Coca-Cola, 76, 100 Cockcroft, Eva, 22, 27, 29, 30, 52 Cohen, Lizabeth, 171–72, 191 Cold War, 1, 16, 19, 24–31, 41–46, 49–51, 52 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 32, 42, 136–39, 141–43, 225 Columbia University, 32, 91 Commercialization, 7, 18, 19, 80, 133, 190.


pages: 357 words: 110,072

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

If anything, homeopathy is even more absurd than snake oil, as demonstrated by a homeopath who wrote a letter outlining a particularly bizarre homeopathic remedy: ‘This patient continues to have multiple symptoms of lumps on scalp and has had a flu-like illness. Overall her mood has improved, however, I have given her a dose of Carcinosin Nosode 30C over the day followed by Berlin Wall 30C one a day in the morning…’ A response in the Medical Monitor emphasized the ridiculous nature of Berlin Wall as a homeopathic remedy: ‘What therapeutic advantages does Berlin Wall have over ordinary garden wall or Spaghetti Junction concrete? And do Scottish homeopaths use microdoses of that historic nostrum, Hadrian’s Wall? I think we should be told.’ So how did we get into a position whereby each year we are spending £40 billion globally on alternative therapies, most of which are as senseless as homeopathy, and many of which are a good deal more dangerous?


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

It isn’t sudden middle-class impoverishment by unemployment that is really the most important story — though it happens in economic downturns of course — it is the slow impoverishment of middle-class professionals, the constriction of their room for manoeuvre, their status and then their salary too. The political thinker Francis Fukuyama caused a storm of intellectual excitement after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by proclaiming ‘the End of History’. He became, rather reluctantly, part of the intellectual underpinnings of a new kind of deregulated ideal, the one that fell to pieces in the banking crash of 2008. These days, he finds himself in rather different company, and has recently begun a defence of the embattled American middle classes.[23] What he described as ‘happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy’, hailing a new economy based exclusively on service and finance, was actually a ‘gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrialization’.

’ If there is any chance to reverse the trends that are killing the middle classes, and of making possible a comfortable, civilized, independent life for the majority of the UK population again, then Bridport may be a kind of template. The middle classes developed a horror of ‘trade’ in the last century, at least down that huge fault line that runs down the middle of the class between upper and lower, what Grayson Perry describes as ‘the Berlin Wall of British taste’. That is a snobbery, if it still exists, which the middle classes can no longer afford. There is no place for them any more in the middle layers of giant corporations, and even the public services are becoming so hidebound and target-driven that they may no longer provide an honourable haven for middle-class professionals.

Index A Abbey National, 71, 101–2, 104–10, 112, 117–19, 121 Abeles, Vicki, 46, 215 accents, 215 Ackroyd and Smithers, 146 Adamson, Sir Campbell, 105 Aga stoves, 280, 305 Aldeburgh, 246–7, 250 Alliance & Leicester Building Society, 106, 110, 118 alternative indicators, 264 Amazon, 114 American Airlines, 133 American Civil War, 111 Andersen, Hans Christian, 186 AOL, 133 Arab Spring, 289 Archer, Mary, 32 Aristotle, 36 asbestosis, 29 Ashoka, 296 Asperger’s syndrome, 79, 230 Aston Reinvestment Trust, 296 Audit Commission, 264–5 auditing and targets, 257–67, 269, 285, 302–3 autism, 79, 218 see also Asperger’s syndrome Aviva, 155 B baby-boomers, 21–2 Baker, Kenneth, 220–1, 228 Balham, 243 Balls, Ed, 111 bank managers, 41, 93–4, 170, 247 Bank of America, 96, 155 Bank of England, 58, 65, 67, 72, 135, 148 and bank mergers, 95–6 ‘Blue Skies Plan’, 137 and City of London, 129–30 Bank of Ireland, 110, 122 Bank of Scotland, 118 bankers’ pay and bonuses, 142–4 banking crisis, 12, 17, 25, 118, 151, 155, 169, 272, 287, 301 and Lloyd’s scandal, 29, 34, 50–1 banks, 91–124 Big Five oligarchy, 95–6, 252 and industry, 95–6 mergers, 91–6 offshore activities, 147 small banks, 92–3, 96–7, 124 and small business lending, 121–2, 125, 170 value of assets, 142 see also building societies Barber, Michael, 262, 265–7 Barclays, 94–6, 106–7, 111, 122, 135, 137, 146–7, 161 Barclays BZW, 106, 110, 114–15, 146 Barings Bank, 132, 135, 157–9 Barker, Roger, 236 Bedaux, Charles, 255 Beijing, 239 Benn, Tony, 106 Bennett, Tony, 42 Bentley cars, 280 Berlin Wall, fall of, 272 Bethlehem Steel plant, 254 Beveridge, Sir William, 177 Birch, Peter, 101 Bird, John, 111, 117, 119 Birkbeck, David, 80 Birmingham, 97, 128, 152, 168, 228, 247, 296 Birmingham Municipal Bank, 91, 122 Bisgood Bishop, 145, 148 Black Hawk, Colorado, 123–4 Black Papers on Education, 220, 234, 237 Black Wednesday, 31 Blair, Tony, 61, 76, 101, 110, 159, 222, 228, 290 and targets culture, 263–6 Blandford Forum, 295 Bleak House, 209 Body Shop, 301 Bogle, John, 197–9 Boléat, Mark, 98–102, 104–6, 108–9, 114, 120 Boothroyd, Betty, 225 Bootle, Roger, 18 Borel, Clarence, 29 Borrie, Sir Gordon, 135–9 Bradford & Bingley Building Society, 113–14, 118 breweries, local, 253 Bridport, 292–7 Brighouse, Tim, 227–8 Bright, John, 106 Brighton, 212 Brighton bomb, 179, 181 Brighton College, 211 Bristol, 162, 234–5, 247, 292–3 drugs action teams, 258–60 Bristol & West Building Society, 110, 122 British Railways, 266 British Social Attitudes survey, 176 British Telecom shares, 148 Brixton, 168 Bromley, 221 Brown, Gordon, 19, 61, 111, 118, 194, 202, 222, 287 and targets culture, 263–5 Buffett, Warren, 24, 155, 197 Building Schools for the Future programme, 205 building societies and banking crisis, 118 and carpetbaggers, 111–13, 117 cartel, 65–6, 71–3, 97, 99–100 demutualization, 92–3, 96–114, 116–21, 252, 285 and middle-class values, 97–8, 120 Building Societies Association, 71, 105, 110, 112, 117 Bulgaria, 3, 68, 294 Burberry’s, 280 Buxton, Andrew, 106 Byatt, A.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, selfie-seeking young murderers everywhere confound the leaden stalkers of ‘extremist ideology’, retaliating to bombs from the air with choreographed slaughter on the ground. How did we get trapped in this danse macabre? Many readers of this book will remember the hopeful period that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse of Soviet Communism, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and human rights appeared to be the right formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression; the words ‘globalization’ and ‘internet’ inspired, in that age of innocence, more hope than anxiety as they entered common speech.

In a massive and under-appreciated shift worldwide, people understand themselves in public life primarily as individuals with rights, desires and interests, even if they don’t go as far as Margaret Thatcher in thinking that ‘there is no such thing as society’. In most of the world since 1945, planned and protected economic growth within sovereign nation states had been the chosen means to broad uplift and such specific goals as gender equality. In the age of globalization that dawned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, political life became steadily clamorous with unlimited demands for individual freedoms and satisfactions. Beginning in the 1990s, a democratic revolution of aspiration – of the kind Tocqueville witnessed with many forebodings in early nineteenth-century America – swept across the world, sparking longings for wealth, status and power, in addition to ordinary desires for stability and contentment, in the most unpromising circumstances.

An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism. * * * Our perplexity, as simultaneously globalized and over-socialized individuals, is greater since no statutory warning came with the promises of world improvement in the hopeful period after the fall of the Berlin Wall: that societies organized for the interplay of individual self-interest can collapse into manic tribalism, if not nihilistic violence. It was simply assumed by the powerful and the influential among us that with socialism dead and buried, buoyant entrepreneurs in free markets would guarantee swift economic growth and worldwide prosperity, and that Asian, Latin American and African societies would become, like Europe and America, more secular and rational as economic growth accelerated.


pages: 729 words: 111,640

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII's Greatest Battle by Iain MacGregor

Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, too big to fail

ALSO BY IAIN MACGREGOR Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth Copyright Published by Constable ISBN: 978-1-47213-522-3 Copyright © Iain MacGregor, 2022 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Constable Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ www.littlebrown.co.uk www.hachette.co.uk I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army.

The Daily Mail 17 proclaimed on its front page: “Stalingrad Army Wiped Out,” while across the Atlantic the New York Times heralded the destruction of “the flower of Adolf Hitler’s army … [with] Axis casualties on the Volga since last Fall to [be] more than 500,000 in dead and captured alone.”18 At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill presented on behalf of King George VI the “Sword of Stalingrad,” inscribed “From a grateful British people” to Joseph Stalin.19 Socialist realism was the official government-approved style of art—in all its forms—that dominated Soviet Russia from the days of Lenin in the 1920s all the way through until nearly the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Writers, artists, sculptors, poets, and filmmakers all came under its sphere of influence in order to perfect the socialist ideal of life in the country. A key element of this doctrine was the embellishment of truth in order to support whatever Party line was taken.

., Private Christian, 67 Babi Yar, 48 Baku, 60 Barmaley Fountain, 141 Barrikady Gun Factory, 14, 121, 145, 147–8, 206, 209, 277 Bath House, 239, 263 Bayerlein, Lieutenant Colonel, 258 Beevor, Antony, 19, 21 Beketovka, 269–70, 273 Below, Lieutenant Colonel von, 116 Below, Major von, 258 Berlin, battle of, 12, 184, 291, 293 Berlin Wall, fall of, 17 Berndl, Private, 109, 272 Bletchley Park, 33 Blitzkrieg, 26 Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von, 37, 48–9, 51, 55, 59 Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther von, 26, 45, 165 Brest Fortress, 12 Brewery, 115, 135, 227, 288 Brezhnev, Leonid, 2–4, 12 Budyonny, Marshal S. M., 33 Burkovski, Albert, 88 Burmakov, Major General Ivan, 268 Case Blue (Fall Blau), 155, 176, 261, 273 Castro, Fidel, 295 Central Ferry Crossing, 107, 127, 134, 146, 149 Central Landing, 9, 90, 92, 103, 115, 117–18, 120, 143, 150, 155, 184 Chemical Plant, 206 Chepurin, Juliy Petrovich, 288–90 Cherkasova, Alexandra Maksimovna, 291–4 Chervyakov, Senior Lieutenant Z.


pages: 807 words: 225,326

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

This went further than just production; I’m talking about creating our own festivals and distribution systems, and establishing relations with television stations willing to fund our work. I consider Alexander Kluge to be the spiritual and ideological force behind West German cinema of the period, including the film-subsidy laws that created an environment within which many of us were able to work, and the Oberhausen Manifesto, issued in 1962, the year after the Berlin Wall went up, declaring the arrival of a new generation of West German filmmakers. Kluge and Edgar Reitz – both ten years older than me – saw some of my early films and asked if I wanted to work through their company and the film school in Ulm they had founded [Institut für Filmgestaltung]. When I told them I was going to be my own producer, they offered me the use of their equipment, and I spent time on their machinery transferring various recordings I had made.

I worked with Schmidt-Reitwein on Fata Morgana, Land of Silence and Darkness, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Heart of Glass. He has a strong feeling for darkness and contrast, threatening shadows and gloom, I suspect in part because he experienced prison and darkened dungeons himself. Just after the Berlin Wall went up he was caught smuggling his girlfriend out of the East and placed in solitary confinement for several months. At the time the East German regime insisted that the wall had been built as a protective barrier against the fascist intruders, though trading was still going on between the two countries.

The nation was in fragments, with no true centre, without a real metropolis or beating heart at its core. While the real capital city – Berlin – was a divided enclave deep in a separate country, we had to make do with Bonn, a provincial town, as our seat of government. It would be like having Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the capital of the United States. The Berlin Wall stood there, an edifice that was going nowhere without a decisive change occurring in the planet’s balance of power. It was a lingering and painful wound of the Second World War, located in the spot where two political continents rubbed up against each other. Germany had become homeless within its own territory.


pages: 173 words: 14,313

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Most accounts point to the Cold War commencing during a brutal winter in Europe, which ratcheted up a contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over which country could provide more aid to the affected nations (most of which were already reeling from the after-effects of World War II). There is near-universal agreement that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. While various labels are applied to the intervening periods, there is general agreement that the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a pitched conflict with the very real possibility of nuclear confrontation after reaching a point of schism in the late 1940s. This nuclear threat persisted until the inauguration of a mutually acknowledged period of détente in 1968.

., 61–6; iTunes Music Store, 65, 86, 122–23, 135 Archerd, Army, 73–74 Aristotle, 7, 38; arête, 39; eunoia, 39; phronesis, 39 Army of Mice (parody of the MPAA), 123–25 ARPANET, 128 Athens, 140 Audio Home Recording Act of 1991, 57–58, 89, 95, 135 authorship, 130–32 bandwidth, 13, 98, 143–44, 146, 148 Barry, Hank, 34, 106, 109–10 Basic Books v. Kinko’s, 16 Beastie Boys, 102–3 Bennett, Jay, 103 Berlin Wall, 115 Berlin, James: Rhetoric and Reality, 132 Berne Convention, 74–75 “Betamax Case,” See Universal Studios v. Sony Billboard, 102 BitTorrent, 6, 123 Black, Edwin, 20 Blackmun, Harry, 56 Blockbuster, 106 BMG Music et al. v. Gonzalez, 91–92. 97 Bond, James, 119 Borges, Jorge Luis: “The Library of Babel,” 19, 147 Bowie, David, 77 Brewster, Sir David, 69 Breyer, Stephen, 138 broadband, 14, 86, 99, 105–6, 141–42, 144–46 Bronfman, Edgar, 108–9, 122–23 Burk, Dan, 20, 120 Burke, Kenneth: identification, 40–41 C/NET, 56, 65 Cake (band), 86–87 cassette tape, 28–29, 63–64, 91, 117 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70 Chicago Reader, 91 Churchill, Winston, 108 client-server, 128 Cold War, 25, 106–7, 112–19, 126 159 Pa r l orPr e s s 160 College Composition and Communication, 132 compact discs, 3, 10–13, 53, 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 72, 74–75, 77, 81, 91–95, 102–3, 110, 112, 117–18 composition pedagogy, 131–32 Computers and Composition, 130 content industries, 6, 12, 52, 66, 68, 76–77, 82–83, 105, 108, 116, 121–26, 136, 146 copyright: Napster users’ perceptions of, 3–5 U.S.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

The 1985 version spoke of an ‘unceasing introduction of new nuclear and conventional Soviet military capabilities’. The secretary of defense’s preface opened with a quote from a NATO document referring to the Warsaw Pact’s emphasis on ‘the element of surprise and the necessity of rapid offensive operations’.32 The September 1990 edition published after the fall of the Berlin Wall acknowledged the changes underway and the greater openness shown in Moscow when discussing the problems posed by its excessively large military establishment. Yet it still insisted that it would be wrong to conclude, ‘no matter how much we might wish it’, that this was ‘an eviscerated force structure and an evaporating threat’.33 It was hard to accept that the USSR might one day do what ‘other declining powers have been impelled to do in history: that is, retreat from an empire it could neither afford to support nor hope to control over the longer term’.34 A National Intelligence Estimate of May 1988 noted how Gorbachev’s policies had ‘increased the potential for instability in Eastern Europe,’ but offered comparatively mild scenarios as its outliers, certainly compared with what was to come.

If his reforms revitalised the Soviet Union he would be ‘potentially more dangerous than his predecessors, each of whom, through some aggressive move, had saved the West from the dangers of its own wishful thinking’. Secretary of State James A. Baker III recalled his belief that Gorbachev’s strategy ‘was premised on splitting the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe.’41 They soon changed their minds. In December 1989, not long after the Berlin Wall was breached, a summit meeting was conducted between Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev on a boat moored in choppy waters off Malta. The Cold War began to be spoken of in the past tense. It had lasted, Gorbachev’s spokesman quipped, ‘from Yalta to Malta’.42 PART TWO [ 10 ] A Science of War Until war has been systematically described it cannot be adequately understood, and with such understanding comes the first meaningful possibility of controlling it.

., III, 106 Balkan Ghosts (Kaplan), 155 Balkans, 12, 141, 160, 186 See also Bosnia; Croatia; Serbia; Yugoslavia balloons, 5, 19 Ban Ki-moon, 261 Bangladesh, 165–166 barbarism, 200–208 Barker, Martin, 198–199 Barot, Odysse, 115 The Battle of Dorking (Chesney), 4–7, 11, 88, 94, 96, 252 Beirut, 169, 178, 191 Belgium, 40, 61, 159 Bellona, x Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine, 261 Berlin Wall, 86 von Bernhardi, Friedrich, 44 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), xi–xv, 131 bin Laden, Osama, 179–180, 182–183 von Bismarck, Otto, 3, 37 Black and White (journal), 12 Blair, Tony, 168, 194 Blight, James, 92 blitzkrieg, 62 Bloch, Ivan Stanislavovich, 15–16, 22–23, 25, 35–36, 115 Boer War, 15, 23, 35, 38–39 Boko Haram, 129, 220 le Bon, Gustave, 22, 56 Bosnia, 144, 154–156, 168–169, 202, 217 Boulding, Kenneth, 111–112 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 147 Boy Scouts, 17–18 The Boys in Company C (film), 176–177 Brahimi, Lakhdar, 174 Brazil, 257–258 Brezhnev, Leonid, 99 Brians, Paul, 95 Britain.


pages: 512 words: 162,977

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

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

What is a clerk going to know about what is actually driving the international currency market? I would be talking to bankers throughout the day and night—in Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, and New York. Were you trading off of this information flow? That’s what foreign exchange trading is all about. Can you give me a recent example of how information flow helps in trading? At the time the Berlin Wall came down, the general market sentiment was that everyone would want to get money into East Germany on the ground floor. The basic assumption was that large capital flows into Eastern Europe would most directly benefit the Deutsche mark. After a Bill Lipschutz / 31 while, the realization set in that it was going to take a lot longer to absorb East Germany into a unified Germany.

Everything started to come together at that time. Not only was I trading on my own without any interference, but that same Eastern European situation led to my first truly major trade for Soros’s Quantum Fund. I never had more conviction about any trade than I did about the long side of the Deutsche mark when the Berlin Wall came down. One of the reasons I was so bullish on the Deutsche mark was a radical currency theory proposed by George Soros in his book, The Alchemy of Finance. His theory was that if a huge deficit were accompanied by an expansionary fiscal policy and tight monetary policy, the country’s currency would actually rise.

The dollar provided a perfect test case in the 1981-84 period. At the time, the general consensus was that the dollar would decline because of the huge budget deficit. However, because money was attracted into the country by a tight monetary policy, the dollar actually went sharply higher. When the Berlin Wall came down, it was one of those situations that I could see as clear as day. West Germany was about to run up a huge budget deficit to finance the rebuilding of East Germany. At the same time, the Bundesbank was not going to tolerate any inflation. I went headlong into the Deutsche mark. It turned out to be a terrific trade.


pages: 423 words: 126,375

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

Isolated on the border between East and West Germany, the families of the squadron became close and participated in community social activities such as weekly officer’s calls, pizza night at the club, and holiday dinners, as well as unit trips to Spanish beaches in the summer and Alpine ski resorts in the winter. The Berlin Wall came down near the end of our assignment in Germany. My tank company occupied Observation Posts Alpha, Romeo, and India along the inter-German border in the state of Hessen in November 1989. We were witnesses to history. The Germans tore gaping holes in the Iron Curtain, thanked the American soldiers for their role in the event, and celebrated their liberation in typical German fashion—with oompah bands, beer, and bratwurst.

My first two commands—the “Maulers” of M Company, 3rd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment—both had been good units, but neither had faced combat under my command. This experience would be vastly different. After I received the brigade’s colors from Major General Robinson, my speech was short and to the point. I tried to place the brigade in historical perspective. “We live in extraordinary times,” I began. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American soldiers have overthrown oppressive regimes in Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Iraq.” As the 1st Armored Division had served honorably during combat operations in World War II and the Gulf War and more recently during peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, we too would do our duty.

After the ceremony I drove up to Warrior Main, headquarters of 3-124 Infantry, to spend a couple of hours with the soldiers from Florida. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thad Hill, and I had served together in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the famed “Blackhorse,” during its days on the inter-German border just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He and his field-grade officers, Major Mike Canzoneri and Major John Haas, were excellent officers who had accomplished a great deal in bringing back together the companies of the battalion that had spent their first couple of months in Iraq apart, guarding Patriot air-defense missile batteries. The battalion was never meant to serve as an integral unit in this war, and the mobilization process had left key portions of the battalion’s organization and equipment behind in Florida.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Britain, alongside America and France, occupied the rest of the country, thereby providing a useful base from which to launch operations to undermine Soviet rule.50 With the establishment of West Germany, SIS headquarters moved to the British embassy in Bonn, but the service kept outstations elsewhere, including West Berlin.The latter soon became the largest SIS unit anywhere in the world, surrounded by communist territory and the Soviet military. Before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, SIS had easy access to plentiful targets and exploited this to the full.51 Operations in Berlin benefited from another advantage. SIS activity was paid for by the Germans through occupation costs, thereby relieving the financial constraint which so often hampered British covert action.52 SIS worked closely with anti-communist resistance organizations left over from the war and also recruited spies amongst the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 64 cold wa r relatives of refugees arriving in the West.

Across Western Europe, black propaganda portrayed American troops in an unfavourable light, including spreading fake stories about them being involved in sexual offences and murders.110 The Lyautey principle, favoured by SIS, lasted at least until the 1970s.111 However, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the treachery of George Blake in the late 1950s severely hampered intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain. SIS increasingly left spying in East Berlin to the West German intelligence service. When SIS opened a station at the new British embassy in East Berlin in 1973, it focused on recruiting agents in Third World countries, as it was here that the covert battle for OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 88 cold wa r influence now took place.

As intelligence mixed with international trade and economics, the 1980s became a conspiracy theorist’s dream and it remains difficult to separate fact from fiction. By the end of the decade, the Cold War was over. Despite this raising fundamental questions about the role and even existence of secret service, and despite deep cuts to SIS itself, covert action continued long after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. It became more ad hoc and flexible, more tactical and operational, but remained a key means of executing ­foreign ­policies and maintaining Britain’s global role in an age of illusions. Perhaps more than ever before, covert action became a force multiplier. In the early 1990s, one of Queen Elizabeth’s private secretaries lunched at Century House, SIS’s headquarters.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

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

Bishop Auckland’s predicament in the 1980s was soon emblematic of hundreds if not thousands of towns across regions of the United States. Left to their own devices, without targeted and sustained state intervention, they simply could not adapt and modernize. They ended up as permanent losers, not winners, in the new economy, and in a state of perpetual decay. Initially in the United States, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was no sense that America too was in postindustrial decline. The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers.

As I had spent a year in Moscow when Gorbachev was attempting his wholesale reconstruction of the Soviet economic system, I enrolled in a class on reforming socialist economies taught by the celebrated Hungarian economist János Kornai. Professor Kornai had written an influential book on the economics of shortage, outlining the systemic flaws in Communist economies. I had direct experience of the economics of shortage in Moscow, so I had something concrete to relate to. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, while Professor Kornai was completing a new book, The Road to a Free Economy, which offered ideas for reforming his native Hungary and, by extension, other Eastern bloc countries. One of his lectures delved into soft and hard budget constraints, the effects of inflation, and the respective responses of state-owned companies and private firms.

He leaned over to me and whispered, “The problem is the president doesn’t know any of this. He doesn’t know any history at all, even some of the basics on the U.S.” As usual, Trump had not bothered to read up on anything ahead of the meeting, but Chancellor Merkel’s personal recounting of her experiences, looking at things from the other side of the Berlin Wall, grabbed his attention. We all could have been blown up in both the West and the East, she said, but the INF saved the day. Trump, for once, agreed on closer coordination. Angela Merkel struck a chord by channeling the 1980s for Eighties Man. The INF episode was one of the bright spots in my time at the NSC—as strange as that may seem, given the fact that this was the withdrawal from what had been such an important arms-control treaty for forty years—and one that assuaged my fears of having to throw myself in a ditch during a ballistic missile strike.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

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

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

Salinas, who took office in December 1988, was surprisingly able to transform expectations and reality in the first two years of his sexenio. In 1989, he consolidated his power by successively jailing Joaquín Hernández Galicia (“La Quina”), the leader of the oil workers’ union, and Eduardo Legorreta, one of the most prominent brokers in Mexico. In January 1990, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Salinas realized at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos meeting that he would have to compete with the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. Salinas ordered the beginning of negotiations toward a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the reprivatization of the banking system.

It may therefore be only a matter of time before some combination of greater debt and higher inflation precipitates a crash in the JGB and yen markets. 8 JAPAN: THE INTERREGNUM GOES ON Richard B. Katz No Political Stability without Economic Prosperity; No Prosperity without Structural Reform The long political interregnum that began in 1989—with the peak of the 1980s financial bubble and the fall of the Berlin Wall—seems destined to continue for at least several more years. In 2009, hopes were raised that the smashing victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the Lower House elections would usher in at least a few years of political stability and some substantial progress on economic reform. Not only did the DPJ throw out the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had ruled virtually uninterrupted for nearly six decades (making the 2009 election the first time voters had ever affected a change in government in postwar Japan), but it did so in an unprecedented landslide.

All of this begs the question, If one-party democracy is maladaptive for modern economies, how did the LDP and its precursor parties manage to rule in all but two of the sixty-five years following the end of World War II? The answer is that, for a long time, the LDP served Japan very well. For one thing, it kept Japan in the Western camp during the Cold War. Recall that until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primary opposition parties were the Socialists and Communists who, unlike the pro-Western Social Democrats of Western Europe, oriented toward Moscow, Beijing, and even Pyongyang. As long as the Socialists and Communists remained the voice of the opposition, the LDP was safe.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The notions of economic equality and communal effort were among the reasons Russia turned to Marx. Their communist revolution in 1917 led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which vied with the capitalist United States as the economic model du jour during the Cold War which lasted from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Marx’s most notable success is communist China. The world’s second largest economy and its most populous nation adopted communism after its 1949 revolution and has remained governed by the Chinese Communist Party ever since. But starting in 1979, when economic stagnation led its leader Deng Xiaoping to adopt reforms, China has moved away from a planned economy towards a more market-based one.

The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity. The Occupy movement reflected the modern version of a struggle that had been ongoing since the previous century. The twentieth century had witnessed an ideological battle between socialism and welfare state capitalism, culminating in the triumph of the latter with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989, which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had observed: There is no figure who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.1 In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the future of capitalism was once again up for debate.

With a knowledge of prices, people can choose to produce certain goods or work in certain industries. The economy as a whole operates efficiently even though no one has coordinated their efforts. The book was seven years in the making, and not well received. It marked the end of his professional career. A year later, it was tremendously fitting that Hayek would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that followed it. He lived long enough to see the victory of capitalism over communism, but only just. In 1992 he died at the age of ninety-two. Hayek and the global financial crisis At the time of his passing, Hayek had seen the dominance of capitalism over communism at the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The notions of economic equality and communal effort were among the reasons Russia turned to Marx. Their communist revolution in 1917 led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which vied with the capitalist United States as the economic model du jour during the Cold War which lasted from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Marx’s most notable success is communist China. The world’s second largest economy and its most populous nation adopted communism after its 1949 revolution and has remained governed by the Chinese Communist Party ever since. But starting in 1979, when economic stagnation led its leader Deng Xiaoping to adopt reforms, China has moved away from a planned economy towards a more market-based one.

The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity. The Occupy movement reflected the modern version of a struggle that had been ongoing since the previous century. The twentieth century had witnessed an ideological battle between socialism and welfare state capitalism, culminating in the triumph of the latter with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989, which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman had observed: There is no figure who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.1 In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the future of capitalism was once again up for debate.

With a knowledge of prices, people can choose to produce certain goods or work in certain industries. The economy as a whole operates efficiently even though no one has coordinated their efforts. The book was seven years in the making, and not well received. It marked the end of his professional career. A year later, it was tremendously fitting that Hayek would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that followed it. He lived long enough to see the victory of capitalism over communism, but only just. In 1992 he died at the age of ninety-two. Hayek and the global financial crisis At the time of his passing, Hayek had seen the dominance of capitalism over communism at the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.


pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

We studied everything from NATO defence strategy through terrorism to national energy requirements. We learned about the carpets of tactical nuclear weapons that would be laid down in East Germany if the Soviet horde ever decided to roll into West Germany. We visited the British Army of the Rhine, the depressing remains of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the reality of the Berlin Wall and, when we passed through it via Checkpoint Charlie, discovered the bleak streetscape of East Berlin devoid of retail outlets and traffic. Simply by passing through the Wall, we had moved from the affluent boulevards of West Berlin into the grim austerity of the Communist world. There was no obvious sign of extreme poverty or starvation but we had entered a different world, a police state, a barren land devoid of freedom in which even members of one’s own family could not be trusted.

When a submarine dives, the ambient radiation level actually drops because the sea shields it from the sun. My Devil’s advocacy held sway for twenty-six years. **** Whilst beavering away at my corporate plan, the world as I had known it turned on its head. The Cold War came to an abrupt end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and within two years, the Soviet Union had dissolved. Our enemy had packed it in. There was now to be a Peace Dividend. Translated, that meant massive cuts to Defence spending, a complete re-think on our Long Term Costing, and a deluge of additional work for Ministry warriors. There would now be redundancies in the Armed Forces.

He held fire. Thank God. Marine Kills Santa Claus would have been an even more unpalatable headline than Protesters Board Submarine. Had that incident happened in the Soviet Union or the USA, they would have been shot. The Soviets shot innocent civilians merely for trying to escape to freedom over the Berlin Wall. Infiltrating the Base was just a game for the protesters. They knew they would not be shot, that they would be handed over to the police, and would then be released to have another go. It may have been a good game for them but it was not a game for those charged with maintaining Base security.


pages: 378 words: 120,490

Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom, Laura Watkinson

Berlin Wall, centre right, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Potemkin village, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control

Your final hours too were a bitter cup, but now you have departed for God’s peace. 2 Soldiers are murderers RETURN TO BERLIN It was in May, and it was in Los Angeles. The president of Loyola Marymount University, the Reverend Thomas P. O’Malley of the Society of Jesus, had invited me to the ceremonial unveiling of a section of the Berlin Wall, a gift to the university from the city of Berlin. Various people were going to speak, including the consul general of Germany, Hans-Alard von Rohr. It was a sunny day, the heat from the nearby desert tempered by the ocean. I felt a little strange as I drove there along the endless freeways. Merely the word “freeway,” with all its associations, made the thought of the Wall and the memories it evokes seem grotesque.

He was German Emperor between 1871 and 1888. Wilhelm II (1859–1941)—Grandson of Queen Victoria and German emperor (1888–1918), Wilhelm was forced to abdicate at the end of the First World War. Wolf, Christa (1929–2011)—German writer who lived in the D.D.R. and was known in her country as a “loyal dissident.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall she opposed moves towards reunification, a stance which attracted much criticism. Wolf, Markus (1923–2006)—Co-founder and head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service. C.D.U. / CHRISTLICH DEMOKRATISCHE UNION—CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS / DEMOCRATIC UNION The C.D.U. was founded in 1945 as a conservative political party guided by the principles of Christian democracy.

World Service 50 Becher, Johannes 185 Begrüßungsgeld (welcome money) 81, 82 Belvedere (Potsdam) 255, 255, 259 Benjamin, Walter 334, 403 Benn, Gottfried 210, 214, 215, 404 “Berceuse” 60 Bergman, Ingmar 315 Berlin in 1963 6–12 in 1989 17–121, 316, 325 in 1990 186–96, 201–2, 231–42, 249, 254, 259–63 in 1997 305–9 in 2008 325–31, 347–52, 361–62, 374 see also individual landmarks Berlin Airlift (1949) 349, 350 Berlin, Battle of 272 Berlin Blockade (1949) 349 Berlin–Hamburg route 49 Berlin Wall 6, 8, 13, 27, 29, 37–38, 36, 39, 53, 56, 285, 303–305 fall of 82, 84–94, 94, 205, 247, 261, 366, 389 gift of section of to Loyola Marymount University 249–50 Berlin Workers’ Councils 25 Berlin zoo 105, 346 Berlusconi, Silvio 385, 388 Bernhard, Thomas 42–43 Bevin, Ernest 237 Bierman, Wolf 410 Bismarck, Otto von 175, 220, 282–83, 404 Mann’s portrait 282–83 statue of (Hamburg) 274–75, 281 statue of (Kiel) 58 Blainville, Monsieur 296 Bloem, J.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

As I said, the giant mistake of the euro played a big role. But Poland, which never joined the euro, sailed through the economic crisis pretty much unscathed; yet democracy there is collapsing all the same. I would suggest, however, that there’s a deeper story here. There have always been dark forces in Europe (as there are here). When the Berlin Wall fell, a political scientist I know joked, “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true path: fascism.” We both knew he had a point. What kept these dark forces in check was the prestige of a European elite committed to democratic values. But that prestige was squandered through mismanagement—and the damage was compounded by unwillingness to face up to what was happening.

Anyway, I think it’s really important to realize the extent to which peddling political snake oil, whether it’s about the economy, race, the effects of immigration, or whatever, is to an important extent a way to peddle actual snake oil: magic pills that will let you lose weight without ever feeling hungry and restore your youthful manhood. WHY IT CAN HAPPEN HERE August 27, 2018 As I mentioned earlier, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine—an expert on international relations—made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path—fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge. And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe.

Economics,” 125 Baily, Martin, 127 Baker, Dean, 169 Bangladesh, 243–44 banking system: unregulated “shadow” of, 9 vulnerability to panics, 82, 89 banknotes, 411, 412, 413 Bank of England, 103, 128 Barnhart, Jo Anne, 26 Barrasso, John, 57 Bartley, Robert, 271, 276 Batchelder, Lily, 239 Beck, Glenn, 356 behavioral finance, 145–46 benefits enhancement, 210, 211–12 Berlin Wall, fall of, 188, 358 Bernanke, Ben, 82, 130, 140, 141 and financial crisis (2007–2008), 89, 147 on income inequality, 282, 283 bin Salman, Mohammed, 371 bipartisanship, 198 Bitcoin, 411–14 Black, Duncan, 157 Blackwater affair, 299 Blanchard, Olivier, 130, 139, 194, 203–5 Blasey Ford, Christine, 345, 346 Bloomberg, Michael, 306 Boehner, John, 362 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 262, 270 bothsidesism, 297–98, 375, 378 Bowles, Erskine, 198, 199, 203, 218 Bowyer, Jerry, 44 “Bridge Too Far, A” (Krugman), 175–77 Britain: Brexit, 158 budget surpluses of, 154 currency of, 180 economy of, 180 hard-money policy in, 185 health care in, 45, 47, 48 retirement system in, 22–24 Brunnermeier, Markus, 412 bubbles: ends of, 87 see also specific bubbles Buckley, William, 408 budget, balancing, 6 budget deficits, 96, 104, 105, 107, 120, 157–58, 179 “deficit scolds,” 194, 207, 209 deficit spending, 153, 218 budget surplus, 154 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 87 Bush, George H.


pages: 426 words: 117,722

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, MITM: man-in-the-middle, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, éminence grise

“Old Stone Face” had the reputation of being a gruff, “almost heartless type of person,” yet his equally hard-nosed associates teared up when they spoke about him. Even the prosecutors felt a little emotional. Most troubling to Kleindienst were the allegations against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Mitchell was no longer in office, but the twin pillars of Nixon’s “Berlin Wall” continued to see the president on a daily basis. Haldeman, in particular, was Nixon’s alter ego, closeted with him throughout the day. He was closer to the president than any chief of staff in living memory. If he and Ehrlichman were guilty of obstruction of justice, Nixon had to be informed immediately.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25 | DAY 95 The president returned to Washington from Key Biscayne late on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning, following a visit to the White House barber, he met with Ron Ziegler in the Oval Office. The press secretary had supplanted Haldeman as Lord High Executioner. Nixon now wanted Ziegler to step up the pressure on the twin pillars of his Berlin Wall. “Let’s just see if we can get them to resign today,” he mused. “What would you do, tell them to resign? Or would you say, ‘Alright, fellows, you’ve got a week’?” Ziegler passed the message on to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, explaining that the presidency could no longer function “in this atmosphere.”

He was surprised to see his older daughter, Tricia, sitting in front of the blazing fire. She had been up all night in the White House with Julie and Julie’s husband, David Eisenhower, discussing the family crisis. They agreed there was no alternative: Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have to resign. The family had never much cared for the “Berlin Wall” that separated Nixon from the rest of the world. But that was no longer the point. Driven to the fogged-in camp by the Secret Service, Tricia told her father that the attacks on the two men had destroyed their ability to serve him effectively. “That is our opinion. But we also want you to know that we have complete confidence in you.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.60 The Fall The violence in Central America raged on until the fall of the Berlin wall, and then kept going. From 1989 to 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart spectacularly, along with all the states that Moscow directly established in the wake of World War II. The Second World was no more, and its residents experienced this as the literal collapse of their governments. For the rest of the planet, most of which had somehow been affected by the Cold War, some things changed, and some things did not.

For the two biggest anticommunist governments ever set up in the former Third World, the end of the Cold War had an indirect effect. Both Indonesia and Brazil transitioned from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. They did so at different times—Brazil started the process well before the fall of the Berlin wall, and Suharto left power almost a decade after it fell. Crucially, however, they both did it the same way. In Brazil and Indonesia, the transition from military dictatorship was carried out in a controlled manner. Negotiated transfers of power both maintained the fundamental social structure the dictatorships were set up to protect and provided impunity for the rulers, who remained wealthy and influential.

Did the triumph of global capitalism mean victory for them too? Were they rewarded with prosperity and democracy? Economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost experts on global inequality, born and raised in communist Yugoslavia, asked those questions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. We can probably guess that no, they didn’t all get that. But it was certainly the idea back in 1991, and in many ways it was the promise that was made to the suffering peoples of the communist world, including to Milanovic himself. What happened instead was a devastating Great Depression.4 Milanovic, in a short essay titled “For Whom the Wall Fell?


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

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

The central task of the state in Europe – the closing of inequalities due to the unfettered market – represents a principle exactly opposed to Isaiah Berlin's classical definition of the American concept of liberty: ‘freedom from state interference’ and ‘freedom to do our own thing’. The universal mission of the free market as America's belief in itself With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and of the Soviet empire shortly afterwards, the free-market utopia became the global mission of the United States, which no longer encounters any evenly matched opponent. ‘Today's project of a single global market is America's universal mission co-opted by its neo-conservative ascendancy.

., p. 164. 91 Gray, p. 129. 92 Fresh confirmation of this has been provided by the Red-Green victory in the German elections of autumn 1998. 8 Vision of the Future I The Europe of Civil Labour The great opportunity that arose with the collapse of the bipolar world order in 1989 lies in the fact that no one can lock themselves away any more from other cultures, religions and ideas; that all now share a space in which the old territorial identities and cultures, as well as the old frontiers and identities controlled by national states, suddenly encounter one another without protection. This helps us understand the globalization shock that has continued to affect the countries of Central Europe, and especially Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The other side of our living in a more open world is the fact that there is no longer a single model of capitalism or a single model of modernity. There are many capitalisms, many modernities, which do, however, need to be brought into relationship with one another. Multiple modernities and the mirror of one's own future The self-transformation of the Western model, and of its claim to a monopoly on modernity, has made people in the West more open to the history and present situation of divergent modernities in all regions of the world.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Two weeks later, on June 4, the army broke through human blockades and entered the square, killing an unknown number of people, injuring many more, and setting back the process of reform for several years. Later that year, China’s leaders watched as Hungary’s embattled communist government opened the country’s border with West Germany. Huge numbers of East Germans crossed into Hungary and then to the West, rendering the Berlin Wall obsolete in a matter of hours. Peaceful uprisings swept the Warsaw Pact governments into history. Two years later, the Soviet Union imploded. China’s conservatives feared for the future, but the country’s reformers looked to learn from the failures of European communism to deliver on promises of a better life for ordinary citizens.

Abbassian, Abdolreza, 103 Abdullah, king of Saudi Arabia, 114, 139 Academy of Social Sciences, 145 adapters, 126–27, 160 Afghanistan, 14, 15, 30, 32, 64, 111, 113, 187, 202n Africa, 40, 59, 71–72, 85, 130, 134–35, 152, 174 China’s trade and investment with, 80, 102, 118–19 foreign purchase of land in, 102 as pivot continent, 117–20 urbanization in, 99 water security in, 105 agflation, 98–104 Algeria, 48, 176 Alstom, 127 alternative energy, 147 America’s Coming War with China (Carpenter), 172 Amodei, Mark, 162 Angola, 120 Annan, Kofi, 104 Anonymous, cyberattacks by, 75 Arab League, 192 Arab world, 62, 77 Arctic, 96–97, 127 Arctic Council, 96–97 Argentina, 37, 101, 102 Armenia, 54 Asia, 85, 152, 174, exports of, 3 as potential hotspot, 69–72, 114–15, 177–78, 191, 193 security of, 71 water security in, 105 Asian Tigers, 51 Asia Water Project, 129 Assange, Julian, 75 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 70, 124, 193–94 Australia, 71, 101 Austria, 167 authoritarian governments, 135 Internet and, 90, 93, 94 Azerbaijan, 54 Bahrain, 69, 71, 112, 113, 114, 135 Bangladesh, water security in, 105 banking standards, 33 banks, 16, 38, 78, 79, 125, 127 beef, 103, 105 Beijing Olympics, 2008, 62, 119 Beijing Power and Desalination Plant, 129, 140 Belarus, 54, 137, 141 Belgium, separatist movements in, 181 Benghazi, Libya, 192 Bergsten, C. Fred, 157–58 Berlin Wall, 53, 54 Best Buy, 75 bin Laden, Osama, 14 biofuels, 99–101 biogenetics, 147 BlackBerry, 33 Boeing, 129 Bolivia, 177 Bombardier, 127 Border Gateway Protocols (BGPs), 89–90 Botswana, 120 Brazil, 3, 10, 21, 25, 26, 28, 55, 71, 76, 79, 84, 125–26, 128, 155, 161, 167–68, 177, 183, 187 biofuel production in, 100 borrowing by, 37 demand for grain in, 99 economic growth in, 99, 148, 166 energy exported by, 30, 116 government intervention in economy in, 78 Latin American leadership of, 175 as pivot state, 115–17 trade by, 116–17, 118 Bretton Woods Monetary Agreement, 39, 41, 42–43, 49–50, 151, 170, 174, 185 BRICS, 28, 30, 120 British Petroleum, 127 Brown, Gordon, 9 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 158–59 Buffett, Warren, 17 Burundi, 106 Bush, George H.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The communist leader Erich Honecker ordered the military to shoot protesters, but they refused to open fire on their fellow citizens, and soon the protests attracted hundreds of thousands. Honecker was deposed and in November the regime said it would allow East Germans to travel directly to West Germany through the Berlin Wall. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered by the wall immediately and overwhelmed border guards stood down. They could only watch in surprise as East Germans began to tear down the wall that symbolized their oppression on 9 November 1989. A year later the two Germanys were re-united. Facing protests, the Czechoslovakian government also gave up in November.

Index abolitionism 146–7 abortion 176–7 acid rain 111 adultery 171–2, 176 Afghanistan 83, 101, 102, 136, 156 Africa 25, 52, 154 and child labour 193, 195 and education 133–4 and HIV/AIDS 59, 60 and homosexuality 187 and malnutrition 21, 23–4 and poverty 79–80, 81 and slavery 140, 142, 143–4, 145 and water 38–40 and women 179 African Americans 162, 163, 167–9 agriculture 13, 14–16, 17–19, 20, 21, 89 and children 190–1 and China 27–9 and land use 22–3, 112 and water 38 Albert, Prince Consort 32 alcohol 31 algae 15 Algerian War of Independence 94 Amazon rainforest 112 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 182–3, 185 American Revolution 149 ammonia 14, 15 An Lushan Revolt 95 Ancient Greece 31–2, 44, 84, 140–1, 183 Angell, Norman 103 Angola 21, 83 anti-Semitism 162 antibiotics 2, 50 apartheid 153 Arab Spring 155, 156 Argentina 133 artificial fertilizers 14–15, 18, 22–3, 108 Asal, Victor 170 Asia 67–70, 133, 187, 195 Auld, Hugh 137, 138 Australia 114 Ausubel, Jesse 112 authoritarianism 156 Bacon, Francis 217 bad news 207–12 Bailey, Ronald 205 Bales, Kevin 148–9 Bangladesh 37, 81, 117 Barbary States 143–4 Basu, Kaushik 135 bathing 34, 47 Beccaria, Cesare 93 Bentham, Jeremy 172, 184 Berg, Lasse 68–9, 129, 130, 202–3, 214–15 Berlin Wall 152 Bible, the 84–5, 86, 140, 183 bigotry 188 bio-fuels 125 birth weight 11 Black Death 42 Blackstone, William 184 bloodletting 44, 47 Boko Haram 148 Bolling, Anders 211 Borlaug, Norman 17–19, 23–4 Bosch, Carl 14 Boschwitz, Rudy 23 Bosnia 102 Botswana 27 Brandt, Willy 151 Braudel, Fernand 9, 10, 63 Brazil 153 Britain, see Great Britain Buggery Act (1533) 184 Bure, Anders 132 bureaucracy 216 Burger, Oskar 45 Bush, George W. 187 Caesar, Julius 141 calories 12, 16, 19–20 Cambodia 38 Cameroon 21 Canada 105 cancer 58, 115 cannibalism 8, 10 capital punishment 93–4, 185, 197–8 capitalism 66–7 carbon dioxide 119, 120, 123–4, 127 cardiovascular disease 58 Carter, Jimmy 24 caste system 72–3 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 153 censorship 157 Chad 83 Charlemagne 216 Charta 77: 151 chemical warfare 15 childbirth 4, 48, 49, 53–4, 197 children 11, 12 and education 133–4 and labour 189–96 and malnutrition 22 and mortality 32, 39–40, 45–6, 51, 53, 56 Chile 132, 153 China 27–9, 112, 200, 216–17 and child labour 193 and governance 153, 158 and homosexuality 187 and pollution 117, 119 and poverty 67–8, 69–71, 81 and slavery 148 and war 95, 104 and women 171, 177 chlorine 36–7 cholera 32, 35–6, 45, 55, 197 Churchill, Winston 163 civil rights movement 167–9 civilians 100–1 Clean Air Act (1956) 114 climate change 108, 119–21 Club of Rome 110, 115, 116 codes of honour 91–2 Cold War 99, 182 colonialism 103, 163 combine harvesters 16 communism 25, 26, 28, 102, 151–3, 182 Condorcet, Marquis de 172 Congress of Vienna (1815) 145 contraception 176, 177 crime 93, 207–8, 211 Cronin, Audrey 103 crop failure 7–8, 18 Cuba 132 Czechoslovakia 151, 152 dalits 72–3, 129 Darwin, Charles 45 De Gaulle, Gen Charles 161 ‘dead zones’ 15 death penalty 93–4, 185 Deaton, Angus 12, 52, 61 Declaration of Independence 144–5 Defoe, Daniel 192 deforestation 111–12 dehydration 54–5 democracy 26–7, 104–5, 150–7 Democratic Republic of Congo 26, 81 Dempsey, Gen Martin 2 Denmark 105 diarrhoea 32, 37–8, 54–5 Dickens, Charles 173 dictatorships 150–1, 153, 154, 155, 158 Diderot, Denis 143 discrimination 167–70, 173 Disraeli, Benjamin 36 Divine Comedy (Dante) 183–4 divorce 176 domestic violence 179 Douglass, Frederick 137–8, 139–40, 174 Dublin, Louis 60 dysentery 40 East Germany 152 Ebola 53, 209–10 Economic Freedom of the World 157–8 economics 67–9, 79, 165–6 education 17, 38–9, 135–7, 173, 197; see also literacy Egypt 133, 155, 156 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 168, 182 Eisner, Manuel 90 Ekman, Freddie 208 Elizabeth I, Queen 33, 34 energy 123–8 Engels, Friedrich 165–6 Enlightenment, the 4, 13, 66, 93, 184 and slavery 142–3 and women 172 environment, the 23–4, 108–12, 113–17 and climate 119–20 and energy 123–8 and poverty 117–19, 120–3 equality 143, 178–9, 188; see also inequality Equatorial Guinea 37 Ethiopia 24 ethnic minorities 161–71 Europe 216, 217–18 extinctions 112–13 extreme poverty 75–8, 79, 80–1 Factory Acts 193 famine 7–10, 13, 14, 17, 25–7, 46, 197 farming, see agriculture fascism 102 female genital mutilation 179 feminism 173 fertility rates 16–17, 24–5, 56 First World War 14, 15, 99, 104 fish stocks 112 Fitzhugh, George 147 Fleming, Alexander 50 flying toilets 39–40 Flynn Effect 164–5 food 2, 10–14, 13, 16, 17, 19; see also famine Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) 20–1 forests 111–12 fossil fuels 108 France 9–10, 11–2, 42–3, 63–4, 161–2, 184 Francis, Pope 2 Frederick II, Emperor 32 Free the Slaves 148 freedom 138, 157–9 Friedan, Betty 183 Friedman, Benjamin 166 Friedman, Milton 158–9 Gandhi, Mahatma 168 Garrison, William Lloyd 146 Gates Foundation 52, 125 Gay Pride 185–6 gay rights 181–8 GDP (gross domestic product) 22, 56–7, 64, 67, 74–5 gender gap 178–9 genetically modified crops 23 genocide 101–2 George V, King 104 germ theory 48–9 Germany 114, 152, 183 Gini coefficient 82 globalization 4, 5, 45, 57, 74–5, 82, 218 Glorious Revolution 149 Golden Bull 149 Gorbachev, Mikhail 151 governance 90–1, 92; see also democracy graphene 126 Gray, John 2 Great Ascent 67 Great Britain 12, 114, 145, 192–4 and homosexuality 184, 185, 186 Great Powers 98–9 Great Smog 107–8, 114 ‘Great Stink, The’ 36 Green Revolution 17–20, 22, 23, 24 greenhouse gases 119 Guan Youjiang 29 Guangdong 70–1 H1N1 virus 59 Haber, Fritz 14, 15 Hagerup, Ulrik 208 Haiti 38, 57, 81, 114 Hans Island 105 happiness 199 Harrington, Sir John 33 Harrison, Dick 140 hate crimes 170 Havel, Václav 151, 152 height 16, 21–2 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 172 Hesiod 213–14 Hilleman, Maurice 54 Hitler, Adolf 94, 95 HIV/AIDS 52–3, 59, 60 Hobbes, Thomas 213 Holocaust, the 102, 170 homicide 85, 89, 90 homosexuality 181–8 Honecker, Erich 152 Hong Kong 67, 70 hookworm 40 human rights 142 human sacrifice 88–9 humanitarianism 93 Hungary 149, 151–2 hunter-gatherers 88 Hutcheson, Francis 143 hygiene 48, 49 India 10, 18–19, 27, 37, 38, 67–9 and child labour 193, 195 and governance 151, 154 and literacy 129–30, 133, 135 and pollution 117, 119 and poverty 71–3, 81 and slavery 145 and war 104 individualism 92 Industrial Revolution 2, 4, 66, 82 inequality 81–2, 178–9 influenza 58–9 Inglehart, Ronald 166–7 inoculation 47–8 intelligence 164–5 International Labour Organization (ILO) 195–6 International Union for the Conservation of Nature 112–13 Iraq 83, 102 irrigation 18, 22, 38 IS 148 Islamists 216 Italy 184, 193 Jang Jin-sung 25–6 Japan 21, 68, 180–1 Japanese Americans 163 Jefferson, Thomas 144, 145, 147 Jenner, Edward 48 Jews 162 Jim Crow laws 162 John, King 149 Johnson, Lyndon B. 169 Kant, Immanuel 201 Karlsson, Stig 68–9, 129, 202–3, 214–15 Kenny, Charles 134 Kenya 39–40 Kibera 39–40 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 168, 181 Klein, Naomi 2 knights 88 knowledge 200–2, 216–18 Korean War 94, 98 Ku Klux Klan 163, 169 land use 22 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 142–3 Latin America 150, 177, 187 law, the 90–1, 92 Lecky, William E.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

But President Jimmy Carter then announced an American boycott of the games in response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, so Coca-Cola was rebuffed once again. Ultimately, however, Coca-Cola's failure to establish itself in the Soviet-bloc countries proved to be an advantage. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, presaging the collapse of communist regimes across eastern Europe and the dissolurion of the Soviet Union in 1991. As East Germans streamed through the cracks in the Berlin Wall, they were greeted with Coca-Cola. "We found ourselves welcoming the new arrivals with bananas, Coca-Cola, flowers, and anything else that smacked of Western consumerism," recalled one eyewitness. East Germans queued up to buy the drink by crate directly from the Coca-Cola bottling plant in West Berlin.


pages: 83 words: 7,274

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Virgin Galactic

But what if I proceed to tell you that this isn’t just any rock you’re holding, but a one-of-a-kind rock, a historical symbol, a fragment of the Berlin Wall that was smuggled out of the country days after the wall’s destruction in 1989, when East and West Berliners began snatching up chips and chunks of the fallen barrier as keepsakes. You now have in your possession a talisman symbolizing the end of the cold war. “Thanks a lot,” you say, this time meaning it. “Anytime,” I answer. “Here’s to turning forty.” A moment goes by. Then I tell you I was just kidding. The rock doesn’t come from the Berlin Wall—it’s even more exceptional than that. The rock you have in 08/08/2009 10:45 74 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html your hand is an authentic moon rock, a chunk of the roughly six ounces of lunar detritus that Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts brought back home with them during their 1969 Apollo 11 mission.


pages: 267 words: 70,250

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

In the minds of those men, freedom wasn’t about the God-given rights of individuals that must be respected by governments. It was about free scope for the will of the proletariat—for whom they were the only legitimate representatives, of course. This kind of confusion about freedom didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Visit almost any major university in America and you’ll find individuals praising freedom while admiring ruthless totalitarians, usually without the least sense of irony or awareness of the contradiction. And often the totalitarians being praised are the ones who, while busily stamping out freedom, are reassuring everyone that they’re stamping in order to free the people, stamping in pursuit of “national liberty and equality,” stamping for “the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples.”1 Why does all of this matter?

Index A abortion Acton, Lord Adventists Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the Acts, Book of Adams, John AIDS Alexandria Alighieri, Dante Amazon American Bishops’ conference American Enterprise Institute American Experiment, the American Medical Association American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Ananias Anderson, Elijah anthropology Apple Apprentice, The Aristotle aristocrats Arkansas Asia Athens Atlantic authoritarianism Au Sable Institute for Environmental Studies avarice Avere AZT B Baltimore Catechism Baptists Bauer, Peter Beatles, The Ben and Jerry’s benefits unemployment welfare Berkeley, University of California Berlin Wall Bible, the bin Laden, Osama birthrate Blu-ray Board of Public Welfare in the United States Bonhoeffer, Dietrich bourgeoisie Bradford, William Brezhnev, Leonid Brooklyn Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir Brooks, Arthur bureaucracy business, environment for global business morality of poverty and profits and small business “Business as Mission,” C capital capitalism “creative destruction” and global capitalism greed and Caritas in Veritate Catholicism Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good Center for Faith and Public Life Centesimus Annus central planning Chamorro, Violeta charity private charity smart charity Chesterton, G.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

There was something about the way those first European settlers were valorized by the proponents of Mars colonization, at a time in which migrants from countries suffering the effects of political violence and climate change were relentlessly villainized, that felt to me like an intimation of a future in which a tiny minority of obscenely wealthy people were free to colonize other planets, mine asteroids, escape the smoldering wreckage of the Earth, while the poor and the desperate would be made to seem like invading armies, barbarian hordes. Was this the future, this hardening of hearts against spectacles of mass suffering, mass death? Was this the end of the world, or how it would continue? Another slide: a jubilant crowd on the Berlin Wall, waving German flags, behind them the Brandenburg Gate lit by fireworks, the fall of an evil empire. Art Harman stepped out from behind his podium, squared his shoulders, adjusted his cuffs with emphatic precision. “I was there,” he said, “when that wall came down. The people in that photo, for the first time in their lives, there’s not a guy with a gun to their heads when they try to express themselves.

The people in that photo, for the first time in their lives, there’s not a guy with a gun to their heads when they try to express themselves. That’s what it’s going to be like for the first people on Mars. We’re here. We’re free. You won’t have the government, the EPA, saying you can’t damage this or that endangered species. Not on Mars.” On the screen, the Berlin Wall gave way to an image of the much-fetishized preamble to the United States Constitution. This right here, he said, was the endangered species we should be trying to protect. “Here in America we have a self-perpetuating free society, because we know our rights. We can defend these rights ourselves.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

What is the thing that is like a piece of paper from a goldsmith in 1690, or a deposit in a bank in 1930, or a money-market fund balance in 2007? When everybody who holds that thing decides to cash it in at once, the world will get very ugly very fast. CHAPTER 14 A Brief History of the Euro (and Why the Dollar Works Better) We remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in a nostalgic haze. It was the beginning of that moment of sweet delusion, between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when the good guys had won and the bad guys had lost and Germany got to be one country again and everything was going to be okay.

And when the French finance minister gave a speech to a roomful of German bankers in the fall of 1989, with the head of the Bundesbank sitting in the front row, he said: “No to technocracy! Yes to democracy! Central bankers have no right to be given superior authority!” Three days after that speech, the Berlin Wall fell. President Mitterrand told Chancellor Kohl that Europe would let Germany be one Germany if Germany would let Europe have one currency. Kohl didn’t really have a choice; reunifying Germany was hard enough without worrying about a bunch of hostile neighbors. So he took the deal. The month after the fall of the Wall, Kohl went against the wishes of Germany’s central bank and many of its people and agreed to give up his country’s precious currency.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

In the wake of the Cold War, no global vision has emerged that gives people hope about how we can collectively improve the world. We spent much of the twentieth century in great intellectual battles and real wars over which systems—capitalism or socialism, communism or democracy, totalitarianism or anarchy—would be better for all people. Ten years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and still we define current thinking in terms of what it Is not: "Post-Cold War." We still don't have any agreed-upon term to call the current era, yet our era is not derivative of any other. We need a new vision to fit these very different times. This year at the World Economic Forum in Davos—a gathering of many of the world's most powerful business and political leaders—President Bill Clinton was asked after his keynote address what he thought was the most important thing the world needs today.

They must adopt the rigorous new economy policies and then build on that framework while finding ways to mitigate the social damage that powerful economic change will inevitably bring. They must stay centered all the time. Contribution 2: From a historical point of view, Europeans also have been involved in a process of economic, financial, and perhaps political integration that will have long-term repercussions for the rest of the world. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe has been going through a massive east-west reintegration. The European Union, now numbering fifteen nations, is well on its way to expanding the economic community by as many as ten eastern and central European nations by 2003. Certainly half of them, including the key nations of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, will be accepted by that time.

., 65-66 Westernization of, 110-112 See also China; Japan; other individual countries Astronomy, 212 AT&T, 22, 36, 112 Atomic force microscopes, 191-192 Auto industry fuel cells, 3,174-177 oil and gas prices, 163 zero emissions policy, 180 Baby Bells, 36 Baby Boomers end of post-World War II era, 12-13, 40 environmental concerns, 159-161 equal opportunity employment, 109 generational changeover to, 121 life expectancy, 288 women, 243-244 Ballard Power Systems Inc., 174,175 Bamiputras, 129 Bangalore, 133 Barnard's star, 217 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 202 Berkeley, 193 Berlin Wall, 93 Bhat, 116 Big Bang theory, 213 Biodegradable plastics, 196-197 Biological models, 263-264, 266-267 Biotechnology in agriculture, 193-197 animal husbandry, 195 324 biodegradable plastics, 192-193 cloning, 195-199 and environment, 191-195 fertilizers, 193 future of, 3, 187-188 genetic engineering, 196-198 health care, 196-203 increasing human life span, 201-202 Long Boom generation and, 283 new drugs, 190-191 PCR breakthrough in, 189 pesticides, 193 pharmaceutical companies and, 190 vs. computer science, 189-190 Blair, Prime Minister Tony, 41, 94, 95, 121 Bloomberg Financial Services, 45-46 Bombay, 129 Borders, 260 Boston, 177, 189, 234 Boston Harbor, 156 Brand, Stewart, 159, 199 Brazil, 51, 98, 99, 100, 102, 151, 180 Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshop, 218 Breeding, 193-195 Breton Woods accord, 49 Brewster, David, 77, 79-80 Brown, Jerry, 73 Bush, President George, 121 Cable News Network (CNN), 233 Cable television, 15 California alternative energy, 174 auto emissions regulations, 179 climate changes, 151 discovery of PCR, 189-190 emergence of New Economy in, 72-73, 76 property taxes, 86 California Institute of Technology, 203 Calvin, William, 155 Cancer drugs, 191 iNckx Capetown, 250-254, 258 Capital in Asia, 260 for biotechnology, 190 for innovative thinkers, 216 international flow of, 260 Japanese savings as, 120 as leg of capitalism, 61 white holes, 61 Capitalism in Asia, 118 changes in, 5, 41-42 in China, 124, 128-129 criticisms of, 39-40 globalization of, 7-8 in India, 129-130 in Japan, 119-120 knowledge economy and, 118 libertarlanism and, 75 personal computers reinventing, 42-45 revamping finance, 45-46 in Russia, 134-136 two legs of, 52 in Western society, 110 Carbon,164-165 Carbon dioxide, 152 Carnegie, Andrew, 72 Carter, President Jimmy, 14 Caspian Sea Crisis, 165-169 Catholic cultures, 100 CDs, 15 Celera, 197 Centralization, 17 Cetus Corp., 188 Challenger space shuttle, 227 Charter schools, 87-88, 293 Children, 154, 288 China capitalism in, 124-125, 129-130 cradle of Eastern civilization, 109-111 economic growth rates in, 56, 129 familial society, 125-128 floods in, 150 movement to market economy, 48, 117 hdex 325 and Internet.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

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

Almost every American detested the Soviet Union in those days, but the Reagan youth always had to detest it more than everyone else, as though only they were aware of the danger. The CRs, for example, were constantly organizing anti-Soviet demonstrations: They built and demolished a model of the Berlin Wall, they demanded that the Soviets allow more emigration, and one day they got up real early to protest the Soviets’ destruction of a civilian airliner. I remember being mystified by all of this as I watched the Abramoff-era College Republicans shout their anti-Soviet slogans. After all, I thought, who in the world supported the destruction of civilian airliners?

*Funderburk first surfaces in the Abramoff files in 1989, when he published an unfortunate essay in the IFF’s magazine arguing that glasnost was a trick, that the “brilliant elitists at State” were “appeasing” the Communists, and that the Soviets would never permit the Eastern bloc countries to break away. The Berlin Wall had the bad manners to fall while the issue was still on the newsstands. But Funderburk would not be deterred. He extended his streak two years later with a book called Betrayal of America: Bush’s Appeasement of Communist Dictators Betrays American Principles (Dunn, N.C.: Larry McDonald Foundation), in which he elaborated on his theory that glasnost was a ploy by “the old Bolsheviks [who] finally found the ideal front man to win over the West while they continue to carry out their objectives” (p. 50).

See also freedom fighters anti-Semitism anti-Soviet demonstrations apartheid Arlington Forest Army-McCarthy hearings Associated Press Auerbach, Carl auto industry Babbitt, Bruce baby-formula industry “bad apple” thesis Badolato, Ed Baez, Joan Baghdad stock exchange U.S. Embassy in Bahrain Baker, Bobby Baldwin, Steve Bandow, Doug banks Bantustans Barnes, Fred Barone, Michael Bechtel beef industry Bell, Daniel Beltway Boys, The (TV show) Bennett, William Berlin Wall “bestiality clubs” Betrayal of America (Funderburk) “Biblical law” Biggs, Andrew Bilbray, Brian Birnbaum, Jeffrey BKSH firm Black Panthers Blackwater Blackwell, Morton Blumenthal, Sidney Blunt, Roy Boeing Bolton, John bond market “Boring from Within” (Norris) Bosner, Leo Boston University Bowe, John Brandeis, Louis Brazil Bremer, Paul Brezhnev, Leonid bribery broadcast spectrum Broder, David Brown, Michael “Brownie” Buchanan, Pat Buffett, Jimmy bullying and pugnacity Bureau of Labor Statistics Bureau of Land Management Burnham, James Burson-Marsteller firm Bush, George H.W.


pages: 400 words: 121,708

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

In 1975, after leaving university, he joined the KGB, then under Yuri Andropov. He was a junior officer in counter-intelligence before moving on to the First Chief Directorate under Kryuchkov. At the end of the Cold War he was based in East Germany and helped to burn KGB files after the fall of the Berlin Wall to prevent them falling into the hands of hostile demonstrators. He resigned having reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1991 but retains some of the paranoia and suspicion about foreign influences that he picked up during his formative KGB years. In this sense there is a direct link between the Soviet Union of Andropov and Kryuchkov and the Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Able Archer 83 exercise 222–56, 344 intelligence failures 256, 257–61, 263 NATO code changes 231, 240, 251 political leaders, participation of 231–2 scenario 224–5 Soviet monitoring of 227, 231, 232–3 Soviet perception as threat 224, 227–9, 232–3, 239, 240, 242, 250–1, 254, 256, 258–61 advanced warning aircraft (AWACs) 138–9 Afghanistan Mujahideen 76, 77, 110, 310, 323 Soviet invasion and occupation of 30, 76–7, 94 Soviet withdrawal from 323 US covert programmes in 77, 110, 310, 323 US military incursions 342 US trade sanctions and 30, 76, 179 Air Force One 232, 261 aircraft carriers 54 airspace violations Soviet ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy 143, 158, 179, 187 US aircraft 142–3, 157, 162, 187 see also Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 al-Assad, Hafez 204 al-Qaeda 77 Allen, Richard 20, 32 Allied Command Europe (ACE) 222 Ames, Aldrich 277–9, 282, 283, 284, 286, 292, 299, 334, 335, 337 Anchorage 149–51, 158 Anderson, Martin 91, 92, 93, 98 Andrew, Christopher 338 Andropov, Yuri 36, 37–40, 41–2, 45–8, 49–50, 241 and the Able Archer 83 exercise 242, 250, 255 background of 39, 40, 41 CIA profile of 106 domestic reforms 87–8 and the downing of KAL 007 179–80, 186–7, 216 elected as Soviet head of state 35 and Gorbachev 50, 87, 215, 236 head of KGB 35, 45, 46–7, 48, 69, 74, 80, 83, 106, 341 ‘Hungarian complex’ 44, 47 and the Hungarian Revolution 43–4 illness and death 180, 213–16, 219–21, 234–6, 263 and the invasion of Afghanistan 76 meets with Averell Harriman 146–8 nuclear paranoia 80, 87, 147, 148, 201, 216–17, 237, 240 and Operation RYaN 83, 87, 88, 216 response to ‘evil empire’ rhetoric 89, 105 on SDI 104, 105, 147 ‘shoot-to-kill’ order 143, 158, 187 suspicion and fear of the West 47, 49, 80, 87, 88 Androsov, Stanislav 277 Angola 29, 70, 101 Annan, Kofi 200 anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) 12, 13 anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) Treaty 92, 313, 314 Apollo spacecraft 14 Arafat, Yasser 203, 264 Arbatov, Georgy 147 Arlov, Yuri 49 Armenia 333 arms control Gorbachev’s views on 299, 304, 306, 309, 311, 312–13, 314–15, 318, 324 Reagan’s views on 304, 306, 314–15 zero-zero option 94–5, 315, 316, 318, 321–2 arms control talks and agreements anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) Treaty 92, 313, 314 Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320, 321–2, 333 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 13 Partial Test Ban Treaty 13 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13, 14, 94, 156 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) 30, 77 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) 94, 105, 270, 334 Armstrong, Anne 349 Arzamus-16 6 Atlantic Lion 83 exercise 223 Atlas missiles 12–13 atom bomb 1–6, 93 Autumn Forge 83 exercises 223, 224 Azerbaijan 333 B-29 bomber 2, 4, 5 B-47 bomber 190 B-52 bomber 8–9, 52–3, 138, 190–1, 192 B1-B Bomber 52 Baker, James 32, 57, 327, 330 Balashika training camp 109, 204 Barents Sea 126, 127, 140 Begin, Menachem 203, 205–6 Beirut airport suicide bomber 208–9 Israeli bombardment of 205–7, 228 US embassy bomb 208 Belarus 333, 334 Benghazi 310 Beria, Lavrenti 5, 6 Berlin, Reagan’s visit to 320–1 Berlin Wall 45, 321 fall of 330–1, 331, 341 Bikini Atoll 7–8 Billion Dollar Spy see Tolkachev, Adolf bin Laden, Osama 77 Bishop, Maurice 210 ‘The Black Book’ 241 Black Program 54 Blanton, Tom 348 Bowen, Ann 129–30, 131, 134 Brady, James 56, 57 Brady, Nicholas 208 Brandt, Willy 135 Brezhnev, Leonid 37, 38, 45, 50, 72, 86, 264 death and funeral of 34, 35, 37, 87 failing health 71, 219 foreign policy 70 and the invasion of Afghanistan 76 meets Carter 297 nuclear policy 70–1 relations with Reagan 59 signs Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13 war games, participation in 68 Britain and Able Archer 83 exercise 231, 232 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 95, 123–4 Falklands War 118, 210 Gorbachev’s visit to 271–4 London KGB residency 81, 118–20, 122, 218, 228, 279 nuclear capability 13 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 13 peace movement 95–6 Trident nuclear missile system 319 British Commonwealth 210, 211, 259 British Labour Party 122–3 Brown, Pat 27 Brown, Ron 123 Browne, John 293 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 189–90 Budanov, Colonel 280 Budapest 43, 44 Bulgaria 332 intelligence services 85 Burr, William 348 Burt, Richard 171 Bush, George H.W. 37, 38, 262, 264, 327–8 election of 327 meets with Andropov 38 meets with Gorbachev 332 signs START 1 334 as vice-president 31 Bush, George W. 256, 342 ‘the button’ 15, 16, 241 Cable News Network (CNN) 183 Callender, Colonel Spike 226, 256 Cambodia 29, 301 Canadian Navy 137 Carstens, Karl 37 Carter, Jimmy 28, 114, 189, 298 and the invasion of Afghanistan 30, 76–7 meets Brezhnev 297 Tehran embassy hostage crisis 20, 29 Casey, William 58, 108, 110, 144, 169, 178, 185–6, 299–300, 320, 337 and Abel Archer exercise 263 assessment of Gorbachev 295 death of 347 head of CIA 107–8, 109 opposes Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320 Ceauşescu, Elena 332 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 332 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 6, 38, 106–12, 277 and the Able Archer 83 exercise 256, 257, 258 aggressive and proactive policy 107–8, 144 assessment of Gorbachev 294–5 bureaucracy 109 covert aid to anti-communist and resistance movements 110 directorates 109–10 and the downing of KAL 007 172, 174, 178–9 and the Farewell dossier 143–4 and the Geneva summit 301 Intelligence Directorate 109–12 intelligence misjudgements and failures 106, 111–12, 257–61, 278–9, 339–40 mole within see Ames, Aldrich Operations Directorate 110 report on events of 1983 339–40 Soviet agents 49, 283–4, 285–6 on Soviet paranoia 80 technological sabotage 144–5 Centre for Documentation 129 Chancellor, Henry 346 Chazov, Dr Yevgeny 215, 234 Chebrikov, Viktor 279 ‘cheggets’ system 241, 250 Cheney, Richard 327 Cherkashin, Viktor 285 Chernenko, Konstantin 34, 35, 181, 215, 220, 268, 270 elected Soviet head of state 264 ill health and death 275, 293 Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) 310–11 Chernyaev, Anatoly 311, 312, 319 China economic reforms 330 nuclear capability 13 Sino–Soviet relations 44, 45, 220, 330 Tiananmen Square massacre 330 Christian churches’ response to nuclear strategy 66, 96 Chun Byung-in, Captain 150, 151, 153–5 Churchill, Winston 24, 146 civil defence Soviet 30, 237 Western 82 Clark, William 98, 99 Clinton, Hillary 342 Cobra Ball missions 156, 162, 170, 173, 178–9 Cold War 1983 war scare see nuclear war scare Cuban missile crisis (1962) 11, 45, 114, 192, 193, 204, 230, 344 DEFCON levels 230 détente 14, 29, 52, 70, 71, 75, 94 end of 332, 344 false alerts 189–201, 239 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 incident 149–56, 157–88 ‘proxy’ engagements through client states 205 stalemate 92 Cole, John 274 Command Post Exercise 222 see also Able Archer 83 exercise Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) 29, 30, 32, 49, 51 Commonwealth of Independent States 333 Congress of People’s Deputies 329 Contras 110, 319–20 Counterforce 10 Crimea 341 Cruise missiles 53, 78, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 258, 270, 299, 309, 321 Cuban missile crisis (1962) 11, 45, 114, 192, 204, 230, 344 Black Saturday 193 cyber attacks 342 Czechoslovakia 42, 238, 248 intelligence services 85 Prague Spring 47 Soviet invasion of 120–1 Velvet Revolution 332 The Day After (film) 261 ‘dead drops’ 285 Deaver, Michael 32 Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) 172, 179 Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) 204, 230 détente 14, 29, 52, 70, 71, 94 end of 75 deterrence 92, 96, 101, 216 Devetyarov, Colonel Maxim 247 Dobrynin, Anatoly 114–16, 117, 146, 148, 180–1 Donovan, William 107 ‘Doomsday Plane’ see National Emergency Airborne Command Post (Boeing 747) double agents 118–35 Hanssen, Robert 284–5 ideological commitment 120–1, 278 Martynov, Valery 285–6 Vetrov, Captain Vladimir 143 see also Ames, Aldrich; Gordievsky, Oleg ‘dry-cleaning’ 286, 287, 289 Dubček, Alexander 47 Dukakis, Michael 327 Dulles, John Foster 8 Duluth air base 192, 193 Eagleburger, Lawrence 171, 174, 260, 262 East Germany 14, 42, 238, 247, 248, 329 collapse of 330–1, 335 foreign intelligence service see HVA Stasi 85, 128, 130, 133, 335 Egypt 202, 343 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 8, 10, 43 El Salvador 70 Eniwetok 7 espionage KGB foreign residencies 46, 81, 118–20, 122–5, 218, 227, 228, 277, 278, 279 listening stations 163–4, 168, 170, 176, 183, 217, 227, 231, 267–8 observation satellites 90, 111, 194–5, 196, 248, 256 post-Cold War 334 RC-135 spy planes 140–1, 156–7, 170, 178, 182 technological sabotage 144–5 see also Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); double agents; HVA; KGB Estonia 329 Ethiopia 70, 101 European Community 129 ‘evil empire’ rhetoric 66–7, 89, 117, 176, 182, 216, 324 F-15 fighter 205 F-16 fighter 138, 205 F-117 Nighthawk 54 F/A-18 Hornet jet 53 Falklands War 118, 210 false alerts 189–201, 239 Farewell dossier 143–4 FBI 127 mole within 284–5 and Red Scares 24 Filatov, Anatoly 49 Finland 291 Winter War 40 ‘First Lightning’ atomic test 5 Fischer, Ben 340, 344, 345–6 ‘Flash’ telegrams 251 FleetEx 83 exercises 137, 138–9, 158 Ford, Gerald 14, 28 Foster, Jodie 58 France intelligence service 143 nuclear capability 13 Friedman, Milton 31 Gaddafi, Muammar 110, 310 Gates, Robert 219, 237, 256, 339, 340, 347 on Kremlin paranoia 112 on SDI 117 Gay, Eugene 226–7 Gemayel, Bashir 206 General Electric (GE) 26 Geneva summit (1985) 297–9, 300–9 boathouse meeting 301, 305 joint communiqué 306, 308 Georgia 329, 341 glasnost 311, 325 Gold Codes 241 Goldwater, Barry 26 Golubev, General 280 Gomulka, Wladyslaw 42, 43 Gorbachev, Mikhail 50, 215, 220, 236, 270–1, 344 and Afghanistan withdrawal 323 arms control and 299, 304, 306, 309, 311, 312–13, 314–15, 318, 324 Casey’s appraisal of 295 Chernobyl and 310–11 CIA assessments of 294–5 and dismantling of the Soviet Union 329, 333 elected Soviet head of state 275–6, 293–4 failed coup against 333 ‘freedom of choice’ proposal 328 Geneva summit 297–9, 300–7, 305 and Gordievsky 338 hostility to SDI 273, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 309, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319 and human rights issues 306, 314, 322 meets with Bush 332 nuclear weapons elimination proposal 309, 313 ‘peace offensive’ 309, 310 perestroika and glasnost 311, 325, 329 political decline 333 political reforms 311–12, 329 popularity abroad 323 on Reagan 294, 304, 309, 319 reduction of Soviet forces in Europe 328, 333–4 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 signs INF Treaty 321 signs START 1 334 visits Britain 271–4, 274 visits China 330 Washington summit 321–3 Gorbachev, Raisa 272, 276, 293, 306, 323 Gordievsky, Leila 118, 282, 338 Gordievsky, Oleg 118–19, 120–5, 127, 259, 260, 270, 284, 336–9 Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George 339 debriefing 336–7 exfiltration 286–92 and Gorbachev’s visit to Britain 271 ideological commitments 120–1 KGB interrogation 279–82 meets Reagan 337, 337 MI6 operative 121–2, 123, 125, 126, 127, 218, 279, 281 and Operation RYaN 84–5, 118, 251 sentenced to death in absentia 339 Gorshikov, Admiral Georgi 245 Great Society reforms 26–7 Great Terror 36, 39–40 Greenham Common peace camp 95 Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap (GIUK Gap) 140 Grenada 210 US invasion of 210–12, 217 Grishin, Viktor 270, 275 Gromyko, Andrei 38, 72, 79, 179, 185, 215, 240, 260, 270, 275, 276–7 and the downing of KAL 007 185 head of Supreme Soviet 275, 297 meets with Shultz 296 GRU and the Able Archer 83 exercise 245, 251 foreign residencies 119 Operation RYaN 80, 81–5, 251 Grushko, Viktor 280, 281 Guk, Arkady 119–20, 124, 125 H-bomb (hydrogen bomb) 6–7 Haavik, Gunvor Galtung 126 Habib, Philip 205, 206 Haig, Alexander 32, 57, 94, 108–9, 115 Hanssen, Robert 284–5, 286, 292, 334 Harriman, Averell 146–8 Hartman, Arthur 263 Havel, Václav 332 Helms, Jesse 149 Helsinki Accords 14, 29, 48 Helsinki Monitoring Group 48–9 Heseltine, Michael 95–6, 231, 272 Hezbollah 209, 217, 232 Hill, General James 91 Hinckley, John Jr 58 Hirohito, Emperor 4 Hiroshima, bombing of (1945) 1–4, 93 Hirshberg, Jim 348 Hitler, Adolf 36, 40 Hollywood Ten 24 Honecker, Erich 329, 330 Hoover, J.

Edgar 24 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 24 Howe, Sir Geoffrey 211, 218, 259, 270, 271, 272, 288 Hubbard, Carroll 149 human intelligence (HUMINT) operations 82 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 Hungary 42, 264 Hungarian Revolution 43–4 political reforms 328 HVA 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 251–2, 253, 336 and Operation RYaN 85–6 hybrid warfare 342 Ikle, Fred 142 India, nuclear arsenal 343 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 12–13, 34, 53, 60, 194, 198, 239, 313 Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320, 321–2, 333 verification processes 322 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) 13 Iran 209 Iranian Revolution 29, 202 Tehran embassy hostage crisis 20, 29 Iran-Contra scandal 319–20 Iraq, US military incursions 342, 343 Irgun 203 Iron Curtain 23, 24, 332 Islamic fundamentalism 76, 202, 209, 323 Israel Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 203–4, 205, 206–7 Israeli Air Force 205 nuclear arsenal 343 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 Ivy League 82 exercise 59, 61–3, 97 Japan Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1–4, 93 listening stations 161–2, 183 Joan (MI6 case officer) 121–2, 291 John Birch Society 149 Johnson, Lyndon B. 26 Jones, General David 56 Jones, Nate 348–9 Kádár, János 43 Kalinin 159 Kalugin, Oleg 85, 240 Kamchatka peninsula 136, 138, 139–40, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 168, 180, 183 Kardunov, Marshal Alexandr 163 Karelian Republic 40–2 Kazakhstan 5, 333, 334 KC-135 tanker aircraft 191 Kennedy, John F. 10, 11, 320 Kennedy, Robert 114 KGB 43, 45–7, 49, 338 and the Able Archer 83 exercise 250–1 Andropov as head of 35, 45, 46–7, 48, 69, 74, 80, 83, 106, 341 directorates 73 First Chief Directorate (FCD) (Foreign Intelligence) 73–4 foreign residencies 46, 81, 118–20, 122–5, 218, 227, 228, 277, 278, 279 intelligence successes 125–8, 134–5 moles within see Gordievsky, Oleg; Martynov, Valery; Vetrov, Captain Vladimir role 45–6, 70 see also Operation RYaN Kharbarovsk 161, 163, 164 Khomeini, Ayatollah 29, 202 Khrushchev, Nikita 9, 10, 42, 43, 45 Cuban missile crisis 11, 114 denounces Stalin 42 Kim Eui-dong 150, 152 Kirghizia 333 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 183 Kissinger, Henry 99, 114 Kline, Major John 56 Kohl, Helmut 319 Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 149–56, 157–88, 165 downing of 157–69 intelligence community’s verdict on 187 Soviet defence of action 181–2, 183–5, 186–7, 216 Soviet propaganda disaster 176–7, 180 US response 169–79, 187–8 Kosygin, Aleksei 68–9 Kremlinologists 37, 214 Kryuchkov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich 74, 75, 80, 127, 229, 255, 279, 281, 282, 333 Kuklinski, Colonel 110–11 Kulikov, Marshal Viktor 248 Kuntsevo Clinic 234–5, 236, 242, 250, 255, 275 Kurchatov, Igor 5 Kurile islands 136, 139, 155, 171, 187 labour camps 46 Lang, Admiral 137 Laos 29 Latvia 329 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 Leahy, Patrick 176 Lebanon 202–9, 220 Israeli bombardment of Beirut 205–7, 228 Israeli invasion of 203–4 Multinational Force 206, 207, 208, 209 UN peacekeepers 203 Lee Kuan Yew 259 LeMay, General Curtis 8 Libya 110, 310 limited nuclear war concept 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Line X operation 123, 143, 144, 285 listening stations 163–4, 168, 170, 176, 183, 217, 227, 231, 267–8 lithium H-bomb 7–8 Lithuania 329 Lockheed 54 Lokot, Sergei 246–7 Los Angeles Olympic Games (1984) 268 Lubyanka 46, 284 M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank 53 McDonald, Larry 149–50, 171 McFarlane, Robert ‘Bud’ 208–9, 262, 297, 320 and Able Archer exercise 231, 260, 261, 265–6 and SDI 99, 100 McNamara, Robert 12 malware 144–5 Manchuria 4, 330 Mao Zedong 44–5 Martynov, Valery 285–6 Marxism-Leninism 36, 45, 50, 65, 69, 71, 134 maskirovka 160, 227, 253 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Matlock, Jack 312 Mauroy, Pierre 37 Meese, Edwin 32, 169 MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service) 110, 121, 122, 126, 281, 336 exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky 286–92 MiG 204, 205 MiG-23 248 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 Minsk 138 Minuteman missiles 195 Misawa 162, 170, 171, 172 missile silos 13, 194, 195, 200, 239, 242–3 Mitterrand, François 143 Moldavia 333 Mondale, Walter 269 Mons 223–4, 225, 229, 250, 256 Moorestown 193 Morrow, Douglas 91 Moscow Olympics (1980) 30, 49, 268 Moscow summit (1988) 323–5 Mozambique 29 Mujahideen 76, 77, 110, 310, 323 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12, 242, 244 Munich Olympic Games (1972) 203 Murmansk 126 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Nagasaki, bombing of (1945) 4, 93 Nagy, Imre 43 Nakasone, Yasuhiro 183 National Association of Evangelicals 66 National Command Authority 241 National Emergency Airborne Command Post (Boeing 747) 59, 61 National Intelligence Council 269 National Military Command Center 61, 91, 193 National Security Advisors 189, 309, 320 National Security Agency (NSA) 141, 156, 161, 187, 258, 299 expansion of 54–5 National Security Archive (NSA) 17, 348–9, 350 National Security Council 144, 145, 208, 209, 231 NATO 55, 82, 86, 88, 100, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 140, 318, 320 Abel Archer 83 exercise 222–56, 344 Allied Command Europe (ACE) 222 Autumn Forge 83 exercises 223 Current Intelligence Group 131 East German agent in 130–5 MC 161 document 132–3 Political Affairs Directorate 131 response to SDI 134 neo-Nazis 129 Nicaragua 29, 70, 319, 323 Contras 110, 319–20 Nicholson, Major Arthur 295–6 Nine Lives exercise 61, 63 9/11 241 1983–The Brink of Apocalypse (documentary) 346 Nitze, Paul 313 Nixon, Richard 32, 114, 298, 320 anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) Treaty 92 signs Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13 Watergate 14, 28, 74 NKVD 5 nomenklatura 70, 220 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) 90–1, 145, 189, 190, 193 North Korea 4, 44 nuclear capability 343 North, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver 320 Norway 126, 127 intelligence service 157 Norwegian Labour Party 127 nuclear accidents 190–2 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 310–11 nuclear arms race 6–9, 12–13 nuclear arsenal 200 Soviet 223 US 8 nuclear ‘football’ system 55–6, 240–1 Nuclear Freeze peace movement 96, 103 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 13 nuclear war Counterforce strategy 10 Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) 204, 230 false alerts 189–201, 239 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 limited nuclear war 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 probable consequences 8, 60, 63, 68, 248–9 protocols for launching nuclear weapons 10, 15–16, 55–6, 62–3, 240–1 simulated nuclear attack 61–2 Withhold Options 60 nuclear war scare (1983) 344 Able Archer 83 exercise and 222–56, 344 CIA report on 339–40 Soviet arsenal on maximum alert 16, 240, 242, 243–9, 255, 257, 307 Soviet paranoia and miscalculation 16, 224, 227–9, 232–3, 239, 240, 242, 250–1, 254, 256, 258–61, 344 nuclear winter 16, 249 Nyerere, Julius 259 Obama, Barack 256, 343 observation satellites 90, 111, 194–5, 196, 248, 256 October War (1973) 204, 230 Odom, William 189 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 107 Ogarkov, Marshal Nikolai 73, 183–4, 184, 198, 236, 241, 245, 250, 255 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 145, 285 Okinawa 138 Oko satellite network 194–5 O’Malley, General 173 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 Operation Barbarossa 80–1, 247 Operation Chrome Dome 190–2 Operation RYaN 80, 81–7, 88, 105, 118, 124–5, 216, 217–18, 227, 228–9, 237, 251, 255, 257, 340 categories of intelligence 81–2 confirmation bias 81, 86 information processing 83–4 spurious reports 81, 84, 86, 124–5, 227–8, 250–1 Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States 210 Ossipovich, Major Gennady 162–3, 164–7, 168, 178, 184–5 Pakistan, nuclear arsenal 343 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 203–4, 205, 206 Palestinian-Israeli conflict 202–9 Palmerston, Lord 273 Palomares incident (1966) 191–2 Parr, Jerry 56–7 Partial Test Ban Treaty 13 peace movement 66, 95–7, 96, 103, 123–4, 237 Pelše, Arvids 214 Pentecostal Christians 59, 116 perestroika 311, 325, 329 Perroots, Lieutenant-General Leonard 253–5 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Petropavlosk 138, 158 Petrov, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav 195–200, 239 Pfautz, Major General James 172–3 Phalangist militiamen 207 Philby, Kim 278, 292 PL-5 missiles 157 plutonium implosion bomb 4, 6 Podgorny, Nikolai 69 Poindexter, Admiral John 320 Poland 65, 94 political reforms 328 popular protests 42–3 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Polaris 13 Politburo 34, 47–8, 64, 70, 76, 78, 181, 214, 215, 236, 255, 264, 275, 312, 317, 319 Prague Spring 47 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) 339, 349–50 protective missile system see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) psychological operations (PSYOPS) 139–43, 147, 162, 182, 187, 310, 340 Putin, Vladimir 341 Pym, Francis 37 radiation sickness 3–4, 249 radioactive contamination 192 RAF Lakenheath 190 Ramstein Air Force Base 253 RAND Corporation 12 RC-135 spy planes 140–1, 156–7, 170, 178, 182 Reagan, Nancy 19, 25, 32, 66, 114, 302, 306 Reagan, Ronald 108 and Able Archer 83 exercise 231–2, 261, 262, 263, 265–6 anti-communism and anti-Soviet rhetoric 23, 24, 25, 26, 30–1, 51–2, 64–7, 77–8, 93, 94–5, 110, 114–15, 116, 177, 182, 216, 266 appearance and personality 21, 22, 33 approval ratings 28, 97, 265, 323 approves technological sabotage 144 attempted assassination of 56–8 background of 20–2 belief in personal diplomacy 51, 93–4, 268 ‘bombing Russia’ poor-taste joke 267–8 and Brezhnev 59 Cold War warrior 31, 267, 321 on the decision to launch nuclear weapons 15–16 demands Berlin Wall be pulled down 321 diary entries 64–5, 98, 99–100, 102, 116, 206, 262, 268, 294, 308 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 177, 178, 179, 182, 188 economic policies 27–8, 31 elected President 15, 31–2 ‘evil empire’ rhetoric 66–7, 89, 117, 176, 182, 216, 324 film career 22, 25–6, 301 Geneva summit 297–9, 300–9, 305 Governor of California 27–8 ‘Great Communicator’ 268 and human rights issues 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 and invasion of Grenada 210, 211, 212 and Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 leadership style 27 and Margaret Thatcher 211–12 meets Gordievsky 337, 337 Moscow summit 323–5 and nuclear policy 51, 58–9, 63–4, 91–3, 97–101, 103–4, 114, 261 political philosophy 22–3, 26 populism 19, 27, 33 president of Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 presidential inauguration 19–20, 21, 32–3 protocol for launching nuclear weapons 55–6, 62–3 re-election 265, 266–7, 269 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 and SDI 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 secret meeting with Soviet ambassador 115–17 signs INF Treaty 321 spouses see Reagan, Nancy; Wyman, Jane suggests rapprochement with Soviet Union 266–7, 268, 294 and total abolition of nuclear weapons 51, 93, 315, 318 visits Berlin 320–1 visits London 65 visits NORAD base 90, 91 war games, participation in 61–3, 62, 97, 262 Washington summit 321–3 Reagan Doctrine 110 Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan (RISOP) 55, 60 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Reed, Thomas 61, 62, 143–4 Reforger 83 exercise 223 Regan, Don 208 reunification of Germany 332 Rex 82 Alpha exercise 61, 63 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 Rivet Joint operations 141, 162 Rogers, William 61 Romania 332 Romanov, Grigory 238, 270 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 27, 146 Rubin, Professor 213 Rupp, Rainer 128–34, 135, 251–3, 336 Russia 334 hybrid warfare capabilities 342 military exercises 342 Sabra and Shatila massacres (1982) 207 Sadat, Anwar 202 Sakhalin island 136, 160, 168, 171, 172, 173, 180, 183, 184 Sakharov, Andrei 48 Sandinistas 29 Saudi Arabia 208, 343 Scarlett, John 121, 125, 218, 259 Schmidt, Helmut 94 Schneider, Dr William 142 Scowcroft, Brent 327 Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 Sea of Okhotsk 136, 138, 156, 159, 162, 168, 180, 187, 299 Second World War 40–1, 107, 146, 255 end of 4 German invasion of Soviet Union 40, 80–1, 247 Serpukhov-15 194, 195–200 Severomorsk 245 Sharansky, Anatoly 49 Sharon, Ariel 203, 207 Shchelokov, Nikolai 88 Shemya 156, 157 Shevardnadze, Eduard 297, 309, 313, 320, 330 Shultz, George 37, 113–16, 117, 146–7, 208, 219, 262 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 175, 176, 179, 185 and the Geneva summit 297, 303 on Gorbachev 295 and the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320 meets with Gromyko 185, 240, 296–7 meets with Shevardnadze 320 and the Reykjavik summit 313, 314, 315, 318 and SDI 100, 298 and the Soviet ‘peace offensive’ 309 signals intelligence (SIGINT) 82, 141, 170, 176, 183 Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) 10, 11, 55, 56, 60, 62, 262 Six Day War (1967) 203 ‘snap-ons’ 161, 163, 164, 170 Snow, Jon 324 Sokol 164 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 48 Son Dong-hui 150, 155, 161, 166, 167 South Korea 138 South Korean Navy 137 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Soviet Air Force 247–8 expansion of 138 Far East Air Defence Command 139, 158, 162, 163, 180–1 Soviet embassy, London 81, 118–20, 122, 218, 228, 279 Soviet embassy, Washington 81, 277, 278 Soviet Far East 136–40, 137, 149–88 Soviet missile systems intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 34, 194, 239 PL-5 missiles 157 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 161 Soviet Navy Northern Fleet 126, 140, 245, 246 Pacific Fleet 138 submarine fleet 245–7 Soviet Union anti-Jewish purges 46 centralised planning 6, 69 civil defence programme 30 communist orthodoxy 36–7 Congress of People’s Deputies 329 corruption and organised crime 87–8, 333 defence budget 30 dismantling of 329, 333 economic stagnation 37, 48, 50, 64–5, 69, 71, 111 Five Year Plans 39–40 German invasion of 40, 80–1, 247 Great Terror 36, 39–40 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 intelligence community see GRU; KGB; SVR invasion and occupation of Afghanistan 30, 76–7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 204–5 Kremlin nuclear paranoia 85, 86, 112, 125, 233, 238, 240 see also Able Archer 83 exercise; Operation RYaN Middle East policies 220 military strength and personnel 222–3 nuclear arsenal 223 nuclear programme 4–6, 8, 9, 12 office of head of state 35, 36 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 285 outrage over Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) launch 104–5, 106 political reforms 311–12, 329 post-Soviet problems 333 post-war reconstruction 41 reduced nuclear stockpile 333–4 reduction of Soviet forces in Europe 328, 333–4 Second World War 4, 40–1, 80–1, 247, 255 Sino-Soviet relations 44, 45, 220, 330 social conditions 69–70 support for global liberation struggles 29, 30, 52, 70, 94, 109, 301 suspected of influencing American presidential elections 269, 342 suspicion and fear of the West 14, 71–2, 73, 78, 80, 85, 240 technology gap 72, 73, 104, 120, 143, 144 The Soviet War Scare, 1983 (documentary) 346 Soyuz spacecraft 14 space weapons see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Speakes, Larry 169, 176 Sputnik 9, 194 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 stagflation 28–9 Stalin, Joseph 5, 23, 24, 35, 146, 237, 329 anti-Jewish purges 47 death of 42 and the Great Terror 36, 39–40 ‘Star Wars’ see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Stasi 85, 128, 130, 133, 335 Stewart, Nina 349 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 Stombaugh, Paul, Jr 284 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13, 14, 94, 156 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) 30, 77 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) 94, 105, 270, 334 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 103 costs 102 Geneva summit and 298, 299, 304 Gorbachev’s hostility to 273, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 309, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 origins of 97–100 proposed limits on 313 public attitudes towards 102 Reagan’s enthusiasm for 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 Soviet fears of 104–5, 106, 117, 216 ‘strip alert’ 248, 254 Su-24 248 submarines Delta class 138, 246 nuclear weapon-carrying submarines 13, 136, 140, 200, 246 Ohio class 54 Typhoon class 246 suicide bombers 208–9 Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) 223, 229 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1, 161 Suslov, Mikhail 45 SVR 285, 334 Symms, Steve 149 Syria 204, 205, 209, 220 Syrian Air Force 205 systems failures 192, 193, 200, 201, 239 T-72 tank 204 Tadzhikistan 333 Taliban 77, 323 Tass news agency 182 Tehran embassy hostage crisis (1979–81) 20, 29 telemetry intelligence (TELINT) 156 Teller, Edward 6–7, 97–8, 101 ter Woerds, Margreet 347 terrorism 108–9 Thatcher, Denis 272 Thatcher, Margaret 124, 134, 210, 211–12, 217, 218, 231, 259, 264, 293 and British–Soviet relations 270 and Gordievsky 337, 338 meets Gorbachev 272–4, 274 on nuclear deterrence 318–19 thermonuclear weapons 7–8, 45, 190–1 Thor missiles 13 Thule 192 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 330 Titan missiles 13 Titov, Gennadi 127 Tkachenko, Captain Viktor 243–4 Tolkachev, Adolf 283–4 Tomahawk Cruise missiles 53 Topaz see Rupp, Rainer Treholt, Arne 127–8 Trident missiles 54, 319 ‘Trinity’ atomic test 5 Tripoli 310 ‘Trojan horses’ 144–5 Trudeau, Pierre 271 Truman, Harry 6, 7, 107 Trump, Donald 31, 269, 342, 343 Tsygichko, Vitalii 239 Tupolev TU-22M ‘Backfire’ bomber 138, 247 United States budget deficit 55, 102 Ukraine 333, 334, 341 United Nations 185 Lebanese operations 203 peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) 203 Security Council 183 United States declining superpower role 342–3 defence budget 52, 66, 79, 342 intelligence community see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); National Security Agency (NSA); Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 203–4 military rearmament 52–4, 116 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 nuclear arsenal 8 nuclear programme 6–8, 9, 12 peace movement 66, 96, 96, 103 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Second World War 107 Washington KGB residency 81, 277, 278 US Air Force Air Force Intelligence 172–3, 178 PSYOPS 140–1, 142 Strategic Air Command 8, 10, 58, 90–1, 156, 190–1, 193 US Marines 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 217 US missile systems anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) 12, 13 Cruise missiles 53, 78, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 258, 270, 299, 309, 321 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 12–13, 53, 198 Minuteman missiles 195 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 submarine-launched ballistic missiles 13 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1 Trident missiles 54 Vanguard missiles 9 US Navy 142 expansion 54, 138 Pacific Fleet 138 PSYOPS 142 US presidential elections 1964 26 1976 28 1980 30–1 1984 265–9 2016 269, 342 suspected Soviet influence 269, 342 USS Coral Sea 137 USS Eisenhower 140 USS Enterprise 136–7 USS Midway 137, 139 USS New Jersey 208 Ustinov, Marshal Dmitri 34–5, 87, 180, 181, 198, 215, 236, 241, 242, 255 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Uzbekistan 333 Vanguard missiles 9 Velikhov, Yevgeny 104 Velvet Revolution 332 Vessey, Admiral 262 Vetrov, Captain Vladimir 143 Vietnam war 27, 29 Vladivostok 138 Volk Field Air Base 192–3 Wakkanai 162, 168, 170, 172, 174 Warsaw Pact 43, 47, 55, 86, 88, 132, 222, 318 Washington summit (1987) 321–3 Watergate 14, 28, 74 Watkins, Admiral James D. 98–9, 139–40 Weinberger, Caspar 32, 52, 58, 100, 131, 179, 262, 296, 320 Weiss, Dr Gus 144, 145 West Germany 14, 128, 319 peace movement 95 Winter War (1939–40) 40 Withhold Options 60 Wolf, Markus 85, 86, 135, 335 Wright, Oliver 260 Wyman, Jane 22, 25 Yeltsin, Boris 329, 333, 338 Yesin, General-Colonel Ivan 245 Yom Kippur War (1973) 204, 230 Yugoslavia 44 Yurchenko, Vitaly 299–300 Zapad 17 exercise 342 Zeleny 139 zero-zero option 94–5, 315, 316, 318, 321, 321–2 Zil limousines 74, 111, 112, 236 Zionists 74, 202, 203 US lobby 204 Zubok, Vlad 348


pages: 385 words: 121,550

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

The so-called bailouts have pushed them up to 180 per cent now and a projected 250 per cent by 2060. And all for what? To satisfy some crudely religious notion that sinners must be severely punished if virtue is to flourish. A polity that inflicts such pointless suffering on some of its most vulnerable citizens is morally askew. The EU lost its moral compass when the Berlin Wall fell. Before that, it was in a competition against communism. The generations of Western European leaders who had experienced the chaos of the 1930s and 1940s were anxious to prove that a market system could be governed in such a way as to create full employment, fair opportunities and steady progress towards economic equality.

The EU was built on an alliance of social-democratic and Christian-democratic parties, differing in many ways but held together by the belief that capitalism must be heavily moderated if it is not to destroy itself and take down whole societies with it. But that fear dissipated. The generation scarred by fascism passed on. The Berlin Wall fell and communism ceased to be a threat, either internally or externally. Without this fear the social-democratic parties lost both their radicalism and their relevance and the Christian-democratic parties became cheerleaders for neoliberalism. The consequence is the biggest contradiction of all: while the EU sells itself to its citizens as the motor that drives economic and political ‘convergence’, the reality is one of fatal social divergence.

The notion that Germany was in effect reversing by stealth the result of two world wars and achieving by economic means the dominance it had been denied on the battlefield had long been there. But its rise as a potent political myth in England was itself an unintended consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The irony here is that Brexit will help to create the very thing its political proponents feared. When Boris Johnson told voters a month before the referendum in 2016 that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’, he was manipulating English anxieties about the dark Teutonic truth behind the EU’s tediously consensual deal-making.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Cleverly edited interview excerpts from scientists are interspersed with various black-and-white clips for guilt by association, including bullies beating up on a 98-pound weakling, Charlton Heston’s character in Planet of the Apes being blasted by a water hose, Nikita Khrushchev pounding his fist on a United Nations desk, East Germans captured while scaling the Berlin Wall in search of freedom in the West, and Nazi crematoria remains and Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves. This propaganda production would make Joseph Goebbels proud. It is true that the Nazis did occasionally adapt a warped version of social Darwinism proffered by the nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel in a “survival of the fittest races” mode.

Hayak called this the “extended order,” the result not of planning and design but of a system that “constitutes an information gathering process, able to call up, and put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.”30 The fatal conceit of socialist planners was tested experimentally over the course of the twentieth century, and it failed in every case. Presciently, Hayak’s The Fatal Conceit was published in 1988, just before the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, so this was an experimentally verified prediction. Robert Frank is not a socialist or a Communist, and neither is President Obama or anyone else working in government today. And yet the design conceit is there nonetheless. Even when gussied up in economic jargon with Darwinian overtones, hints of the totalitarian mind from millennia past creep into our thoughts and reach for the controls.

See alternative archaeology Archetype Theory of Truth (Peterson), 304–307 Arden, Jacinda, 29 Arendt, Hannah, 34 Areopagitica (Milton), 3–4 Aristotle, 231 Asimov’s Axiom, 117–118 atheism anti-something movements are doomed to fail, 90 challenging religious beliefs, 86–92 freedom to disbelieve, 86–92 meaning of life and, 103–108 morality and, 87–88 New Atheist movement, 289 power of positive assertions, 90 rational consciousness raising, 91 societal health and, 88 Australia effects of gun law reform, 174–175 Austria effects of gun control, 187–190 authority bias, 24 availability bias, 24 Aveling, Edward, 90, 288 Baby Boomer generation, 65 Bachmann, Michele, 81, 82–83 Baer, Elizabeth, 1–2 Bailey, Ronald, 289 baraminology, 58 Barash, David, 287 Barlow, Connie, 289 Barna, George, 87–88 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 165 Barrow, John, 120 Bastiat, Frédéric, 214–215 Baumeister, Roy, 34–35 Bazile, Leon M., Judge, 72 Beale, Howard, 88 Beckner, Stephen, 300 belief pluralism case for, 81–85 beliefs cognitive biases and, 23–24 believability bias, 24 Bentham, Jeremy, 139 Bentley, Alex, 86 Berg, Alan, 30 Berger, Victor, 2 Berkman, Alexander, 2 Berlin Wall, 217 Berra, Yogi, 289 Bible, 224–225, 317 Big Bang, 121 Big Five personality traits, 260–261 Big Questions Online (BQO) program, 103 bigotry historical influences, 30–31 Bill of Rights, 143 bio-altruism, 106 Biography Bias, 262 birth order personality and, 261–262 Black Lives Matter movement, 132 Black Swan events, 29, 162 Blackburn, Simon, 287 Bligh, William, 156–159 Bod, Rens, 225–226 Boemeke, Isabelle, 74 Boko Haram, 34 Bolt, Robert, 8, 22 boom-and-bust cycles, 121 Boone, Richard, 298 Boonin, David, 44 bottom-up self-organization, 203–205, 215–217 Bouchard, Thomas, 289 Boudreaux, Donald, 212–213 Brandeis, Louis, Justice, 41, 44 brane universes, 123 Breivik, Anders Behring, 29, 165–166 Brexit, 153 Brin, David, 153 Brin, Sergey, 260 Bronowski, Jacob, 299 Brooks, Arthur C., 89, 212 Browne, Janet, 288 Browning, Robert, 160 Bruruma, Ian, 282 Bryan, William Jennings, 48 Buckholtz, Joshua W., 168 Buffett, Warren, 211 Burke, Edmund, 153 Bush, George W., 138 Calhoun, John C., 14 Callahan, Tim, 115–116 Calvin, William, 289 Camus, Renaud, 30 Carlson, Randall, 314 Carroll, Sean, 117, 118, 121 Cassidy, John, 212–213 categorical imperative (Kant), 240 censorship, 1–9arguments against, 19–27 college students’ responses to controversial subjects, 64–78 hate speech, 28–37 Holocaust denial, 38–43 Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives, 78 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 trigger warnings and, 66–67 Center for Inquiry (CFI), 269, 271 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 250–251 Change.org, 33–34 Christakis, Nicholas, 154–156 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre responses to, 28–37 Christian, Fletcher, 156–159 Christian values v. the US Constitution, 81–85 Churchill, Ward, 41 civilization free trade institutions, 249–251 how to get to Civilization,1.0, 251–253 influence of political tribalism, 243–246 pre-financial crisis world, 243 Types of civilization, 246–247 Clark, Kenneth, 299 classical liberalism, 136case for, 138–144 Clinton, Bill, 83, 253 Coase, Ronald, 201 Cockell, Charles S., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Hardin’s paper, which went on to become the most widely reprinted ever published in a scientific journal, read by millions of people across the world.32 ‘[It] should be required reading for all students,’ declared an American biologist in the 1980s, ‘and, if I had my way, for all human beings.’33 Ultimately, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ would prove among the most powerful endorsements for the growth of the market and the state. Since common property was tragically doomed to fail, we needed either the visible hand of the state to do its salutary work, or the invisible hand of the market to save us. It seemed these two flavours – the Kremlin or Wall Street – were the only options available. Then, after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, only one remained. Capitalism had won, and we became Homo economicus. 4 To be fair, at least one person was never swayed by Garrett Hardin’s arguments. Elinor Ostrom was an ambitious political economist and researcher at a time when universities didn’t exactly welcome women.

In fact, it grew into something of an academic hippie commune, with parties where Ostrom herself led the singing of folksongs.35 And then one day, years later, the call came from Stockholm. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, the first woman ever to win.36 This choice sent a strong message. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the crash of capitalism in 2008, finally the moment had arrived to give the commons – that alternative between the state and the market – the spotlight it deserves. 5 It may not be breaking news, but since then the commons has made a spectacular comeback. If it seems like history’s repeating itself, that’s because it’s not the first time this has happened.

., here Bahn, Paul, here, here bananas, here ‘barbarians’, here Bataclan massacre, here Battle of the Somme, here Baumeister, Roy, here BBC Prison Study, here, here, here Beethoven, Ludwig van, here behavioural disorders, here behaviourism, here Belyaev, Dmitri, here, here Bentham, Jeremy, here Berkowitz, Roger, here Berlin Wall, fall of, here, here Berners-Lee, Tim, here Bertsch, Leann, here bestiality, here bin Laden, Osama, here binge drinking, here Bird Mound, here Birdman Cult, here Bismarck, Otto von, here Bitcoin, here Blackett, Patrick, here Bletchley Park, here Blitz, the, here, here, here Bloom, Paul, here blushing, here, here, here, here, here Boer Wars, here Boersema, Jan, here, here, here, here bonobos, here, here Book of Genesis, here Book of Samuel, here Bornem, Coca-Cola Incident, here Bosch, Reinier, here, here Boston Marathon bombing, here, here Bowman, Steve, here brain areas, here brain damage, here brain size, here, here, here, here Bratton, William, here Breivik, Anders, here Brexit, here, here Brown, Jack, here Buddha, here bullying, here Burke, Edmund, here Buss, David, here Buurtzorg, here, here, here, here, here, here bystander effect, here Calvin, John, here canaries, here cannibalism, here, here, here, here, here, here capitalism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and incentives, here, here cargo cults, here Carib people, here Carlin, John, here Cattivelli, Walter, here cave paintings, here, here Chagnon, Napoleon, here, here Charles V, Emperor, here Chávez, Hugo, here Chávez, Julio, here Chekhov, Anton, here Chernoweth, Erica, here chimpanzees, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Christmas truce (1914), here, here Churchill, Winston, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cicero, here Cleary, Raoul, here climate change, here, here Clinton, Bill, here Code of Hammurabi, here coinage, here Cold War, here collective work events, here Collins, Randall, here Colombia, and FARC insurgency, here, here, here Columbus, Christopher, here, here commons, the, here, here communism, here, here, here, here, here, here and evolutionary theory, here, here and incentives, here, here from Latin communis, here Confucius, here conquistadors, here, here Cook, James, here Cookie Monster study, here Crécy, Battle of, here Crick, Francis, here crime, here broken windows theory, here, here, here see also prisons; terrorists Crimean War, here crocodiles, here, here Curtis, Richard, here Daily Mail, here, here Dams, John, here Darley, John, here, here Dart, Raymond, here, here, here Darwin, Charles, here, here, here, here Dawkins, Richard, here, here, here, here de Blok, Jos, here, here, here, here, here de Klerk, Frederik Willem, here De May, Joseph, here de Moor, Tine, here de Queirós, Pedro Fernandes, here de Tocqueville, Alexis, here de Waal, Frans, here, here, here Deci, Edward, here, here demand characteristics, here democracy, here Alaska, here Leicester East, here Porto Allegre, here, here, here Torres, here, here Vallejo, California, here see also commons, the; participatory budgeting depression, here Diamond, Jared, here, here, here, here, here, here Diaz, Julio, here, here Diderot, Denis, here dogs, here Dresden bombing, here drones, here Drummen, Sjef, here, here, here, here, here, here Du Bois, W.


pages: 584 words: 187,436

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deal flow, do well by doing good, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, High speed trading, index fund, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine translation, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, operational security, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule

As he reported later to his investors, the two men “turned the music up to full blast and took off for Austria with a brief stop in Lichtenstein. Purpose—skiing.”36 In early November 1989, when Griffin was on leave at business school at Stanford, the fax machine that he had installed in his room sputtered out a message from the chief: “Big guy, the Berlin Wall is coming down soon. This is gonna be a VERY big deal.” A few days later, the wall duly fell, and two days after that Tiger began to load up on German securities. Robertson knew next to nothing about Germany; but Griffin had studied the German market during a summer stint in London, and Robertson was not going to let an absence of experience get in the way of a historic opportunity.

Showing a coolness that was all the more remarkable given that he owned much of the money in Quantum, Soros moved his family to London. “I’m going to Europe,” he told Druckenmiller as he went. “Now we’ll find out whether I’ve just been in your hair too much or whether you really are inept.”6 The next few months gave Soros ample reason to feel pleased with his gamble. The Berlin wall came down, and the move to London gave him the freedom that he craved to focus on philanthropy in eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the collapse of the wall created the sort of market turbulence that Druckenmiller relished, and his returns entered an astonishing period. He was up 31.5 percent in 1989, followed by 29.6 percent, 53.4 percent, 68.8 percent, and 63.2 percent in the next four years; he was like Bob Dylan in the midsixties, producing one hit album after the next, as a colleague put it.7 Assets in Quantum leaped from $1.8 billion to $5 billion, and Soros Fund Management opened new funds alongside its flagship, so that by the end of 1993 its total assets under management had soared to $8.3 billion.8 Soros had the sense to recognize his good fortune.

And following Soros’s practice, Druckenmiller seized opportunities with both hands. If there was one thing that the disciple had learned from the master, it was to pile on with all you’ve got when the right moment presents itself.11 Soon after Soros decamped with his family to London, the collapse of the Berlin wall created such a moment. Joyful East Germans flooded into the freer and richer West, expecting jobs and social benefits; the associated costs seemed certain to force the German government to run large budget deficits. Other things equal, budget deficits fuel inflation, eroding a currency’s value; based on this logic, traders dumped deutsche marks after the wall came down, and the currency dipped against the dollar.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Admiral Kimmel’s code-breakers had deciphered the Japanese “winds” code, but he, the principal consumer of that intelligence, nonetheless failed to anticipate that the actual blow would land on the Pacific Fleet headquarters. The day that would live in ignominy well described the resting place of Admiral Kimmel’s reputation for all time. By contrast, no one in the U.S. intelligence community was cashiered for failing to predict that the Berlin Wall would come down in November 1989, though fail to predict it they did. This asymmetry in incentives leads the vast majority of those who work on national security issues to resort routinely to worst-case analysis as a means of covering themselves in case bad things happen on or just beyond their watch.

See Bird flu Balance of payments, 44, 45, 49–50 Bangladesh, climate change in, 105 Banking, in East Asian economic crisis, 44–45, 46, 52 Bank of Thailand, 45 Barbarian societies, 131 Baron, Jon, 110–11 Bataille, Georges, 161 Believability: of asteroid strike scenario, 3, 98; of strategic surprises, 93–94, 98, 103–05 Bellah, Robert, 103 Berlin Wall, fall of, 2 Bernanke, Ben, 148 Berners-Lee, Tim, 123 index Bias(es): denial as form of, 103; against optimism, in intelligence community, 2–3; toward optimism, in policymaking, 111 Binary mathematics, in digital computers, 123–24 Bin Laden, Osama, 72 Bioengineering, 163 Biofuels, 78–80 Biological weapons: affordability of, 8; infectious disease as, 83; optimism vs. pessimism about prospect of, 136; political barriers to preparing for, 10; probability of attack with, 10; technological innovation in, 163 Biotechnology, 163 Bird flu: H5N1 strain of, 82, 83, 84, 85; H7N7 strain of, 86; optimism vs. pessimism about prospect of, 136 Blair, Tony, 105 Bletchley Park (Britain), 122 “Blue” states, 141 BNP.


pages: 274 words: 73,344

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche

airport security, Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, glass ceiling, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the market place

The Polish press had a field day with the comments, and once the U.S. media got wind of it, so did they. (President Carter took the incident in stride, and Seymour went on to have a distinguished career as a translator—in Russian, not Polish.) The Kennedy Mistranslation Myth In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech after the Berlin Wall was erected to express solidarity with the citizens of Berlin. His few words of German—“Ich bin ein Berliner,” which means “I am a Berliner”—made an immediate impact on his audience. But rumors soon began to spread that Kennedy had botched the grammar and mistakenly called himself a jelly donut also known as a Berliner.

., 93 Auschwitz concentration camp, 34 Australia, 41, 163 auto manufacturers, 70 automated translation, 77, 203–4, 218–19, 226, 227–28, 229, 231 automatic teller machines (ATMs), 75–76 Aymara, 75 back-translation, 136 Baio, Andrew, 71 Baird, Jessie Little Doe, 28, 29 Bangkok International Hospital, 138 Barabé, Donald, 30 baseball, 186–88 Bashir, Omar al-, 43 basketball, 184–86 Basque, 75 Bayulgens, Okan, 200, 201 BBC, 42, 104 beauty pageants (international), 147–50 Behbd, Muhammad Bqir, 118 Beijing, China, 195, 196, 197 bejuco daydreams, 103–6 Belgian, 151 Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, 85–87 Bellugi, Ursula, 168 Bengali, 205 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Rajiv), 37–38 Benkala, North Bali, 171 Berlin Wall, 57 Berlusconi, Silvio, 59 Berne Convention, 97 beverage and food industry, 150–53 Bhutan, 50, 51 Bibles, 28, 112–13, 120, 220 Bing, 206 bin Laden, Osama, 199 bird flu, 9–10, 11 Bislama, 208 Björk, 78 Bohemian, 135 Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kundera), 98 Bosnian, 131 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 54 Bo Xilai, 60–61 boxing, 193–95 Bradley, Nathan, 38 “brainiac charisma,” 207 branding and minimizing text, 63–65 Brandt, Willy, 58 Braniff International Airways, 78 Brazil, 85, 151, 163, 177, 188–89, 190 Britain, 19, 151, 161, 220–21 British Medical Journal, 104 broadcasting global politics, 60–61 Buber, Martin, 114 Buddhist text translation, 109, 115–16 Bulgarian, 48, 58, 96, 153, 161, 171 Burton, Sir Richard Francis (Captain), 130 Bush, George H.


pages: 267 words: 74,296

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed by John Peet, Anton La Guardia, The Economist

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, Doha Development Round, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Money creation, moral hazard, Northern Rock, oil shock, open economy, pension reform, price stability, quantitative easing, special drawing rights, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, éminence grise

Chapter 2 shows how the idea of European integration was born from the political necessities of the early 1950s, with Europe emerging from the ruins of the second world war and then having to confront the challenge of the cold war. The euro was launched as a result of the failure of repeated attempts to fix exchange rates between European economies, and the desire to anchor a unified Germany more firmly within Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The system that was created through successive treaties was a complex hybrid with elements of federalism and intergovernmentalism, a pantomime horse that was part United States and part United Nations. Chapter 3 explains the functioning of the EU, and the flawed structure of the euro, to help make clear how Europeans managed, and mismanaged, the crisis.

Maastricht laid the foundations for a new ECB and a single European currency, to be brought in either in 1997 or (at the latest) 1999. It also promised to make progress towards the parallel objective of political union; and it symbolically renamed the European Community the European Union. The new treaty reflected above all the changed political situation in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire. Mitterrand, in particular, was minded to accept German unification after the fall of the wall only if France could secure some control of the Deutschmark, which he feared would otherwise become Europe’s de facto currency. In effect, he had no wish to replace the dominance of the dollar with the dominance of the Deutschmark.


pages: 237 words: 77,224

The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, borderless world, invention of movable type, Khyber Pass, mass immigration

“Look at what we did in Jerusalem in 1979,” he said: 230 people—the Israeli population is 5.3 million—performed yogic flying on the eve of the Camp David talks, and a peace agreement was signed. Then again, and most ambitiously, seven thousand people met and performed the rituals in a gymnasium outside Washington, D.C., and, their power being harnessed to improve the lot of the then 4.9 million people of the planet, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the atomic stalemate, which had dogged the global population for half a century, was ended. His conversation then veered into areas I could not possible understand—the nature of the five sub-atomic particles, the coincidence of the five levels of Vedic-inspired consciousness, the overlapping circles of energy, the works of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, the role of the mantra in stimulating internal vibration.

.), and effectively ruled as a separate semiautonomous province, distinct from the Bosnian-Croat Federation that rules the remainder of the country. Stari Most The exquisite Turkish-built bridge (1566) over the Neretva river in Mostar (which derives its name from the Turkish word for bridge), destroyed by Croatian artillery in November 1993—ironically on the anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Its four centuries of existence stood as a symbol of the ethnic cohesion of Bosnia; its destruction showed that same cohesion’s vulnerability and fragility. Stari Planina The Bulgarian name for the Balkan Mountains, which have given their name—the word Balkan means simply “mountains”—to the entire region.


pages: 275 words: 77,955

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

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

The climate of opinion received a further boost in the same direction when the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. That brought to a dramatic end an experiment of some seventy years between two alternative ways of organizing an economy: top-down versus bottom-up; central planning and control versus private markets; more colloquially, socialism versus capitalism. The result of that experiment had been foreshadowed by a number of similar experiments on a smaller scale: Hong Kong and Taiwan versus mainland China; West Germany versus East Germany; South Korea versus North Korea. But it took the drama of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union to make it part of conventional wisdom, so that it is now taken for granted that central planning is indeed The Road to Serfdom, as Friedrich A.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

The relatively new concept of European identity finds itself battling with national identities and symbols that have been forged over centuries. Flags, and the importance nation states and peoples attach to them, give the lie to the famous theory of the American thinker Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. Dr Fukuyama argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not ‘just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. This damaging idea continues to influence generations of foreign-policy thinkers who appear oblivious to the patterns of history and the political direction of Russia, the Middle East, China, swathes of Central Asia and elsewhere.

Happily, it was settled with the compromise that the joint team would march under the black, red and gold but with the Olympic rings on the red, which is what happened in 1960 and 1964. In 1968 separate teams were entered but each complied with the compromise agreed earlier, and after that each used their national flag. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification the following year, the problem was solved. Many East Germans made their feelings plain in the heady days when the Wall came down by cutting out the coat of arms from the flag. They drew inspiration from the Hungarians, who in 1956 had done the same during their uprising against Soviet occupation.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Here, instead, we inhabit a world in free-fall and yet we are all along for the ride. Some aspects of this, like the European migration crisis, are highly mediatised and public. Here, people displaced by war and social breakdown migrate, often meeting with hostility in response. While for previous generations the Berlin Wall was totemic of division, only 235 people died trying to cross it. Compare that to the 3,770 souls who died or went missing in the Mediterranean trying to reach the shores of Europe just in 2015. And if, as an undocumented migrant, you are fortunate enough to safely cross the Mediterranean, or the US–Mexico border, or the fences and forests between Hungary and Bulgaria, your problems are only just beginning.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010. Menand, Louis. ‘Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History’. New Yorker, 3 September 2018. Crisis Unleashed ‘Depression Looms as Global Crisis’. BBC News, 2 September 2009. Hertle, Hans-Hermann and Maria Nooke. The Victims at the Berlin Wall 1961–1989: A Biographical Handbook. Links Verlag, 2011. ‘IOM Counts 3,771 Migrant Fatalities in Mediterranean in 2015’. International Organization for Migration, 1 May 2016. Jones, Owen. ‘Suicide and Silence: Why Depressed Men Are Dying for Somebody to Talk To’. Guardian, 15 August 2014. 2008: Return of History Allen, Katie and Larry Elliott.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

In the twelfth edition, the graph was replaced with a table declaring that, between 1928 and 1983, the Soviet Union had grown at a remarkable 4.9 percent annual growth rate, higher than that of the United States, the United Kingdom, or even Germany and Japan (Samuelson and Nordhaus 1985, 776). Ironically, right before the Berlin Wall was torn down, Samuelson and Nordhaus confidently declared, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed [a reference to Mises and Hayek], a socialist command economy can function and even thrive" (1989, 837). Even conservative Yale economist Henry C. Wallich, a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, was so convinced by CIA statistics that he wrote a whole book arguing that freedom leads to lower economic growth, greater inequality, and less competition.

He would later write The Worldly Philosophers (1999 [1953]), a popular history of economics. Under the influence of Schumpeter and Adolph Lowe, among others, Heilbroner joined the rest of the profession and concluded that Mises was wrong and socialism could work. He maintained that position for decades. In the late 1980s, shortly before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Heilbroner began to reconsider his views. In a stunning article in the New Yorker entitled "The Triumph of Capitalism," Heilbroner wrote that the longstanding debate between capitalism and socialism was over and capitalism had won. He went on to say, "The Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satis-factorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of the planned economy; however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism; and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one" (Heilbroner 1989, 98).


pages: 249 words: 79,740

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going by George Friedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, It's morning again in America, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

Certainly the Americans and the British had supported these NGOs, and the consultants who were now managing the campaigns of some of the pro-Western candidates in Ukraine had formerly managed elections in the United States. Western money from multiple sources clearly was going into the country, but from the American point of view, there was nothing covert or menacing in any of this. The United States was simply doing what it had done since the fall of the Berlin Wall: working with democratic groups to build democracies. This is where the United States and Russia profoundly parted company. Ukraine was divided between pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, but the Americans merely saw themselves as supporting democrats. That the factions seen as democratic by the Americans were also the ones that were anti-Russian was, for the Americans, incidental.

Its antecedents reach back to the early 1950s and the European Steel and Coal Community, a narrowly focused entity whose leaders spoke of it even then as the foundation for a European federation. It is coincidental but extremely important that while the EU idea originated during the Cold War, it emerged as a response to the Cold War’s end. In the west, the overwhelming presence of NATO and its controls over defense and foreign policy loosened dramatically. In the east, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union found sovereign nations coming out of the shadows. It was at this point that Europe regained the sovereignty it had lost but that it is now struggling to define. The EU was envisioned to serve two purposes. The first was the integration of western Europe into a limited federation, solving the problem of Germany by binding it together with France, thereby limiting the threat of war.


Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Its maximum speed was 40 kph (25 mph) – heady stuff for the 20 passengers. The tram replaced horse-drawn trams and steam buses and its technology led to electric underground trains. In 1929, there was more than 600 km (370 miles) of tram track in Berlin. Today, the figure is not quite 200 km (120 miles), most of it having been preserved behind the Berlin Wall in the Communist east. Locomotive repairs being carried out at the Krupp works in Essen in the Ruhr valley, the industrial heart of Germany STEEL WHEELS AND A SAFETY DIVIDEND MEN MADE AND LOST GREAT WEALTH on the railways throughout the 19th century. For Alfred Krupp (1812–1887), a happy collaboration with locomotive makers cemented a fortune that had already been established and turned his surname into a byword for steel.

INDEX (page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations) A AB Svenska Kullagerfabriken, ref1 Abdul Hamid II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 deposed, ref1 Abe, Shinzo, ref1 advertisements, ref1, ref2, ref3 Albula railway, ref1 Alexander II of Russia, ref1, ref2 Alexander III of Russia, ref1 Alexander the Great, ref1 Alexandra, Queen, ref1 Alexandria–Cairo line, ref1 Alfonso XII of Spain, ref1 Alfonso XIII of Spain, ref1, ref2 plot to assassinate, ref1, ref2 Algeciras, Conference of, ref1 Algeciras (Gibraltar) Railway Company, ref1 Aligeri, ref1 Allenby, Lord, ref1 American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, ref1 (see also Armenian Christians) Amsterdam–Northern France journey, ref1 Anasthatos, ref1 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), ref1 Ansaldo, Giovanni, ref1 anti-Semitism, ref1, ref2 Aparicio, Juan Pedro, ref1 Apennine mountains, ref1, ref2 Aranjuez line, ref1, ref2 Arcachon, ref1 arches, two-storey, ref1, ref2 Armenian Christians, genocide of, ref1 Art Deco, ref1 Asquith, Herbert, ref1 Association of German Engineers, ref1 Astapovo station, ref1, ref2 Atatürk, Kemal, ref1 Athens–Thessaloniki journey, ref1 Atocha station, ref1, ref2 Auschwitz, ref1, ref2 ‘Austrian bridge’, ref1, ref2 Austrian empire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Austrian State Railways, ref1 Austro-Hungarian empire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 map of, ref1 Auto, ref1 B Baden State Railway, ref1 Baedeker, Karl, ref1, ref2 Baghdad Railway, ref1 Bake, William Archibald, ref1 Balfour, Arthur, ref1 Balkan War, First, ref1 ball bearings, ref1, ref2 Barcelona–Mallorca journey, ref1 Barcelona–Mataró line, Spain’s first domestic train on, ref1 Barcelona metro, ref1, ref2 Barcelona, as regional railway hub, ref1 barges, ref1, ref2 Barraclough, John, ref1 Bartali, Gino, ref1 Basel–Jungfraujoch journey, ref1 Battle of Langensalza, ref1 Battle of the Somme, ref1 Bavarian Ludwig Railway, ref1, ref2 Bayard, ref1 BBC, ref1, ref2 Beer, Hanna, ref1 Belgian chocolate, ref1 Belgian Resistance, ref1 belle époque, ref1, ref2 Belpaire, Alfred, ref1 Bergen line, conversion of, ref1 Berlin, Congress of, ref1 Berlin–Rhine journey, ref1 Berlin, trams in, ref1, ref2 Berlin Wall, ref1 Betjeman, Sir John, ref1 Bianchi, Riccardo, ref1, ref2 bicycles, ref1 Bilbao station, ref1 Bing, Stefan, ref1 Bismarck, Otto von, ref1 Black Forest, ref1 Blériot, Louis, ref1 Blowitz, Adolphe Opper de, ref1 Bon Marché, ref1 Bonaparte, Napoleon, ref1, ref2 Booth, Alfred, ref1 Bordeaux–Bilbao journey, ref1 Bordeaux station, ref1 Bordeaux wines, ref1 Boris III of Bulgaria, ref1 Bradshaw, George, ref1, ref2, ref3 cholera suffered by, ref1 grave, ref1 railway shares bought by, ref1 Bradshaw’s Continental Guide (1913), ref1, ref2 (see also Bradshaw’s guidebooks) journeys (Destinations 1): Amsterdam to Northern France, ref1 Basel to Jungfraujoch, ref1 Berlin to the Rhine, ref1 Hungary to Austria, ref1 London to Monte Carlo, ref1 journeys (Destinations 2): Bordeaux to Bilbao, ref1 Copenhagen to Oslo, ref1 Dresden to Kiel, ref1 Madrid to Gibraltar, ref1 Prague to Munich, ref1 Turin to Venice, ref1 journeys (Destinations 3): Haifa to Negev Desert, ref1 La Coruña to Lisbon, ref1 Lyon to Marseille, ref1 Rome to Taormina, ref1 Tula to St Petersburg, ref1 Warsaw to Kraków, ref1 journeys (Destinations 4): Athens to Thessaloniki, ref1 Barcelona to Mallorca, ref1 Freiburg to Hannover, ref1 Pisa to Lake Garda, ref1 Sofia to Istanbul, ref1 Vienna to Trieste, ref1 legacy of, ref1 published, ref1, ref2 Bradshaw’s guidebooks, ref1, ref2, ref3 (see also Bradshaw’s Continental Guide (1913)) Belgium praised by, ref1 on Circumvesuviana, ref1 Dresden praised by, ref1 Dutch praised by, ref1 on Greece, ref1 on Heidelberg Castle, ref1 on Jerusalem, ref1 on Leipzig, ref1 on Pyrenees, ref1 on Santiago Cathedral, ref1 warnings in, ref1, ref2 Brandt, Alfred, ref1 Braque, Georges, ref1 bread train, ref1 Breda, Ernesto, ref1 locomotive built by, ref1 Brenner Pass, ref1, ref2 British empire, ref1, ref2 broad gauge tracks, ref1, ref2, ref3 (see also narrow gauge tracks) Broders, Roger, ref1 Brooke, Rupert, ref1 Brothers Grimm, ref1, ref2 Brown, Charles, ref1 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, ref1, ref2 Budapest: Chain Bridge, ref1, ref2 Europe’s first underground system in, ref1 Budweis line, ref1, ref2 Bunyol, Miquel Biada, ref1, ref2 Burschenschaften, ref1 Busse, Otto, locomotive designed by, ref1 Byron, Lord, ref1 Byzantine empire, ref1, ref2 C Café Central, Vienna, ref1, ref2 Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Canadian Pacific Company, ref1 Cannes, ref1 Carlos I of Portugal, ref1, ref2, ref3 Carnegie, Andrew, ref1 Carnot, Sadi, ref1 Carpathian Mountains, ref1 Carrel, Alexis, ref1 Carriage 2419, ref1, ref2 Caserio, Sante Geronimo, ref1 Central Station, Amsterdam, ref1, ref2 Chain Bridge, Budapest, ref1, ref2 Channel Tunnel, ref1, ref2 Charing Cross station, ref1 Charles Albert of Piedmont, ref1 Cherepanov, Miron, ref1 Cherepanov, Yefim, ref1 chocolate manufacture, ref1 Chopin, Frederick, ref1 Christie, Agatha, ref1 Chrzanów factory, ref1 ‘Cinderella’, ref1 Cinématographe, ref1 Circumvesuviana, ref1, ref2 CIWL (Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits), ref1 Clark, Adam, ref1 Clark, William Tierney, ref1 clocks and time, ref1, ref2, ref3 CO (Société Générale pour l’Exploitation des Chemins de Fer Orientaux), ref1 Colaço, Jorge, ref1 Committee of Union and Progress (‘Young Turks’), ref1 Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM), ref1, ref2 Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL), ref1 Compañía Vapores del Sur de España, ref1 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, ref1 concentration camps, ref1, ref2 (see also anti-Semitism; Nazi Germany) Conference of Algeciras, ref1 Congress of Berlin, ref1 Cook, Thomas, ref1 Copenhagen–Oslo journey, ref1 Corinth Canal, ref1 corkscrew tracks, ref1, ref2 Credit Mobilier, ref1 Credit Suisse, ref1 Cresta Run, ref1, ref2 Crimean War, ref1 Cuypers, Petrus J.


pages: 235 words: 73,873

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

The air of tension outside echoed the mood of the talks taking place inside the house. Macmillan wanted to talk about UK entry to the European Economic Community (EEC), but de Gaulle was more preoccupied with the situation in Berlin where the Russians had closed the border and begun work on the Berlin Wall that August; there was no agreement on a concerted Anglo-French response and Macmillan described the talks on Europe as ‘equally unproductive’. • • • By 1961, Macmillan and de Gaulle had known each other for more than twenty years. After an initial meeting in London in 1940, the two met again in Algiers in 1943; de Gaulle having moved his La France Libre headquarters there from London and Macmillan having been appointed by Churchill as his Minister Resident in the Mediterranean, with full Cabinet rank.

As Margaret Thatcher said in her Bruges speech, ‘the European Community is one manifestation of Europe’s identity but not the only one’. Europe in the 1980s was much more about forcing the withdrawal of the Soviet intermediate nuclear missiles that threatened Europe’s security. It was about bringing the Cold War to an end and liberating East and central Europe from Communism. It was about bringing down the Berlin Wall and reuniting Germany. In strategic and global terms, these achievements were of greater significance for the future of the Continent than developments in the EC, which itself played only a peripheral role in them. In judging the performance of British Prime Ministers in Europe, one has to keep in mind the relative importance of the EC in that wider context.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

That will require them to evolve. Low-density sprawl, which trades connection for privacy, is one-half of that challenge. The other is the rising inequality – both within and between cities – that has led the rich and the poor to inhabit largely separate worlds. The World is Not Flat The years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global financial crisis were days of heady excitement over globalization. A wave of trade deals, capped off in 2001 by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, integrated the world’s major economies. Many poor countries appeared to finally be catching up economically on the back of increased trade and soaring demand for their commodities.

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

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

The totalitarian era is passing.’’35 114 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT Within six months of taking the oath of office, the Soviet Union began to unwind and communism worldwide began to collapse. Lech Wałesa led Solidarity’s triumph in Poland in June. Hungary’s decision to open its border with Austria in the summer led to East Germans leaving in droves. Just one year earlier, Erich Honecker, the leader of Communist East Germany, stated that the Berlin Wall would be standing for another ‘‘fifty or even one-hundred years.’’36 Few questioned his statement, but on November 9, 1989, jubilant Germans surged to the wall. ‘‘We are trying to read very cautiously and carefully the change in East Germany,’’ said the new president, but Chancellor Kohl was more emphatic.

The approval ratings for the president began to turn down, and they portended a bitter harvest in the fall. 8 Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow In the new decade, streams of past history began to merge. The world was very different in 1991 from what it had been just four years earlier. In a sense, George Bush had spent the political capital accumulated by Ronald Reagan. The Berlin Wall was gone. Americans and Russians were busy destroying their intercontinental missiles, instead of aiming them at each other. The two old rivals were even cooperating in space travel and trade. Eastern Europe was independent; the Soviet Union was no more, and Germany was united for the first time since 1945.

., 27, 29, 31 Arafat, Yasir, 155–56 arms-for-hostages deals, 90–91 arms race, 125 Atwater, Lee, 105, 111, 139 ‘‘Baby Jessica’’ McClure, rescue, 76 Baghdad, 124, 131–35, 138, 229–31 Barone, Michael, 27, 83 BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), 154, 177, 179 Beckwith, ‘‘Chargin’’ Charlie, Colonel, 11 Beirut. See Lebanon Bergen-Belsen, 88 Berlin Wall, 114, 141 bin Laden, Osama, 214–15, 219–23, 226 Bitburg fiasco, 87–88, 92 Black Monday, 63–64 Boesky, Ivan, 67–68 boll weevils, 36, 47, 79 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 66 Bork, Robert, 104–5 Bosnia, 189–91 Brady Gun Law, 202 Branch Davidians, 154–55, 177 Brawley, Tawana, court case, 75 Bremer, Paul, U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, 231, 242 Brown, Edmund G.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Some rare good news in gloom-laden Britain, mid-1946 (© The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images) 30. A postcard to mark the first anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp (© Interfoto / Friedrich / Mary Evans) Maps Introduction As a journalist, I have covered events ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union to the cycle of violence and counter-violence in the Middle East over the existence of Israel and Palestine. Throughout, America has dominated as the world’s superpower. During many visits to India I have seen a desperately poor country, stuck in the past, transform itself into a vibrant society, looking to the future.

But there was a heavy price to pay for this largesse. Nobody knows for certain how many German women were raped by Soviet troops in the immediate euphoria of victory. It was seldom mentioned in Germany until decades afterwards; certainly not in Eastern Germany, where the subject was completely taboo until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the spring of 1946 between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ were born in the Soviet zone, the vast majority of whom were brought up as orphans. Of all children born in Berlin between January and April, it is estimated that one in six were fathered by Russians. The number aborted was far higher – according to some medical opinion, between five and eight times higher.

In the Berlin municipal elections five months later, the SDP campaigned separately from the SED. The Social Democrats obtained 43 per cent of the vote in the city and won 63 of the 130 seats. The new ‘unified’ Party was humiliated, winning only 19 per cent of the vote and 26 seats. It would be the last free election in Eastern Germany until after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet empire collapsed. Stalin, the supreme cynic, now had another merger in mind. This shocked even Ulbricht and other senior German communists. The Soviet leader wanted to co-opt Nazis and ‘collaborators with the Hitler regime to support the communists and to operate within the same bloc as the SED’.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

And even if growth is sustained, most of its people may find themselves worse off. The debate about economic globalization is mixed with debates about economic theory and values. A quarter century ago, three major schools of economic thought competed with each other—free market capitalism, communism, and the managed market economy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, the three were reduced to two, and the argument today is largely between those who push free market ideology and those who see an important role for both government and the private sector. Of course, these positions overlap. Even free market advocates recognize that one of the problems in Africa is the lack of government.

Countries in transition from communism Just as the successes of East Asia are far greater than even the impressive GDP statistics suggest, the failures of Russia and most of the other countries making the transition from communism to capitalism were far deeper than GDP statistics alone show. Decreases in life expectancy—in Russia it fell by a stunning four years between 1990 and 2000—confirmed the impression of increasing destitution.12 (Elsewhere in the world, life expectancy was rising.) Crime and lawlessness were rampant. After the Berlin Wall fell, there was hope of democracy and economic prosperity throughout the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. Advisers from the West rushed to Eastern Europe to guide those countries through their transitions. Many believed, mistakenly, that “shock therapy” was needed—that the transition to Western-style capitalism should take place overnight through rapid privatization and liberalization.

(China, in spite of its progress toward a market economy, is still treated as a nonmarket economy.) 55 In the case of nonmarket economies, the costs used to calculate whether goods are being dumped are not the actual costs, but what the costs would be in some surrogate country. Those seeking to make a dumping charge stick look for a country where costs will be high, so that high dumping duties can be levied. In one classic case, in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States levied dumping duties against Polish golf carts, using Canada as the surrogate country. Costs in Canada were so high that Canada did not produce golf carts, so dumping duties were levied on the basis of a calculation of what it would have cost Canada to produce golf carts, if Canada were to have produced them.


pages: 556 words: 141,069

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

For a decade, there had been calls for a post–Cold War downsizing of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex, and an international groundswell for nuclear nonproliferation was under way. Government inspectors, DOE and DOD officials, and nuclear experts agreed that both national labs were twice as big as they should be. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, and international calls for nuclear disarmament “sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis,” as one journalist put it. “What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies?”

An outgrowth of the People for Peace movement—and in response to the 1991 Gulf War—LASG grew from an informal association of peace activists, ministers, and political progressives to a formalized organization providing technical consultation to a coalition of over a hundred loosely allied citizen nuclear groups in New Mexico, California, and Washington, DC. “Our idea was that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility [following a raid by the FBI for environmental crimes], we could have citizen-influenced change in Los Alamos. I felt that the institutional configurations of the Cold War of my entire life could finally become unstuck.” By 1997, LASG had become a nonprofit entity funded by small local foundation grants and private donors, with Mello its full-time executive director and primary financial contributor.

., 134 Bechtel Power Corporation, 114, 134 Bechtel workforce CIA agents in, as cover, 76, 78 Colley’s murder in Iraq and, 77, 192 on Dad Bechtel’s railroad projects in California, 25 deaths on Libyan pipeline projects and, 94 as hostages in Iraq, after US invasion, 201–02 Hoover Dam construction and, 35, 42, 317 Jewish workers excluded from, 61, 124–25 on Jubail new city project, Saudi Arabia, 123 Philippines as source of, 123 in Saudi Arabia, 61–62 Steve Jr.’s antilabor stance on, 87 Belgian Relief, 55 Belgium, 121 Benedict, Kennette, 255, 258 ben Halim, Mustafa, 94 Berger, Jeff, 223 Berlin Wall, 257, 269 Berrigan, Frida, 257, 259–60 Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, 294–95 Biden, Joe, 139, 301 Bin Laden Construction, 58, 59 bin Laden family, 219–20 Bird, Kai, 70 Black Canyon, 28, 31, 35, 37, 39–40 Blackwater, 4 Blitzer, Wolf, 174, 178 Boeing Company, 122 Bohemian Grove, California, 88–89, 100, 117, 184, 224 Bechtel family’s Mandalay Lodge at, 88, 89, 97, 105, 114 Bolivia, 98, 222–23 Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project (“Big Dig”), 9, 206–08, 222, 233–24, 310 Boston Globe, 66, 207, 222, 310 Boston Phoenix (newspaper), 208 Boulder Canyon Project Act, 32–33 Boulder City, Nevada, 38, 40, 41, 318 Boulder Dam.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

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

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

Yet (in its own unparaphrasable words), “as huge as our world of Coca-Cola is today, it is just a tiny sliver of the world we can create.”30 Coke has had global ambitions for a long time.31 But nowadays an ambitious company cannot simply capture global consumer markets by aping their ideologies and accommodating their tastes: it must also be prepared to create global markets by careful planning and control. The new technologies are more powerful than the old, and Coke has now manufactured its own soft-drink ideology that assimilates the ideals of the Olympics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Rutgers University into a theme-park ideal existence for Coke drinkers. McWorld’s innovative virtual industries generate virtual need factories (advertising agencies, corporate public relations and communications divisions, business foundations) where emotions are identified and manipulated with images that forge new wants.32 Now thirst cannot be manufactured but taste can.

German enragees are often if not always unemployed or underemployed in lower-paying jobs, often if not always young people with little education and few prospects, often if not always Ossi’s or Easterners from the old German Democratic Republic, deprived overnight both of jobs and the social safety nets that might cushion their joblessness.23 They would perhaps join McWorld if they could, and they are happy enough to use its instrumentalities (whether these take the form of British fashion statements, commercially rewarding rock bands, or Internet bulletin boards like The Thule Network) as weapons in their struggle.24 In a sense, the German neo-fascists are a counterreaction to reunification that filled the void when the primary anti-Communist revolution failed. Had the indigenous political movements that helped bring down first the iron curtain and then the Berlin Wall survived the traumatic passage to German reunification and been even a little successful in the West-dominated elections that came soon afterwards, Ossi extremism might have been averted. But the citizens’ movement that constituted itself as Neues Forum (New Forum) and the intellectuals and workers who had sought a “third way,” some version of civil society between state-coercive communism and private market capitalism, drown in what we might call liberty’s second wave.25 Privatization quickly displaced democratization on the German agenda, which for East Germans meant that the price they had to pay for individual liberty was a total loss of regional autonomy.

As Mark Pendergrast tells the story in his For God, Country and Coca-Cola (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), Coke has been doing whatever it takes to penetrate markets ever since accommodating the Nazis (who were claiming Coke was a Jewish-American company because it sold Kosher-stamped bottles) by passing out samples at Hitler Youth rallies, and accommodating Stalin by decaramelizing “White Coke” and shipping fifty cases in clear bottles with red-star-embossed white caps for his approval. Coke was also there recently when the Berlin Wall came down, handing out six-packs. Pendergrast sums it up unsentimentally: “In World War II, Coke was an American imperialist symbol, a kosher food, a fake Communist beverage and the drink of Hitler Youth. Most people thought the war was about good, evil, competing ideologies and so on, but for Coca-Cola the issue was simpler: more Coke or less Coke.”


pages: 572 words: 134,335

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

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

Van Buren Cleveland when he wrote that ‘the MLF made sense in terms of American interests precisely because it was not a step toward the sharing of nuclear control, but rather a way of channelling Europe’s — and especially Germany’s — nuclear interests and energies away from the development of independent nuclear forces.’86 The American aim was to reconstruct a world configuration of forces in which the United States again commanded a central, mediating position and as far as the attitude towards a military role for Germany was concerned, there was even the hint of a reemergence of the wartime coalition between the Soviet Union and the United States, spurred on by German nuclear ambitions. In an Izvestia interview, Kennedy declared his opposition to a West German nuclear capability, and his refusal to allow a military reaction to the construction of the Berlin Wall likewise reflected a determination not to activate German militarism. Comparing the new American attitude with the policies of the previous period still adhered to by men like Adenauer, Kennedy’s National Security Assistant, McGeorge Bundy, claimed that ‘among the allies …, we are the moderates’.87 The first partner the United States turned to in the new Atlantic offensive was Great Britain.

From 1960 on, when the SPD overtly attuned its policy to the NATO line, there was a marked improvement of relations between the AFL-CIO and the SPD which extended to relations with the DGB. This amelioration of the Atlantic climate at the labour level was further enhanced by the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.14 In 1961, however, Brandt, then Mayor of West Berlin and SPD candidate for the Chancellorship, made clear that his Atlantic allegiance went beyond military-strategic dependence; Atlantic integration for him represented a potential for developing the productive forces and the long-term stability of a humanized capitalist order.

Der Spiegel’s role in the reaffirmation of the Atlantic alliance and liberal democracy, moreover, cost it the advertising accounts of the traditionally continentalist Hoechst chemical concern and of the Bosch electrical engineering company.54 In the course of 1963, Kennedy’s appearance at the Berlin Wall, which underlined the American guarantee, reinforced the Atlanticists’ position. In October, Erhard succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor. Although Adenauer as chairman of the CDU continued to attack the liberal Atlantic turn, and Schroder in particular (whom he reproached for spoiling the relation with France by dropping the demand for a reorganization of NATO);55 the trend towards renewed acceptance of Atlantic integration was not reversed.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

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

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

In the following decades, dominated by the Cold War, various other Western European countries joined the EEC. Step by step, restrictions were eased on work, travel, and trade between the expanding list of EEC countries. But it was not until the end of the Cold War that European integration really gained steam. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showed that the time for much closer, stronger European bonds had grown near. The hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future were higher than ever, among both leaders and citizens. This led to the signing, in 1992, of the Maastricht Treaty, which formally established the European Union and created much of its economic structure and institutions—including setting in motion the process of adopting a common currency, which would come to be known as the euro.

Then, through heavy investments in education, it grew to the point that by 2007 its per capita income was $42,300, or 93 percent of that of the United States. But then a series of problems befell the country: in the fast-changing world of hi-tech, its leading company, Nokia, lost out to competitors. Finland had close ties with Estonia, which was badly hit by the 2008 crisis. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Finland had profited by strong trade with Russia. But sanctions with that country hurt Finland as well as Russia, which also suffered from the decline in oil and gas prices. Finland’s GDP shrank by 8.3 percent in 2009, and in 2015 it was still some 5.5 percent below its 2008 peak. In the absence of the euro, Finland’s exchange rate would have fallen, and the decrease in imports and increase in exports would have stimulated the economy.

Africa, 10, 95, 381 globalization and, 51 aggregate demand, 98, 107, 111, 118–19, 189, 367 deflation and, 290 lowered by inequality, 212 surpluses and, 187, 253 tech bubble slump in, 250 as weakened by imports, 111 aggregate supply, 99, 104, 189 agricultural subsidies, 45, 197 agriculture, 89, 224, 346 airlines, 259 Akerlof, George, 132 American Express, 287 Apple, 81, 376 Argentina, 18, 100, 110, 117, 371 bailout of, 113 debt restructuring by, 205–6, 266, 267 Arrow-Debreu competitive equilibrium theory, 303 Asia, globalization and, 51 asset price bubbles, 172 Athens airport, 191, 367–68 austerity, xvi–xvii, 9, 18–19, 20, 21, 28–29, 54, 69–70, 95, 96, 98, 97, 103, 106, 140, 150, 178, 185–88, 206, 211, 235, 316–17 academics for, 208–13 debt restructuring and, 203–6 design of programs of, 188–90 Germany’s push for, 186, 232 government investment curtailed by, 217 opposition to, 59–62, 69–70, 207–8, 315, 332, 392 private, 126–27, 241–42 reform of, 263–65 Austria, 331, 343 automatic destabilizers, see built-in destabilizers automatic stabilizers, 142, 244, 247–48, 357 flexible exchange rate as, 248 bail-ins, 113 bailouts, 91–92, 111, 112–13, 201–3, 354, 362–63, 370 of banks, 127–28, 196, 279, 362–63 of East Asia, 202 of Latin America, 202 of Mexico, 202 of Portugal, 178–79 of Spanish banks, 179, 199–200, 206 see also programs balanced-budget multiplier, 188–90, 265 Balkans, 320 bank capital, 284–85 banking system, in US, 91 banking union, 129–30, 241–42, 248, 263 and common regulations, 241 and deposit insurance, 241, 242, 246 Bank of England, 359 inflation target of, 157 Bank of Italy, 158 bankruptcies, 77, 94, 102, 104, 346, 390 super–chapter 11 for, 259–60 banks, 198–201 bailouts of, 127–28, 196, 279, 362–63 capital requirements of, 152, 249 closing of, 378 credit creation by, 280–82 development, 137–38 evolution of, 386–87 forbearance of regulations on, 130–31 Greek, 200–201, 228–29, 231, 270, 276, 367, 368 lending contracted by, 126–27, 246, 282–84 money supply increased by, 277 restructuring of, 113 small, 171 in Spain, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 too-big-to-fail, 360 bank transfers, 49 Barclays, 131 behavioral economics, 335 Belgium, 6, 331, 343 belief systems, 53 Berlin Wall, 6 Bernanke, Ben, 251, 351, 363, 381 bilateral investment agreement, 369 Bill of Rights, 319 bimetallic standard, 275, 277 Blanchard, Olivier, 211 bonds, 4, 114, 150, 363 confidence in, 127, 145 Draghi’s promise to support, 127, 200, 201 GDP-indexed, 267 inflation and, 161 long-term, 94 restructuring of, 159 bonds, corporate, ECB’s purchase of, 141 borrowing, excessive, 243 Brazil, 138, 370 bailout of, 113 bread, 218, 230 Bretton Woods monetary system, 32, 325 Brunnermeier, Markus K., 361 Bryan, William Jennings, xii bubbles, 249, 381 credit, 122–123 real estate, see real estate bubble stability threatened by, 264 stock market, 200–201 tech, 250 tools for controlling, 250 budget, capital, 245 Buffett, Warren, 287, 290 built-in destabilizers, 96, 142, 188, 244, 248, 357–58 common regulatory framework as, 241 Bulgaria, 46, 331 Bundesbank, 42 Bush, George W., 266 Camdessus, Michel, 314 campaign contributions, 195, 355 Canada, 96 early 1990s expansion of, 209 in NAFTA, xiv railroad privatization in, 55 tax system in, 191 US’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 capital, 76–77 bank, 284–85 human, 78, 137 return to, 388 societal vs. physical, 77–78 tax on, 356 unemployment increased by, 264 capital adequacy standards, 152 capital budget, 245 capital controls, 389–90 capital flight, 126–34, 217, 354, 359 austerity and, 140 and labor flows, 135 capital flows, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27–28, 40, 116, 125, 128, 131, 351 economic volatility exacerbated by, 28, 274 and foreign ownership, 195 and technology, 139 capital inflows, 110–11 capitalism: crises in, xviii, 148–49 inclusive, 317 capital requirements, 152, 249, 378 Caprio, Gerry, 387 capture, 158–60 carbon price, 230, 260, 265, 368 cash, 39 cash flow, 194 Catalonia, xi CDU party, 314 central banks, 59, 354, 387–88 balance sheets of, 386 capture of, 158–59 credit auctions by, 282–84 credit creation by, 277–78 expertise of, 363 independence of, 157–63 inequality created by, 154 inflation and, 153, 166–67 as lender of last resort, 85, 362 as political institutions, 160–62 regulations and, 153 stability and, 8 unemployment and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147, 153 CEO compensation, 383 Chapter 11, 259–60, 291 childhood poverty, 72 Chile, 55, 152–53 China, 81, 98, 164, 319, 352 exchange-rate policy of, 251, 254, 350–51 global integration of, 49–50 low prices of, 251 rise of, 75 savings in, 257 trade surplus of, 118, 121, 350–52 wages controlled in, 254 as world’s largest economy, 318, 327 chits, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–389 Citigroup, 355 climate change, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 Clinton, Bill, xiv, xv, 187 closing hours, 220 cloves, 230 cognitive capture, 159 Cohesion Fund, 243 Cold War, 6 collateral, 364 collective action, 41–44, 51–52 and inequality, 338 and stabilization, 246 collective bargaining, 221 collective goods, 40 Common Agricultural Policy, 338 common regulatory framework, 241 communism, 10 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 360, 382 comparative advantage, 12, 171 competition, 12 competitive devaluation, 104–6, 254 compromise, 22–23 confidence, 95, 200–201, 384 in banks, 127 in bonds, 145 and structural reforms, 232 and 2008 crisis, 280 confirmation bias, 309, 335 Congress, US, 319, 355 connected lending, 280 connectedness, 68–69 Connecticut, GDP of, 92 Constitutional Court, Greek, 198 consumption, 94, 278 consumption tax, 193–94 contract enforcement, 24 convergence, 13, 92–93, 124, 125, 139, 254, 300–301 convergence criteria, 15, 87, 89, 96–97, 99, 123, 244 copper mines, 55 corporate income tax, 189–90, 227 corporate taxes, 189–90, 227, 251 corporations, 323 regulations opposed by, xvi and shutdown of Greek banks, 229 corruption, 74, 112 privatization and, 194–95 Costa, António, 332 Council of Economic Advisers, 358 Council of State, Greek, 198 countercyclical fiscal policy, 244 counterfactuals, 80 Countrywide Financial, 91 credit, 276–85 “divorce”’s effect on, 278–79 excessive, 250, 274 credit auctions, 282–84 credit bubbles, 122–123 credit cards, 39, 49, 153 credit creation, 248–50, 277–78, 386 by banks, 280–82 domestic control over, 279–82 regulation of, 277–78 credit default swaps (CDSs), 159–60 crisis policy reforms, 262–67 austerity to growth, 263–65 debt restructuring and, 265–67 Croatia, 46, 331, 338 currency crises, 349 currency pegs, xii current account, 333–34 current account deficits, 19, 88, 108, 110, 120–121, 221, 294 and exit from euro, 273, 285–89 see also trade deficit Cyprus, 16, 30, 140, 177, 331, 386 capital controls in, 390 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 “haircut” of, 350, 367 Czech Republic, 46, 331 debit cards, 39, 49 debtors’ prison, 204 debt restructuring, 201, 203–6, 265–67, 290–92, 372, 390 of private debt, 291 debts, xx, 15, 93, 96, 183 corporate, 93–94 crisis in, 110–18 in deflation, xii and exit from eurozone, 273 with foreign currency, 115–18 household, 93–94 increase in, 18 inherited, 134 limits of, 42, 87, 122, 141, 346, 367 monetization of, 42 mutualization of, 242–43, 263 place-based, 134, 242 reprofiling of, 32 restructuring of, 259 debt-to-GDP ratio, 202, 210–11, 231, 266, 324 Declaration of Independence, 319 defaults, 102, 241, 338, 348 and debt mutualization, 243 deficit fetishism, 96 deficits, fiscal, xx, 15, 20, 93, 96, 106, 107–8, 122, 182, 384 and balanced-budget multiplier, 188–90, 265 constitutional amendment on, 339 and exit from euro, 273, 289–90 in Greece, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 limit of, 42, 87, 94–95, 122, 138, 141, 186, 243, 244, 265, 346, 367 primary, 188 problems financing, 110–12 structural, 245 deficits, trade, see trade deficits deflation, xii, 147, 148, 151, 166, 169, 277, 290 Delors, Jacques, 7, 332 democracy, lack of faith in, 312–14 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), xiii democratic deficit, 26–27, 35, 57–62, 145 democratic participation, xix Denmark, 45, 307, 313, 331 euro referendum of, 58 deposit insurance, 31, 44, 129, 199, 301, 354–55, 386–87 common in eurozone, 241, 242, 246, 248 derivatives, 131, 355 Deutsche Bank, 283, 355 devaluation, 98, 104–6, 254, 344 see also internal devaluation developing countries, and Washington Consensus, xvi discretion, 262–63 discriminatory lending practices, 283 disintermediation, 258 divergence, 15, 123, 124–44, 255–56, 300, 321 in absence of crisis, 128–31 capital flight and, 126–34 crisis policies’ exacerbation of, 140–43 free mobility of labor and, 134–36, 142–44, 242 in public investment, 136–38 reforms to prevent, 243 single-market principle and, 125–26 in technology, 138–39 in wealth, 139–40 see also capital flows; labor movement diversification, of production, 47 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 355 dollar peg, 50 downsizing, 133 Draghi, Mario, 127, 145, 156, 158, 165, 269, 363 bond market supported by, 127, 200, 201 Drago, Luis María, 371 drug prices, 219 Duisenberg, Willem Frederik “Wim,” 251 Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium model, 331 East Asia, 18, 25, 95, 102–3, 112, 123, 202, 364, 381 convergence in, 138 Eastern Europe, 10 Economic Adjustment Programme, 178 economic distortions, 191 economic growth, xii, 34 confidence and, 232 in Europe, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 lowered by inequality, 212–13 reform of, 263–65 and structural reforms, 232–35 economic integration, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50 euro and, 46–47 political integration vs., 51–57 single currency and, 45–46 economic rents, 226, 280 economics, politics and, 308–18 economic security, 68 economies of scale, 12, 39, 55, 138 economists, poor forecasting by, 307 education, 20, 76, 344 investment in, 40, 69, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 electricity, 217 electronic currency, 298–99, 389 electronics payment mechanism, 274–76, 283–84 emigration, 4, 68–69 see also migration employment: central banks and, 8, 94, 97 structural reforms and, 257–60 see also unemployment Employment Act (1946), 148 energy subsidies, 197 Enlightenment, 3, 318–19 environment, 41, 257, 260, 323 equality, 225–26 equilibrium, xviii–xix Erasmus program, 45 Estonia, 90, 331, 346 euro, xiv, 325 adjustments impeded by, 13–14 case for, 35–39 creation of, xii, 5–6, 7, 10, 333 creation of institutions required by, 10–11 divergence and, see divergence divorce of, 272–95, 307 economic integration and, 46–47, 268 as entailing fixed exchange rate, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 143, 193, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 as entailing single interest rate, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 and European identification, 38–39 financial instability caused by, 131–32 growth promised by, 235 growth slowed by, 73 hopes for, 34 inequality increased by, xviii interest rates lowered by, 235 internal devaluation of, see internal devaluation literature on, 327–28 as means to end, xix peace and, 38 proponents of, 13 referenda on, 58, 339–40 reforms needed for, xii–xiii, 28–31 risk of, 49–50 weakness of, 224 see also flexible euro Eurobond, 356 euro crisis, xiii, 3, 4, 9 catastrophic consequences of, 11–12 euro-euphoria, 116–17 Europe, 151 free trade area in, 44–45 growth rates in, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 military conflicts in, 196 social models of, 21 European Central Bank (ECB), 7, 17, 80, 112–13, 117, 144, 145–73, 274, 313, 362, 368, 380 capture of, 158–59 confidence in, 200–201 corporate bonds bought by, 141 creation of, 8, 85 democratic deficit and, 26, 27 excessive expansion controlled by, 250 flexibility of, 269 funds to Greece cut off by, 59 German challenges to, 117, 164 governance and, 157–63 inequality created by, 154–55 inflation controlled by, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 250, 256, 266 interest rates set by, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 Ireland forced to socialize losses by, 134, 156, 165 new mandate needed by, 256 as political institution, 160–62 political nature of, 153–56 quantitative easing opposed by, 151 quantitative easing undertaken by, 164, 165–66, 170, 171 regulations by, 249, 250 unemployment and, 163 as unrepresentative, 163 European Commission, 17, 58, 161, 313, 332 European Court of Human Rights, 45 European Economic Community (EEC), 6 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 30, 335 European Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), 336 European Free Trade Association, 44 European Free Trade Association Court, 44 European Investment Bank (EIB), 137, 247, 255, 301 European Regional Development Fund, 243 European Stability Mechanism, 23, 246, 357 European Union: budget of, 8, 45, 91 creation of, 4 debt and deficit limits in, 87–88 democratic deficit in, 26–27 economic growth in, 215 GDP of, xiii and lower rates of war, 196 migration in, 90 proposed exit of UK from, 4 stereotypes in, 12 subsidiarity in, 8, 41–42, 263 taxes in, 8, 261 Euro Summit Statement, 373 eurozone: austerity in, see austerity banking union in, see banking union counterfactual in, 235–36 double-dip recessions in, 234–35 Draghi’s speech and, 145 economic integration and, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50, 51–57 as flawed at birth, 7–9 framework for stability of, 244–52 German departure from, 32, 292–93 Greece’s possible exit from, 124 hours worked in, 71–72 lack of fiscal policy in, 152 and move to political integration, xvi, 34, 35, 51–57 Mundell’s work on dangers of, 87 policies of, 15–17 possible breakup of, 29–30 privatization avoided in, 194 saving, 323–26 stagnant GDP in, 12, 65–68, 66, 67 structure of, 8–9 surpluses in, 120–22 theory of, 95–97 unemployment in, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 working-age population of, 70 eurozone, proposed structural reforms for, 239–71 common financial system, see banking union excessive fiscal responsibility, 163 exchange-rate risks, 13, 47, 48, 49–50, 125, 235 exchange rates, 80, 85, 288, 300, 338, 382, 389 of China, 251, 254, 350–51 and competitive devaluation, 105–6 after departure of northern countries, 292–93 of euro, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 flexible, 50, 248, 349 and full employment, 94 of Germany, 254–55, 351 gold and, 344–45 imports and, 86 interest rates and, 86 quantitative easing’s lowering of, 151 real, 105–6 and single currencies, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 stabilizing, 299–301 and trade deficits, 107, 118 expansionary contractions, 95–96, 208–9 exports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98 disappointing performance of, 103–5 external imbalances, 97–98, 101, 109 externalities, 42–43, 121, 153, 301–2 surpluses as, 253 extremism, xx, 4 Fannie Mae, 91 farmers, US, in deflation, xii Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 91 Federal Reserve, US, 349 alleged independence of, 157 interest rates lowered by, 150 mandate of, 8, 147, 172 money pumped into economy by, 278 quantitative easing used by, 151, 170 reform of, 146 fiat currency, 148, 275 and taxes, 284 financial markets: lobbyists from, 132 reform of, 214, 228–29 short-sighted, 112–13 financial systems: necessity of, xix real economy of, 149 reform of, 257–58 regulations needed by, xix financial transaction system, 275–76 Finland, 16, 81, 122, 126, 292, 296, 331, 343 growth in, 296–97 growth rate of, 75, 76, 234–35 fire departments, 41 firms, 138, 186–87, 245, 248 fiscal balance: and cutting spending, 196–98 tax revenue and, 190–96 Fiscal Compact, 141, 357 fiscal consolidation, 310 fiscal deficits, see deficits, fiscal fiscal policy, 148, 245, 264 in center of macro-stabilization, 251 countercyclical, 244 in EU, 8 expansionary, 254–55 stabilization of, 250–52 fiscal prudence, 15 fiscal responsibility, 163 flexibility, 262–63, 269 flexible euro, 30–31, 272, 296–305, 307 cooperation needed for, 304–5 food prices, 169 forbearance, 130–31 forecasts, 307 foreclosure proposal, 180 foreign ownership, privatization and, 195 forestry, 81 France, 6, 14, 16, 114, 120, 141, 181–82, 331, 339–40, 343 banks of, 202, 203, 231, 373 corporate income tax in, 189–90 euro creation regretted in, 340 European Constitution referendum of, 58 extreme right in, xi growth in, 247 Freddie Mac, 91 Freefall (Stiglitz), 264, 335 free mobility of labor, xiv, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 142–44, 242 Friedman, Milton, 151, 152–53, 167, 339 full employment, 94–97, 379 G-20, 121 gas: import of, 230 from Russia, 37, 81, 93 Gates Foundation, 276 GDP-indexed bonds, 267 German bonds, 114, 323 German Council of Economic Experts, 179, 365 Germany, xxi, 14, 30, 65, 108, 114, 141, 181–82, 207, 220, 286, 307, 331, 343, 346, 374 austerity pushed by, 186, 232 banks of, 202, 203, 231–32, 373 costs to taxpayers of, 184 as creditor, 140, 187, 267 debt collection by, 117 debt in, 105 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 in departure from eurozone, 32, 292–93 as dependent on Russian gas, 37 desire to leave eurozone, 314 ECB criticized by, 164 EU economic practices controlled by, 17 euro creation regretted in, 340 exchange rate of, 254–55, 351 failure of, 13, 78–79 flexible exchange of, 304 GDP of, xviii, 92 in Great Depression, 187 growing poverty in, 79 growth of, 78, 106, 247 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 79, 333 inflation in, 42, 338, 358 internal solidarity of, 334 lack of alternative to euro seen by, 11 migrants to, 320–21, 334–35, 393 minimum wage in, 42, 120, 254 neoliberalism in, 10 and place-based debt, 136 productivity in, 71 programs designed by, 53, 60, 61, 202, 336, 338 reparations paid by, 187 reunification of, 6 rules as important to, 57, 241–42, 262 share of global employment in, 224 shrinking working-age population of, 70, 78–79 and Stability and Growth Pact, 245 and structural reforms, 19–20 “there is no alternative” and, 306, 311–12 trade surplus of, 117, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 “transfer union” rejected by, 22 US loans to, 187 victims blamed by, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309 wages constrained by, 41, 42–43 wages lowered in, 105, 333 global financial crisis, xi, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 17, 24, 67, 73, 75, 114, 124, 146, 148, 274, 364, 387 and central bank independence, 157–58 and confidence, 280 and cost of failure of financial institutions, 131 lessons of, 249 monetary policy in, 151 and need for structural reform, 214 originating in US, 65, 68, 79–80, 112, 128, 296, 302 globalization, 51, 321–23 and diminishing share of employment in advanced countries, 224 economic vs. political, xvii failures of, xvii Globalization and Its Discontents (Stig-litz), 234, 335, 369 global savings glut, 257 global secular stagnation, 120 global warming, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 gold, 257, 275, 277, 345 Goldman Sachs, 158, 366 gold standard, 148, 291, 347, 358 in Great Depression, xii, 100 goods: free movement of, 40, 143, 260–61 nontraded, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 traded, 102, 103, 216 Gordon, Robert, 251 governance, 157–63, 258–59 government spending, trade deficits and, 107–8 gravity principle, 124, 127–28 Great Depression, 42, 67, 105, 148, 149, 168, 313 Friedman on causes of, 151 gold standard in, xii, 100 Great Malaise, 264 Greece, 14, 30, 41, 64, 81, 100, 117, 123, 142, 160, 177, 265–66, 278, 307, 331, 343, 366, 367–68, 374–75, 386 austerity opposed by, 59, 60–62, 69–70, 207–8, 392 balance of payments, 219 banks in, 200–201, 228–29, 231, 270, 276, 367, 368 blaming of, 16, 17 bread in, 218, 230 capital controls in, 390 consumption tax and, 193–94 counterfactual scenario of, 80 current account surplus of, 287–88 and debt restructuring, 205–7 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 debt write-offs in, 291 decline in labor costs in, 56, 103 ECB’s cutting of funds to, 59 economic growth in, 215, 247 emigration from, 68–69 fiscal deficits in, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 GDP of, xviii, 183, 309 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 72 inherited debt in, 134 lack of faith in democracy in, 312–13 living standards in, 216 loans in, 127 loans to, 310 migrants and, 320–21 milk in, 218, 223, 230 new currency in, 291, 300 oligarchs in, 16, 227 output per working-age person in, 70–71 past downturns in, 235–36 pensions in, 16, 78, 188, 197–98, 226 pharmacies in, 218–20 population decline in, 69, 89 possible exit from eurozone of, 124, 197, 273, 274, 275 poverty in, 226, 261, 376 primary surplus of, 187–88, 312 privatization in, 55, 195–96 productivity in, 71, 342 programs imposed on, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 renewable energy in, 193, 229 social capital destroyed in, 78 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 and structural reforms, 20, 70, 188, 191 tax revenue in, 16, 142, 192, 227, 367–368 tools lacking for recovery of, 246 tourism in, 192, 286 trade deficits in, 81, 194, 216–17, 222, 285–86 unemployment in, xi, 71, 236, 267, 332, 338, 342 urgency in, 214–15 victim-blaming of, 309–11 wages in, 216–17 youth unemployment in, xi, 332 Greek bonds, 116, 126 interest rates on, 4, 114, 181–82, 201–2, 323 restructuring of, 206–7 green investments, 260 Greenspan, Alan, 251, 359, 363 Grexit, see Greece, possible exit from eurozone of grocery stores, 219 gross domestic product (GDP), xvii decline in, 3 measurement of, 341 Growth and Stability Pact, 87 hedge funds, 282, 363 highways, 41 Hitler, Adolf, 338, 358 Hochtief, 367–68 Hoover, Herbert, 18, 95 human capital, 78, 137 human rights, 44–45, 319 Hungary, 46, 331, 338 hysteresis, 270 Iceland, 44, 111, 307, 354–55 banks in, 91 capital controls in, 390 ideology, 308–9, 315–18 imports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98, 107 incentives, 158–59 inclusive capitalism, 317 income, unemployment and, 77 income tax, 45 Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, 376–377 Indonesia, 113, 230–31, 314, 350, 364, 378 industrial policies, 138–39, 301 and restructuring, 217, 221, 223–25 Industrial Revolution, 3, 224 industry, 89 inequality, 45, 72–73, 333 aggregate demand lowered by, 212 created by central banks, 154 ECB’s creation of, 154–55 economic performance affected by, xvii euro’s increasing of, xviii growth’s lowering of, 212 hurt by collective action, 338 increased by neoliberalism, xviii increase in, 64, 154–55 inequality in, 72, 212 as moral issue, xviii in Spain, 72, 212, 225–26 and tax harmonization, 260–61 and tax system, 191 inflation, 277, 290, 314, 388 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 bonds and, 161 central banks and, 153, 166–67 consequences of fixation on, 149–50, 151 costs of, 270 and debt monetization, 42 ECB and, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 255, 256, 266 and food prices, 169 in Germany, 42, 338, 358 interest rates and, 43–44 in late 1970s, 168 and natural rate hypothesis, 172–73 political decisions and, 146 inflation targeting, 157, 168–70, 364 information, 335 informational capital, 77 infrastructure, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 inheritance tax, 368 inherited debt, 134 innovation, 138 innovation economy, 317–18 inputs, 217 instability, xix institutions, 93, 247 poorly designed, 163–64 insurance, 355–356 deposit, see deposit insurance mutual, 247 unemployment, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 integration, 322 interest rates, 43–44, 86, 282, 345, 354 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 ECB’s determination of, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 and employment, 94 euro’s lowering of, 235 Fed’s lowering of, 150 on German bonds, 114 on Greek bonds, 4, 114, 181–82 on Italian bonds, 114 in late 1970s, 168 long-term, 151, 200 negative, 316, 348–49 quantitative easing and, 151, 170 short-term, 249 single, eurozone’s entailing of, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 on Spanish bonds, 114, 199 spread in, 332 stock prices increased by, 264 at zero lower bound, 106 intermediation, 258 internal devaluation, 98–109, 122, 126, 220, 255, 388 supply-side effects of, 99, 103–4 International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 79, 341 International Labor Organization, 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xv, xvii, 10, 17, 18, 55, 61, 65–66, 96, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 154, 234, 289, 309, 316, 337, 349, 350, 370, 371, 381 and Argentine debt, 206 conditions of, 201 creation of, 105 danger of high taxation warnings of, 190 debt reduction pushed by, 95 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 and failure to restore credit, 201 global imbalances discussed by, 252 and Greek debts, 205, 206, 310–11 on Greek surplus, 188 and Indonesian crisis, 230–31, 364 on inequality’s lowering of growth, 212–13 Ireland’s socialization of losses opposed by, 156–57 mistakes admitted by, 262, 312 on New Mediocre, 264 Portuguese bailout of, 178–79 tax measures of, 185 investment, 76–77, 111, 189, 217, 251, 264, 278, 367 confidence and, 94 divergence in, 136–38 in education, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 infrastructure in, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 lowered by disintermediation, 258 public, 99 real estate, 199 in renewable energy, 229–30 return on, 186, 245 stimulation of, 94 in technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), 393–94 invisible hand, xviii Iraq, refugees from, 320 Iraq War, 36, 37 Ireland, 14, 16, 44, 113, 114–15, 122, 178, 234, 296, 312, 331, 339–40, 343, 362 austerity opposed in, 207 debt of, 196 emigrants from, 68–69 GDP of, 18, 231 growth in, 64, 231, 247, 340 inherited debt in, 134 losses socialized in, 134, 156–57, 165 low debt in, 88 real estate bubble in, 108, 114–15, 126 surplus in, 17, 88 taxes in, 142–43, 376 trade deficits in, 119 unemployment in, 178 irrational exuberance, 14, 114, 116–17, 149, 334, 359 ISIS, 319 Italian bonds, 114, 165, 323 Italy, 6, 14, 16, 120, 125, 331, 343 austerity opposed in, 59 GDP per capita in, 352 growth in, 247 sovereign spread of, 200 Japan, 151, 333, 342 bubble in, 359 debt of, 202 growth in, 78 quantitative easing used by, 151, 359 shrinking working-age population of, 70 Java, unemployment on, 230 jobs gap, 120 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 228 Keynes, John Maynard, 118, 120, 172, 187, 351 convergence policy suggested by, 254 Keynesian economics, 64, 95, 108, 153, 253 King, Mervyn, 390 knowledge, 137, 138–39, 337–38 Kohl, Helmut, 6–7, 337 krona, 287 labor, marginal product of, 356 labor laws, 75 labor markets, 9, 74 friction in, 336 reforms of, 214, 221 labor movement, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 320 austerity and, 140 capital flows and, 135 see also migration labor rights, 56 Lamers, Karl, 314 Lancaster, Kelvin, 27 land tax, 191 Latin America, 10, 55, 95, 112, 202 lost decade in, 168 Latvia, 331, 346 GDP of, 92 law of diminishing returns, 40 learning by doing, 77 Lehman Brothers, 182 lender of last resort, 85, 362, 368 lending, 280, 380 discriminatory, 283 predatory, 274, 310 lending rates, 278 leverage, 102 Lichtenstein, 44 Lipsey, Richard, 27 liquidity, 201, 264, 278, 354 ECB’s expansion of, 256 lira, 14 Lithuania, 331 living standards, 68–70 loans: contraction of, 126–27, 246 nonperforming, 241 for small and medium-size businesses, 246–47 lobbyists, from financial sector, 132 location, 76 London interbank lending rate (LIBOR), 131, 355 Long-Term Refinancing Operation, 360–361 Lucas, Robert, xi Luxembourg, 6, 94, 142–43, 331, 343 as tax avoidance center, 228, 261 luxury cars, 265 Maastricht Treaty, xiii, 6, 87, 115, 146, 244, 298, 339, 340 macro-prudential regulations, 249 Malta, 331, 340 manufacturing, 89, 223–24 market failures, 48–49, 86, 148, 149, 335 rigidities, 101 tax policy’s correction of, 193 market fundamentalism, see neoliberalism market irrationality, 110, 125–26, 149 markets, limitations of, 10 Meade, James, 27 Medicaid, 91 medical care, 196 Medicare, 90, 91 Mellon, Andrew, 95 Memorandum of Agreement, 233–34 Merkel, Angela, 186 Mexico, 202, 369 bailout of, 113 in NAFTA, xiv Middle East, 321 migrant crisis, 44 migration, 26, 40, 68–69, 90, 125, 320–21, 334–35, 342, 356, 393 unemployment and, 69, 90, 135, 140 see also labor movement military power, 36–37 milk, 218, 223, 230 minimum wage, 42, 120, 254, 255, 351 mining, 257 Mississippi, GDP of, 92 Mitsotakis, Constantine, 377–78 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 377–78 Mitterrand, François, 6–7 monetarism, 167–68, 169, 364 monetary policy, 24, 85–86, 148, 264, 325, 345, 364 as allegedly technocratic, 146, 161–62 conservative theory of, 151, 153 in early 1980s US, 168, 210 flexibility of, 244 in global financial crisis, 151 political nature of, 146, 153–54 recent developments in theory of, 166–73 see also interest rates monetary union, see single currencies money laundering, 354 monopolists, privatization and, 194 moral hazard, 202, 203 mortgage rates, 170 mortgages, 302 multinational chains, 219 multinational development banks, 137 multinationals, 127, 223, 376 multipliers, 211–12, 248 balanced-budget, 188–90, 265 Mundell, Robert, 87 mutual insurance, 247 mutualization of debt, 242–43, 263 national development banks, 137–38 natural monopolies, 55 natural rate hypothesis, 172 negative shocks, 248 neoliberalism, xvi, 24–26, 33, 34, 98–99, 109, 257, 265, 332–33, 335, 354 on bubbles, 381 and capital flows, 28 and central bank independence, 162–63 in Germany, 10 inequality increased by, xviii low inflation desired by, 147 recent scholarship against, 24 Netherlands, 6, 44, 292, 331, 339–40, 343 European Constitution referendum of, 58 New Democracy Party, Greek, 61, 185, 377–78 New Mediocre, 264 New World, 148 New Zealand, 364 Nokia, 81, 234, 297 nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), 379–80 nonaccelerating wage rate of unemployment (NAWRU), 379–80 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 276 nonperforming loans, 241 nontraded goods sector, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), xiv North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 196 Norway, 12, 44, 307 referendum on joining EU, 58 nuclear deterrence, 38 Obama, Barack, 319 oil, import of, 230 oil firms, 36 oil prices, 89, 168, 259, 359 oligarchs: in Greece, 16, 227 in Russia, 280 optimal currency area, 345 output, 70–71, 111 after recessions, 76 Outright Monetary Transactions program, 361 overregulate, 132 Oxfam, 72 panic of 1907, 147 Papandreou, Andreas, 366 Papandreou, George, xiv, 60–61, 184, 185, 220, 221, 226–27, 309, 312, 366, 373 reform of banks suggested by, 229 paradox of thrift, 120 peace, 34 pensions, 9, 16, 78, 177, 188, 197–98, 226, 276, 370 People’s Party, Portugal, 392 periphery, 14, 32, 171, 200, 296, 301, 318 see also specific countries peseta, 14 pharmacies, 218–20 Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), 132 physical capital, 77–78 Pinochet, Augusto, 152–53 place-based debt, 134, 242 Pleios, George, 377 Poland, 46, 333, 339 assistance to, 243 in Iraq War, 37 police, 41 political integration, xvi, 34, 35 economic integration vs., 51–57 politics, economics and, 308–18 pollution, 260 populism, xx Portugal, 14, 16, 64, 177, 178, 331, 343, 346 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315, 332, 392 GDP of, 92 IMF bailout of, 178–79 loans in, 127 poverty in, 261 sovereign spread of, 200 Portuguese bonds, 179 POSCO, 55 pound, 287, 335, 346 poverty, 72 in Greece, 226, 261 in Portugal, 261 in Spain, 261 predatory lending, 274, 310 present discount value, 343 Price of Inequality, The (Stiglitz), 154 prices, 19, 24 adjustment of, 48, 338, 361 price stability, 161 primary deficit, 188, 389 primary surpluses, 187–88 private austerity, 126–27, 241–42 private sector involvement, 113 privatization, 55, 194–96, 369 production costs, 39, 43, 50 production function, 343 productivity, 71, 332, 348 in manufacturing, 223–24 after recessions, 76–77 programs, 17–18 Germany’s design of, 53, 60, 61, 187–88, 205, 336, 338 imposed on Greece, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 of Troika, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 346, 366, 379, 392 progressive automatic stabilizers, 244 progressive taxes, 248 property rights, 24 property taxes, 192–93, 227 public entities, 195 public goods, 40, 337–38 quantitative easing (QE), 151, 164, 165–66, 170–72, 264, 359, 361, 386 railroads, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 168, 209 real estate bubble, 25, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 126, 148, 172, 250, 301, 302 cause of, 198 real estate investment, 199 real exchange rate, 105–6, 215–16 recessions, recovery from, 94–95 recovery, 76 reform, 75 theories of, 27–28 regulations, 24, 149, 152, 162, 250, 354, 355–356, 378 and Bush administration, 250–51 common, 241 corporate opposition to, xvi difficulties in, 132–33 of finance, xix forbearance on, 130–31 importance of, 152–53 macro-prudential, 249 in race to bottom, 131–34 Reinhardt, Carmen, 210 renewable energy, 193, 229–30 Republican Party, US, 319 research and development (R&D), 77, 138, 217, 251, 317–18 Ricardo, David, 40, 41 risk, 104, 153, 285 excessive, 250 risk markets, 27 Rogoff, Kenneth, 210 Romania, 46, 331, 338 Royal Bank of Scotland, 355 rules, 57, 241–42, 262, 296 Russia, 36, 264, 296 containment of, 318 economic rents in, 280 gas from, 37, 81, 93, 378 safety nets, 99, 141, 223 Samaras, Antonis, 61, 309, 377 savings, 120 global, 257 savings and loan crisis, 360 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 57, 220, 314, 317 Schengen area, 44 schools, 41, 196 Schröeder, Gerhard, 254 self-regulation, 131, 159 service sector, 224 shadow banking system, 133 shareholder capitalism, 21 Shiller, Rob, 132, 359 shipping taxes, 227, 228 short-termism, 77, 258–59 Silicon Valley, 224 silver, 275, 277 single currencies: conflicts and, 38 as entailing fixed exchange rates, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 external imbalances and, 97–98 and financial crises, 110–18 integration and, 45–46, 50 interest rates and, 8, 86, 87–88, 92, 93, 94 Mundell’s work on, 87 requirements for, 5, 52–53, 88–89, 92–94, 97–98 and similarities among countries, 15 trade integration vs., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Both married in their early twenties and rented apartments in the cities where they had settled. In the early 1950s, the differences in the economic lives of the two brothers were still small. Their families saw each other regularly, although, as the boundaries between the German occupation zones became more marked, visits became less frequent. After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, they talked to each other only by telephone, and less and less often. When the Wall came down in 1989, Heinz, like millions of other Easterners, drove his Trabant into the Western zone to see for himself He had known that the range and quality of goods in the shops was far superior; now that was a reality.

But, within a few years, West Germany was again among the richest and most productive economies in the world, 4 while the East struggled. The division of Germany into two economic zones is the nearest approach ever made in social science to a controlled experiment. And the results were decisive. From 1961 the Berlin Wall divided the two zones. Otherwise the experiment would have ended prematurely with the flight of population from the East. Twenty-eight years later the citizens of the two zones literally tore down the wall that separated them. The destruction of physical capital does not lead to enduring differences in economic performance; the implementation of different mechanisms of economic management does.

.), 111-12 airline industry, 123, 151-52, 194 Akerlof, George, 207, 223, 327, 330, 357 Allais, Maurice, 234-35, 357 altruism, 217, 252, 255 Amazon.com, 218, 273 American business model (ABM), 11, 17, 311-22 and contracts, 352 and corporations, 79,322, 342-44 and economic policy-making, 334-3 7 inadequacies of, 319 and income distribution, 203, 320-22 in]apan, 63-64 in New Zealand, 62 philosophy of, 343 and property rights, 318-19 reality vs. caricature of, 20-21 and regulation, 87 and self-interest, 315-18, 342, 343-44 supportfor, 104,203,313,355 ancient Greece, 55, 78, 146 antitrust laws, 76,87-88, 138,268,313,334 intellectual property, 273 AOL,83, 123 Apple, 119-20, 122,261,273 architecture, 311-12 Argentina,33,58,59-62, 139,285,288,344 Arkwright, Richard, 273 Arrow, Kenneth, 100, 127, 179, 181,318, 335,357 Arrow-Debreu model, 100, 134, 179, 181-83, 194,197,201-8,259,314 and economic rents, 295 function of, 208, 330-31 limitations of, 205,232 and property rights, 318,319 Asia economic development, 16, 62-68,279 market crisis (1997), 16, 53, 150-51,237 rich states, 31, 32,66 assets, 172, 175 assignment (resource allocation), 93-104 coordination of, 173-83 See also central planning ATMs (bank cash machines), 351 auctions, 95, 101-2, 143,227-29 Australia, 47, 51, 67, 68,285 cost ofliving, 48, 49 cuisine changes, 75-76 electricity auction, 227-28 "Austrian economics," 199 authority dangers of unchecked, 109-14 delegation of, 117, 124 Axelrod, Robert, 254 Babbage, Charles, 266-67 balance of payments, 177 bank notes, 100, 165-66 banks,55,69, 165-67,303 cash machines, 351 bargaining theory, 289-90, 294-95, 300, 353 Becker, Gary, 199-201,256,286,302,324, 328,333,335,338,358 behavioral economics, 220-21,235,324,333, 339 Bell Laboratories, 268 Berkshire Hathaway, 298 Berlin, Isaiah, 190, 191 Berlin Wall, 29, 30 Black, Fischer, 160 Black-Scholes model, 159, 160-61 Blanchard, Olivier, 338 blocking coalition, 294-95 Blodget, Henry, 218,229 blood donation, 257-58 bonds, 150, 167-69 bookkeeping, 55,175-78 brands,20, 74,89,296,319,352 Braque,Georges,85-86,89,90,293 Britain. See United Kingdom brokers, 147 Buchanan, James, 251,358 Buchholz, Todd, 189 Buffett, Warren, 12, 171,298-99,300,317 Bush, George W., 100, 156, 200, 335, 337 business-cycle theory, 200 California blackouts, 101, 127, 128 Canada,31,32,58,67 capital, 55, 79, 123, 124 intangible, 171-72 and living standards, 27-28 selling/ buying risks, 169-70,244 supply/demand for, 163-67 capitalism, 10, 21, 78 future of, 340-55 See also market economy Cardoso, Fernando, 285-86 { 412} Index Carlson, Chester, 117 Carrefour SA, 5, 8, 79 cash machines, 351 cell phones, 261-62, 351 central banks, 166-68 central planning, 105-14,200,333-34 adaptive behavior, 214-15 British electricity, 110-12, 141-42, 171, 214 coordination failures, 127, 173-74 decision-making scale, 18, 19, 106-9, 110, 112-14 development economics, 277-79,281 drawbacks/failures, 108, 110, 112-14, 127, 288,306-7 General Electric, 116-17 Hayek on, 198 incentive compatibility, 97-100, 199 market spontaneity vs., 19-21 Marxist, 17 Chain, Ernst, 267 chaos theory, 131 Chicago School, 199-201,205,207,210,217, 324,335 China, 36, 151,214,215 central planning, 105-14 economic development, 16-17,62-63,66, 67,288 Chubais, Anatoly, 288,319 Clark,Jim, 122-23 climate, 51, 55,90 Coase, Ronald, 205,358 Coca-Cola, 88-89, 137, 225-26, 298 economic rent, 292-93, 294, 296 trademark, 224, 272 Cohen, Jonathan, 218 colonization, 56-62, 67, 284, 355 commensurability, 187-93 communism, collapse of, 287, 306.


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

Ivanov had twice used a Minox camera at Profumo’s home, Nash House, on Chester Terrace, when Valerie Hobson, the minister’s wife, left him alone in the study. He subsequently despatched details of the top-secret X-15 experimental high-altitude, hypersonic aircraft. He also revealed, for example, “Long Trust,” contingency plans for the rotation of individual battle groups after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. Had a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact broken out at that moment, Soviet knowledge of these plans would have enabled them to inflict severe damage on Western conventional forces that held the line in Berlin. Ivanov also revealed MC-70: top-secret plans for the dual deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.102 These were matters of considerable importance for NATO during a period of heightened international tension, especially given the ever-present danger of miscalculation on the part of the unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev leading to war.

Thus, to those in communications intelligence, the demise of a system unable to compete could not have come as a surprise, whereas those in human intelligence were only now reaping the harvest sown in recent years and were inevitably both more shocked and all the more embittered by the collapse of the régime. Holding the diehards at bay, Gorbachev defied every expectation at home and abroad by permitting the Berlin Wall to be breached in November 1989. He had finally allowed the imbalance of military power in Europe, which had stood provocatively and overwhelmingly to Soviet advantage since 1945, to be broken unopposed. Behind all this lay a basic truth: Moscow had effectively already given up the ideological struggle.

Amerikanomania (Pro-Americanism) Ames, Aldrich Amiel, Xavier Amin, Hafizullah Amtorg Andreev, Nikolai Andrew, Christopher Andropov, Yuri Androsov, Stanislav Angleton, James Anglo-Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) anonimki (anonymous letters) anti-Americanism anti-Semitism Antonov, Boris Antonov, Sergei “Apostles” Aptekar’, Nikolai Arabs Arafat, Yasser Arcadia Restaurant and Night Club Arcos Raid (1927) Arlington Hall Station Armand, Inessa Aronskii, Boris Artamonov, Yuri artillery Artuzov, Artur A Service Astor, Lord atomic weapons, see nuclear weapons Austria Auswärtiges Amt (Ausamt) Aviation Industry Ministry, Soviet Azef, Evgenii B-47 bombers B-52 bombers Bagley, “Pete” “Baikal-79” Balamutov, Aleksandr Baldwin, Stanley Balitsky Balkan states Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) Bandera, Stefan Banford Academy of Beauty Culture Baranov, Aleksandr Baranov, Vyacheslav Barkovskii, Vadim “Basket Three” Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) Bazarov, Boris Bazilevskii, Yuri BBC BBC World Service Beckett, Thomas à Beckman, Bengt Beirut Bekrenyov, Leonid Belkin, Naum Belyusov, Pyotr Bentley, Elizabeth Berezhkov, Valentin Berezovsky, Boris Beria, Lavrentiy Berkovich, Veniamin Berlin Berlin, East Berlin, West Berlin Blockade Berlin Command Centre Berlings, Orest Berlin Tunnel Berlin Wall Berzin, Yan Bezymensky, Lev “Big House” “Big White House” Bild Zeitung Biographic Register biological and chemical warfare Birk, Ado Black Friday (October 29, 1948) Blake, George Bletchley Park blue-sky projects Blumental’-Tamarin, Vsevolod Blunt, Anthony Blyukher, Vasilii Blyumkin, Yakov BND Boeckenhaupt, Herbert boevye shifry (working ciphers) Bogomolets, Viktor Bohnsack, Günther Bokhan, Sergei Bokii, Gleb Bolmasov, Aleksandr Bol’shakov, Georgii Bolshevik Revolution (1917) “bolshevisation” “bomber gap” book codes Borodin, Mikhail Borodin, Norman Bortnowski, Bronisław Bosik, Aleksei Boyarinov, Grigory Boyarov, Vitalii Boyce, Ernest Brandt, Willy Brauchitsch, Walther von Bredow, Colonel von Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918) Brezhnev, Leonid Briand, Aristide Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) Brighton, Ronald British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) British Communist Party (CPGB) British Museum Browder, Earl Bruevich, Nikolai Bruk, Isaak BRUSA Brzezinski, Zbigniew BStU (Stasi) Bucharest Budapest Buinov, Captain Bukharin, Nikolai Bukovsky, Vladimir Bulat (Sword) computer Bulganin, Nikolai Bulgaria Bulgarian Communist Party Bureau No. 1 Burgess, Guy Butler, R.


pages: 455 words: 131,569

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

Neal also believed that if the GPS-guided drones were inexpensive enough, the U.S. military could use them to stop the swarms of Soviet tanks that analysts expected to pour through the Fulda Gap, lowlands on the border between West and East Germany, if Moscow decided to invade Western Europe. The risk of a Soviet invasion of West Germany had preoccupied Neal for a long time, partly because his wife was an East German by birth. Anne Prause’s father had smuggled his family out of the Communist German Democratic Republic before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. For Neal, meeting Anne was one of the highlights of the Yale Daily News Asian Expedition—she had been a stewardess on his Pan Am flight to Europe—and they married in 1962. Over the years, they had talked a lot about the need to stop the Communists, and about the horrors of indiscriminate Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, which Anne and her family had witnessed.

In other words, General Atomics needed to build the kind of drone Abe Karem had already designed. Neal listened. By now it was clear that the military had no interest in using UAVs as cheap cruise missiles; moreover, the potential targets that had inspired his interest in the concept were gone. In Nicaragua the Sandinistas were out of power; in Europe, the Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union was collapsing. In the foreseeable future, at least, no Russian tanks would be pouring into Western Europe. The Blue brothers began a series of conversations with Karem, and on Valentine’s Day 1991 Karem faxed Kuhn copies of a “first-cut” proposal he had sent General Atomics and a counteroffer he had gotten back.

See Forty-Four Ball Anaconda, Operation Anderegg, Dick Andrews Air Force Base Andy (sensor operator) Anvil, Project Aphrodite, Project Aquila Arab League Armenia Army Amber and Aquila and Hellfire and Predator and Army Air Forces Army Intelligence Center Army Rangers Associated Press Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems Atef, Mohammed (aka Abu Hafs al-Masri) Atlantic fiber-optic cable Augustine, Norman Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists Act (2001) autopilot Aviation Week avionics Awlaki, Anwar al- B-1B bomber B-2 bomber B-17 bomber B-52 bomber Bagram airfield Bahrain Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Bay of Pigs invasion BBC News Beech Aircraft Begert, William J. Beirut bombing Berger, Sandy Berlin Wall Big Bird Big (pilot) Big Safari. See 645th Aeronautical Systems Group Black, Cofer Blue, Anne Prause Blue, James E. Blue, Karsten Blue, Linden Blue, Neal Blue, Virginia Neal Blue Bird (plane) Boeing Bosnia Boston Globe Box, Jon Boyle, Bev Boyle, Edward J. BQ-7 bomber British Royal Air Force British Royal Flying Corps Brokaw, Tom Brown, Gabe Browne, G.


pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

As the late political consultant Philip Gould wrote in his influential New Labour text The Unfinished Revolution, a central aim of Labour’s modernisers was to make the party less hostile to the sorts of people who ‘want to do better for themselves and their families’.21 Broader historical trends also played a part in Labour’s ideological transmutation. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a blow was struck not only against the totalitarian delusions of communists, but also against the faint hopes of some on the left that economic planning could be made to work if only the right people were put in charge. Remove the ugly trappings of communist dictatorship but maintain the dominant role of the state in economic life and, so some maintained, socialism would flourish as surely as night follows day.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

The Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Before proceeding, it may be useful to say a little more about the theoretical and conceptual framework of this research as well as the intellectual itinerary that led me to write this book. I belong to a generation that turned eighteen in 1989, which was not only the bicentennial of the French Revolution but also the year when the Berlin Wall fell. I belong to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dicatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union. I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it.

The highly imperfect estimates available to us indicate that private wealth in Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries stood at about four years of national income in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and net public wealth was extremely low, just as in the rich countries. Available estimates for the 1970s and 1980s, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist regimes, are even more imperfect, but all signs are that the distribution was strictly the opposite: private wealth was insignificant (limited to individual plots of land and perhaps some housing in the Communist countries least averse to private property but in all cases less than a year’s national income), and public capital represented the totality of industrial capital and the lion’s share of national capital, amounting, as a first approximation, to between three and four years of national income.

Since Europe’s GDP accounted for nearly one-quarter of global GDP in 2013, the question is of interest not just to inhabitants of the Eurozone but to the entire world. The usual answer to this question is that the creation of the euro—agreed on in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany and made a reality on January 1, 2002, when automatic teller machines across the Eurozone first began to dispense euro notes—is but one step in a lengthy process. Monetary union is supposed to lead naturally to political, fiscal, and budgetary union, to ever closer cooperation among the member states.


pages: 956 words: 267,746

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Thousands of nuclear warheads still sit atop missiles belonging to the United States and Russia, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice. Hundreds more are possessed by India, China, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Great Britain, and France. As of this writing, a nuclear weapon has not destroyed a city since August 1945. But there is no guarantee that such good luck will last. The fall of the Berlin Wall now feels like ancient history. An entire generation has been raised without experiencing the dread and anxiety of the Cold War, a conflict that lasted almost half a century and threatened to annihilate mankind. This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use.

And yet their positions seemed irreconcilable, especially with a deadline approaching. For the Soviet leader, West Berlin was a “rotten tooth which must be pulled out,” a center of American espionage, a threat to the future of East Germany. For Kennedy, it was an outpost of freedom, surrounded by totalitarian rule, whose two million inhabitants couldn’t be abandoned. The Berlin Wall, at least, had preserved the status quo. “It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy said, the day the barbed wire went up, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” On September 19, the day before the White House meeting on whether to launch a surprise attack, Kennedy sent a list of questions to General Power: Berlin developments may confront us with a situation where we may desire to take the initiative in the escalation of the conflict from the local to the general war level… .

The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For the first time since the Cold War began, tanks belonging to the U.S. Army and the Red Army pointed their guns at one another, separated by about a hundred yards. General Norstad had ordered his tank commanders to tear down the Berlin Wall, if East German guards blocked the rightful passage of American civilians. Amid the armored standoff at the border, Secretary of State Rusk had those orders rescinded. A miscalculation by either side, a needless provocation, could lead to war. The Soviet foreign minister met with the American ambassador in Moscow to discuss the situation.


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

This questioning is by no means limited to Great Britain; there are signs of it throughout Europe, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else. All this is a far cry from the optimism and confidence that were just as widespread a quarter of a century before. One source of this mood was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (11/9 of all days), an event that heralded the peaceful and successful demise of the Cold War, the unprecedented struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that had defined much of international relations for the four decades following the end of the Second World War.

But some of the credit for how history unfolded surely goes to successive U.S. presidents and, more broadly, the sustained efforts of the United States and its allies over four decades. George Kennan, the architect of containment, proved prescient when he suggested the Soviet system might not be able to withstand the prolonged frustration of being unable to expand its reach.9 George H. W. Bush, the American president at the time the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, deserves special praise for his handling of the Cold War’s final chapter. Bush was criticized at the time and afterward for not making more of these events, but he was careful not to humiliate his opposite numbers and risk bringing about a situation that could have pressured them to take dramatic action or brought to power those who wanted to do just that.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

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

While racking their brains as they search for policy fixes to the euro’s troubles, Europe’s policy makers may be amused to recall this metaphor for impossible tasks. German reunification and its global significance The steady disintegration of the Soviet Union, which began unexpectedly in the late 1980s, soon led to the demolition of the Berlin Wall. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl moved quickly to seize this opportunity to annex East Germany. Conventional wisdom has it that the inordinate cost of Germany’s reunification is responsible for the country’s economic ills and for its stagnation in the 1990s. This is not my reading. While it is undoubtedly true that reunification strained Germany’s public finances (to the tune of approximately $1.3 billion), and even led it to flout the very Maastricht Treaty that it had insisted upon, reunification also helped reduce German labour’s bargaining power.

ABN-Amro, takeover by RBS, 119–20 ACE (aeronautic–computer–electronics) complex, 83 Acheson, Dean, 68 Adenauer, Konrad, 74 Afghanistan, proposed US invasion, 106–7 Africa: colonization, 79; investment in, 214, 218, 252, 253 agriculture, 26, 31 AIG (American Insurance Group), 150, 153, 159 Akins, James, 97 Allied Control Council, 70 America see US (United States) American Civil War, 40 Anglo-Celtic model, 12–13, 23, 117, 199 Anglo-Celtic societies, 20, 128–9 Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Angola, effect of China on, 214–15 AOL-Time Warner, 117 apartheid, in the US, 84 aporia, 1, 3–4, 25, 33, 146 Argentina: Crash of 2008, 163; currency unions, 61, 65; effect of China on, 215, 218; financial crisis, 190; trade with Asia, 215 asabiyyah (solidarity), 33–4 Asia: investment in, 191, 215; investors from, 175; reaction to the Crash of 2008, 13; surplus output, 184; US-controlled, 78 see also East Asia; South East Asia; specific countries ATMs (automated telling machines): virtual, 8, 9; Volcker on, 122 Australia: effect of China on, 214; house prices, 128, 129, 129; Reserve Bank, 160 balance, global, 22 Bank of America, 153, 157, 158 Bank of Canada, 148, 155 Bank of Denmark, 157 Bank of England: and Barings Bank, 40; and the Crash of 2008, 151, 155, 156, 158; and Northern Rock, 148; rates, 148, 159 Bank of Japan, 148, 187, 189 Bank of Sweden, 157 bankruptocracy, 164–8, 169, 191, 230, 236, 237, 250 banks: bonuses, 8; and the EFSF, 175; main principle of, 130; nationalization, 153, 154, 155, 158; Roosevelt’s regulations, 10; runs on, 148; zombie, 190–1 see also specific banks Barclays Bank, 151, 152 Barings Bank, 40 bauxite, prices, 96 Bear Stearns, 147, 151 Belgium, 75, 79, 120, 154, 196 Berlin crisis, 71 Berlin Wall, demolition, 201 Bernanke, Ben, 147, 148, 164, 230, 231, 233, 234 Big Bang, 138 bio-fuels, 163 biological weapons, 27 Black Monday, 2, 10 Blake, William, 29 BNP-Paribas, 147–8 boom to bust cycle, 35 Bradford and Bingley, 154 Brazil: Crash of 2008, 163; effect of China on, 215, 217, 218, 253; trade with Asia, 215 Bretton Woods conference, 58–61, 62, 64, 254–5 Bretton Woods system, 60, 62, 63, 67, 78, 92–3; end, 94, 95–6 Britain: Crash of 2008, 2, 159; crisis of 1847, 40; devaluing of the pound, 93; economy under Thatcher, 136–7; Global Plan, 69; gold request, 94; Gold Standard, 44; Icelandic bank nationalization, 155; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; stance on Cyprus, 79; stance on India, 79; unemployment rate, 160 British Academy, 4, 5, 6 Buffet, Warren, 8 bureaucracies, rise of, 27 Bush, George W., 149, 156, 157 Byrnes, James, 68 capital, and the human will, 18–19 capitalism: dynamic system, 139–40; free market, 68; generation of crises, 34; global, 58, 72, 114, 115, 133; Greenspan and, 11–12; Marxism, 17–18; static system, 139; supposed cure for poverty, 41–2; surplus recycling mechanisms, 64–5 capitalists, origin of, 31 car production, 70, 103, 116, 157–8 carry trade, 189–90 Carter, Jimmy, 99, 100 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), 141–2, 147–8, 149, 150, 153; for crops, 163; eurozone, 205; explanation, 6–9; France, 203; function, 130–2; Greece, 206 see also EFSF; Geithner–Summers Plan CDSs (credit default swaps), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 CEOs (chief executive officers), 46, 48, 49 Chamber of Commerce, British, 152 cheapness, ideology of, 124 Chiang Kai-shek, 76 Chicago Commodities Exchange, 120 Chicago Futures Exchange, 163 China: aggregate demand, 245; Crash of 2008, 156, 162; currency, 194, 213, 214, 217, 218, 252; economic development, 106–7; effects of the Crash of 2008, 3; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 116; Global Plan, 76; growth, 92; rise and impact, 212–18, 219–20 Chrysler, 117, 159 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 69 Citigroup, 149, 156, 158 City of London: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 148, 152; debt in relation to GDP, 4–5; financialization, 118–19; under Thatcher, 138; wealth of merchants, 28 civilization, 27, 29–30, 128 Clinton, Hillary, 212, 215–16 Cold War, 71, 80, 81, 86 collateralized debt obligations see CDOs commodification: resistance to, 53–4; rise of, 30, 33, 54; of seeds, 175 commodities: global, 27–8; human nature not, 53; labour as, 45, 49, 54; money as, 45, 49; prices, 96, 98, 102, 125; trading, 31, 175 common market, European, 195 communism, collapse of, 22, 107–8 complexity, and economic models, 139–40 Condorcet, Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de, 29, 32 Congress (US): bail-outs, 77, 153–4, 155; import tariff bill, 45 Connally, John, 94–5 council houses, selling off, 137, 138 Crash of 1907, 40 Crash of 1929, 38–43, 44, 181 Crash of 2008, 146–68; aftermath, 158–60; chronicle, 2007, 147–9; chronicle, 2008, 149, 151–8; credit default swaps, 150; effects, 2–3; epilogue, 164–8; explanations, 4–19; in Italy, 237; review, 160–4; in Spain, 237; warnings, 144–5 credit crunch, 149, 151 credit default swaps (CDSs), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 credit facilities, 127–8 credit rating agencies, 6–7, 8, 9, 20, 130 crises: as laboratories of the future, 28; nature of, 141; pre-1929, 40; pre-2008, 2; proneness to, 30; redemptive, 33–5, 35 currency unions, 60–1, 61–2, 65, 251 Cyprus, Britain’s role in, 69, 79 Daimler-Benz, 117 DaimlerChrysler, 117 Darling, Alistair, 159 Darwinian process, 167 Das Kapital (Marx), 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 76, 93 Debenhams, takeover of, 119 debt: and GDP, 4–5; unsecured, 128; US government, 92; US households, 161–2 see also CDOs; leverage debt–deflation cycle, 63 deficits: in the EU, 196; US budget, 22–3, 25, 112, 136, 182–3, 215–16; US trade, 22–3, 25, 111, 182–3, 196, 227 Deng Xiao Ping, 92, 212 Depressions: US 1873–8, 40; US Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 deregulations, 138, 143, 170 derivatives, 120, 131–2, 174, 178 Deutschmark, 74, 96, 195, 197 Dexia, 154 distribution, and production, 30, 31, 54, 64 dollar: devaluing, 188; flooding markets, 92–3; pegging, 190; reliance on, 57, 60, 102; value of, 96, 204; zone, 62, 78, 89, 164 dotcom bubble, 2, 5 Draghi, Mario, 239 East Asia, 79, 143, 144, 194 see also Asia; specific countries East Germany, 201, 202 see also Germany Eastern Europe, 108, 198, 203 ECB (European Central Bank): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 158; bank bail-outs, 203, 204; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 155, 156, 157; European banking crisis, 208, 209–10; Greek crisis, 207; LTRO, 238; Maastricht Treaty, 199–200; toxic theory, 15 economic models, 139–42 Economic Recovery Advisory Board (ERAB), 180, 181 Economic Report of the President (1999), 116 ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), 74, 75–6 Edison, Thomas, 38–9 Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), 15 EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility), 174, 175–7, 207, 208–9 EIB (European Investment Bank), 210 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 82 Elizabeth II, Queen, 4, 5 ERAB (Economic Recovery Advisory Board), 180, 181 ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism), 197 EU (European Union): economies within, 196; EFSF, 174; European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174; financial support for the US, 216; origins, 73, 74, 75; SPV, 174 euro see eurozone eurobonds, toxic, 175–7 Europa myth, 201 Europe: aftermath of Crash of 2008, 162; bank bail-outs, 203–5; Crash of 2008, 2–3, 12–13, 183; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; eurozone problems, 165; Geithner–Summers Plan, 174–7; oil price rises, 98; unemployment, 164 see also specific countries European Central Bank see ECB European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 74, 75–6 European Commission, 157, 203, 204 European Common Market, 195 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 197 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), 174, 207, 208–9 European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174, 175–7 European Investment Bank (EIB), 210 European Recovery Progam see Marshall Plan European Union see EU eurozone, 61, 62, 156, 164; crisis, 165, 174, 204, 208–9, 209–11; European banks’ exposure to, 203; formation of, 198, 202; France and, 198; Germany and, 198–201; and Greek crisis, 207 exchange rate system, Bretton Woods, 60, 63, 67 falsifiability, empirical test of, 221 Fannie Mae, 152, 166 Fed, the (Federal Reserve): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 159; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157; creation, 40; current problems, 164; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173, 230; Greenspan and, 3, 10; interest rate policy, 99; sub-prime crisis, 147, 149; and toxic theory, 15 feudalism, 30, 31, 64 Fiat, 159 finance: as a pillar of industry, 31; role of, 35–8 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 166 financialization, 30, 190, 222 First World War, Gold Standard suspension, 44 food: markets, 215; prices, 163 Ford, Henry, 39 formalist economic model, 139–40 Forrestal, James, 68 Fortis, 153 franc, value against dollar, 96 France: aid for banks, 157; colonialism criticized, 79; EU membership, 196; and the euro, 198; gold request, 94; Plaza Accord, 188; reindustrialization of Germany, 74; support for Dexia, 154 Freddie Mac, 152, 166 free market fundamentalism, 181, 182 French Revolution, 29 G7 group, 151 G20 group, 159, 163–4 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 73 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 78 GDP (Gross Domestic Product): Britain, 4–5, 88, 158; eurozone, 199, 204; France, 88; Germany, 88, 88; Japan, 88, 88; US, 4, 72, 73, 87, 88, 88, 161; world, 88 Geithner–Summers Plan, 159, 169–83; in Europe, 174–7; results, 178–81; in the US, 169–74, 170, 230 Geithner, Timothy, 170, 173, 230 General Motors (GM), 131–2, 157–8, 160 General Theory (Keynes), 37 geopolitical power, 106–8 Germany: aftermath of the Second World War, 68, 73–4; competition with US, 98, 103; current importance, 251; and Europe, 195–8; and the eurozone, 198–201, 211; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70; Greek crisis, 206; house prices, 129; Marshall Plan, 73; reunification, 201–3; support for Hypo Real Estate, 155; trade surplus, 251; trade surpluses, 158 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 93 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 10, 180 global balance, 22 global imbalances, 251–2 Global Plan: appraisal, 85–9; architects, 68; end of, 100–1, 182; geopolitical ideology, 79–82; Germany, 75; Marshall Plan, 74; origins, 67–71; real GDP per capita, 87; unravelling of, 90–4; US domestic policies, 82–5 global surplus recycing mechanism see GSRM global warming, 163 globalization, 12, 28, 125 GM (General Motors), 131–2, 157–8, 160 gold: prices, 96; rushes, 40; US reserves, 92–3 Gold Exchange Standard, collapse, 43–5 Goodwin, Richard, 34 Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 Greece: currency, 205; debt crisis, 206–8 greed, Crash of 2008, 9–12 Greek Civil War, 71, 72, 79 Greenspan, Alan, 3, 10–11 Greenwald, Robert, 125–6 Gross Domestic Product see GDP GSRM (global surplus recycling mechanism), 62, 66, 85, 90, 109–10, 222, 223, 224, 248, 252–6 HBOS, 153, 156 Heath, Edward, 94 hedge funds, 147, 204; LTCM, 2, 13; toxic theory, 15 hedging, 120–1 history: consent as driving force, 29; Marx on, 178; as undemocratic, 28 Ho Chi Minh, 92 Holland, 79, 120, 155, 196, 204 home ownership, 12, 127–8; reposessions, 161 Homeownership Preservation Foundation, 161 Hoover, Herbert, 42–3, 44–5, 230 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 73 house prices, 12, 128–9, 129, 138; falling, 151, 152 human nature, 10, 11–12 humanity, in the workforce, 50–2, 54 Hypo Real Estate, 155 Ibn Khaldun, 33 IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) see World Bank Iceland, 154, 155, 156, 203 ICU (International Currency Union) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 251 IMF (International Monetary Fund): burst bubbles, 190; cost of the credit crunch, 151; Crash of 2008, 155–6, 156, 159; demise of social services, 163; on economic growth, 159; European banking crisis, 208; G20 support for, 163–4; Greek crisis, 207; origins, 59; South East Asia, 192, 193; Third World debt crisis, 108; as a transnational institution, 253, 254 income: distribution, 64; national, 42; US national, 43 India: Britain’s stance criticized, 79; Crash of 2008, 163; suicides of farmers, 163 Indochina, and colonization, 79 Indonesia, 79, 191 industrialization: Britain, 5; Germany, 74–5; Japan, 89, 185–6; roots of, 27–8; South East Asia, 86 infinite regress, 47 interest rates: CDOs, 7; post-Global Plan, 99; prophecy paradox, 48; rises in, 107 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) see World Bank International Currency Union (ICU) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 253 International Labour Organisation, 159 International Monetary Fund see IMF Iran, Shah of, 97 Ireland: bankruptcy, 154, 156; EFSF, 175; nationalization of Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Irwin, John, 97 Japan: aftermath of the Second World War, 68–9; competition with the US, 98, 103; in decline, 186–91; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70, 76–8, 85–6; house prices, 129; labour costs, 105; new Marshall Plan, 77; Plaza Accord, 188; post-war, 185–91; post-war growth, 185–6; relations with the US, 187–8, 189; South East Asia, 91, 191–2; trade surpluses, 158 joblessness see unemployment Johnson, Lyndon B.: Great Society programmes, 83, 84, 92; Vietnam War, 92 JPMorgan Chase, 151, 153 keiretsu system, Japan, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 Kennan, George, 68, 71 Kennedy, John F., New Frontier social programmes, 83, 84 Keynes, John Maynard: Bretton Woods conference, 59, 60, 62, 109; General Theory, 37; ICU proposal, 60, 66, 90, 109, 254, 255; influence on New Dealers, 81; on investment decisions, 48; on liquidity, 160–1; trade imbalances, 62–6 Keynsianism, 157 Kim Il Sung, 77 Kissinger, Henry, 94, 98, 106 Kohl, Helmut, 201 Korea, 91, 191, 192 Korean War, 77, 86 labour: as a commodity, 28; costs, 104–5, 104, 105, 106, 137; hired, 31, 45, 46, 53, 64; scarcity of, 34–5; value of, 50–2 labour markets, 12, 202 Labour Party (British), 69 labourers, 32 land: as a commodity, 28; enclosure, 64 Landesbanken, 203 Latin America: effect of China on, 215, 218; European banks’ exposure to, 203; financial crisis, 190 see also specific countries lead, prices, 96 Lebensraum, 67 Left-Right divide, 167 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152–3 leverage, 121–2 leveraging, 37 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 187 liberation movements, 79, 107 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 148 liquidity traps, 157, 190 Lloyds TSB, 153, 156 loans: and CDOs, 7–8, 129–31; defaults on, 37 London School of Economics, 4, 66 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund collapse, 13 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) hedge fund collapse, 2, 13 Luxembourg, support for Dexia, 154 Maastricht Treaty, 199–200, 202 MacArthur, Douglas, 70–1, 76, 77 machines, and humans, 50–2 Malaysia, 91, 191 Mao, Chairman, 76, 86, 91 Maresca, John, 106–7 Marjolin, Robert, 73 Marshall, George, 72 Marshall Plan, 71–4 Marx, Karl: and capitalism, 17–18, 19, 34; Das Kapital, 49; on history, 178 Marxism, 181, 182 Matrix, The (film), 50–2 MBIA, 149, 150 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 73 mercantilism, in Germany, 251 merchant class, 27–8 Merkel, Angela, 158, 206 Merrill Lynch, 149, 153, 157 Merton, Robert, 13 Mexico: effect of China on, 214; peso crisis, 190 Middle East, oil, 69 MIE (military-industrial establishment), 82–3 migration, Crash of 2008, 3 military-industrial complex mechanism, 65, 81, 182 Ministry for International Trade and Industry (Japan), 78 Ministry of Finance (Japan), 187 Minotaur legend, 24–5, 25 Minsky, Hyman, 37 money markets, 45–6, 53, 153 moneylenders, 31, 32 mortgage backed securities (MBS) 232, 233, 234 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 214 National Bureau of Economic Research (US), 157 National Economic Council (US), 3 national income see GDP National Security Council (US), 94 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (US), 106 nationalization: Anglo Irish Bank, 158; Bradford and Bingley, 154; Fortis, 153; Geithner–Summers Plan, 179; General Motors, 160; Icelandic banks, 154, 155; Northern Rock, 151 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 76, 253 negative engineering, 110 negative equity 234 neoliberalism, 139, 142; and greed, 10 New Century Financial, 147 New Deal: beginnings, 45; Bretton Woods conference, 57–9; China, 76; Global Plan, 67–71, 68; Japan, 77; President Kennedy, 84; support for the Deutschmark, 74; transfer union, 65 New Dealers: corporate power, 81; criticism of European colonizers, 79 ‘new economy’, 5–6 New York stock exchange, 40, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19 Nixon, Richard, 94, 95–6 Nobel Prize for Economics, 13 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 214 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 76 North Korea see Korea Northern Rock, 148, 151 Obama administration, 164, 178 Obama, Barack, 158, 159, 169, 180, 230, 231 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 73 OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation), 73, 74 oil: global consumption, 160; imports, 102–3; prices, 96, 97–9 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 96, 97 paradox of success, 249 parallax challenge, 20–1 Paulson, Henry, 152, 154, 170 Paulson Plan, 154, 173 Penn Bank, 40 Pentagon, the, 73 Plaza Accord (1985), 188, 192, 213 Pompidou, Georges, 94, 95–6 pound sterling, devaluing, 93 poverty: capitalism as a supposed cure for, 41–2; in China, 162; reduction in the US, 84; reports on global, 125 predatory governance, 181 prey–predator dynamic, 33–5 prices, flexible, 40–1 private money, 147, 177; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; toxic, 132–3, 136, 179 privatization, of surpluses, 29 probability, estimating, 13–14 production: cars, 70, 103, 116, 157–8; coal, 73, 75; costs, 96, 104; cuts in, 41; in Japan, 185–6; processes, 30, 31, 64; steel, 70, 75 production–distribution cycle, 54 property see real estate prophecy paradox, 46, 47, 53 psychology, mass, 14 public debt crisis, 205 quantitative easing, 164, 231–6 railway bubbles, 40 Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), 15–16 RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 99, 133–5, 182–3 Real Business Cycle Theory (RBCT), 15, 16–17 real estate, bubbles, 8–9, 188, 190, 192–3 reason, deferring to expectation, 47 recession predictions, 152 recessions, US, 40, 157 recycling mechanisms, 200 regulation, of banking system, 10, 122 relabelling, 14 religion, organized, 27 renminbi (RMB), 213, 214, 217, 218, 253 rentiers, 165, 187, 188 representative agents, 140 Reserve Bank of Australia, 148 reserve currency status, 101–2 risk: capitalists and, 31; riskless, 5, 6–9, 14 Roach, Stephen, 145 Robbins, Lionel, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 165; attitude towards Britain, 69; and bank regulation, 10; New Deal, 45, 58–9 Roosevelt, Theodore (‘Teddy’), 180 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Rudd, Kevin, 212 Russia, financial crisis, 190 Saudi Arabia, oil prices, 98 Scandinavia, Gold Standard, 44 Scholes, Myron, 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schuman, Robert, 75 Schumpter, Joseph, 34 Second World War, 45, 55–6; aftermath, 87–8; effect on the US, 57–8 seeds, commodification of, 163 shares, in privatized companies, 137, 138 silver, prices, 96 simulated markets, 170 simulated prices, 170 Singapore, 91 single currencies, ICU, 60–1 slave trade, 28 SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), 186 social welfare, 12 solidarity (asabiyyah), 33–4 South East Asia, 91; financial crisis, 190, 191–5, 213; industrialization, 86, 87 South Korea see Korea sovereign debt crisis, 205 Soviet Union: Africa, 79; disintegration, 201; Marshall Plan, 72–3; Marxism, 181, 182; relations with the US, 71 SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), 174 see also EFSF stagflation, 97 stagnation, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 72–3 steel production, in Germany, 70 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 60, 254, 255 Summers, Larry, 230 strikes, 40 sub-prime mortgages, 2, 5, 6, 130–1, 147, 149, 151, 166 success, paradox of, 33–5, 53 Suez Canal trauma, 69 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 97 Summers, Larry, 3, 132, 170, 173, 180 see also Geithner–Summers Plan supply and demand, 11 surpluses: under capitalism, 31–2; currency unions, 61; under feudalism, 30; generation in the EU, 196; manufacturing, 30; origin of, 26–7; privatization of, 29; recycling mechanisms, 64–5, 109–10 Sweden, Crash of 2008, 155 Sweezy, Paul, 73 Switzerland: Crash of 2008, 155; UBS, 148–9, 151 systemic failure, Crash of 2008, 17–19 Taiwan, 191, 192 Tea Party (US), 162, 230, 231, 281 technology, and globalization, 28 Thailand, 91 Thatcher, Margaret, 117–18, 136–7 Third World: Crash of 2008, 162; debt crisis, 108, 219; interest rate rises, 108; mineral wealth, 106; production of goods for Walmart, 125 tiger economies, 87 see also South East Asia Tillman Act (1907), 180 time, and economic models, 139–40 Time Warner, 117 tin, prices, 96 toxic theory, 13–17, 115, 133–9, 139–42 trade: balance of, 61, 62, 64–5; deficits (US), 111, 243; global, 27, 90; surpluses, 158 trades unions, 124, 137, 202 transfer unions, New Deal, 65 Treasury Bills (US), 7 Treaty of Rome, 237 Treaty of Versailles, 237 Treaty of Westphalia, 237 trickle-down, 115, 135 trickle-up, 135 Truman Doctrine, 71, 71–2, 77 Truman, Harry, 73 tsunami, effects of, 194 UBS, 148–9, 151 Ukraine, and the Crash of 2008, 156 UN Security Council, 253 unemployment: Britain, 160; Global Plan, 96–7; rate of, 14; US, 152, 158, 164 United States see US Unocal, 106 US economy, twin deficits, 22–3, 25 US government, and South East Asia, 192 US Mortgage Bankers Association, 161 US Supreme Court, 180 US Treasury, 153–4, 156, 157, 159; aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 160; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173; bonds, 227 US Treasury Bills, 109 US (United States): aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 161–2; assets owned by foreign state institutions, 216; attitude towards oil price rises, 97–8; China, 213–14; corporate bond purchases, 228; as a creditor nation, 57; domestic policies during the Global Plan, 82–5; economy at present, 184; economy praised, 113–14; effects of the Crash of 2008, 2, 183; foreign-owned assets, 225; Greek Civil War, 71; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; profit rates, 106; proposed invasion of Afghanistan, 106–7; role in the ECSC, 75; South East Asia, 192 value, costing, 50–1 VAT, reduced, 156 Venezuela, oil prices, 97 Vietnamese War, 86, 91–2 vital spaces, 192, 195, 196 Volcker, Paul: 2009 address to Wall Street, 122; demand for dollars, 102; and gold convertibility, 94; interest rate rises, 99; replaced by Greenspan, 10; warning of the Crash of 2008, 144–5; on the world economy, 22, 100–1, 139 Volcker Rule, 180–1 Wachowski, Larry and Andy, 50 wage share, 34–5 wages: British workers, 137; Japanese workers, 185; productivity, 104; prophecy paradox, 48; US workers, 124, 161 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (documentary, Greenwald), 125–6 Wall Street: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 11–12, 152; current importance, 251; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; global profits, 23; misplaced confidence in, 41; private money, 136; profiting from sub-prime mortgages, 131; takeovers and mergers, 115–17, 115, 118–19; toxic theory, 15 Wallace, Harry, 72–3 Walmart, 115, 123–7, 126; current importance, 251 War of the Currents, 39 Washington Mutual, 153 weapons of mass destruction, 27 West Germany: labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188 Westinghouse, George, 39 White, Harry Dexter, 59, 70, 109 Wikileaks, 212 wool, as a global commodity, 28 working class: in Britain, 136; development of, 28 working conditions, at Walmart, 124–5 World Bank, 253; origins, 59; recession prediction, 149; and South East Asia, 192 World Trade Organization, 78, 215 written word, 27 yen, value against dollar, 96, 188, 193–4 Yom Kippur War, 96 zombie banks, 190–1


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Further to these many theoretical interventions—Foucault, Deleuze, Kittler, Mandel, Castells, Jameson, Hardt and Negri—are many dates that roughly confirm my periodization: the discovery of DNA in 1953; the economic crisis in the West during the 1970s epitomized by President Richard Nixon’s decoupling of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard on August 17, 1971 (and thus the symbolic evaporation of the Bretton Woods agreement); Charles Jencks’s claim that modern architecture ended on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 P.M.; the ARPAnet’s mandatory rollover to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the crashing of AT&T’s long-distance 46. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 330. 47. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 199. 48. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 200. 49. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 138. Introduction 26 Table 1 Periodization Map Period Machine Dates Diagram Manager Sovereign society Simple mechanical machines March 2, 1757 (Foucault) Centralization Hierarchy Disciplinary society Thermodynamic machines May 24, 1844 (telegraph); 1942 (Manhattan Project) Decentralization Bureaucracy Control society Cybernetic machines, February 28, 1953 (Watson and Distribution computers Crick); January 1, 1983 (TCP/IP) Protocol telephone switches on January 15, 1990; the start of the Gulf War on January 17, 1991.50 These dates, plus the many periodization theories mentioned earlier, map together as shown in table 1.

., 227n32 Braden, Bob, 142–143 Brain, relationship to computers, 103 Brand, Stewart, 152n10, 160, 169 Britain, 181 British Standards Institution (BSI), 129 Brecht, Bertolt, 55 Bretton Woods agreement, 26 Broeckmann, Andreas, 197n61 Browser, 75–76, 218 Bug, computer, 185–186, 224 Bukoff, Alan, 235 Bunting, Heath, 219, 225–226 Burden, Chris, 227n32 Bureaucracy, 121, 205 Bureau of Inverse Technology, 195, 228–229 Burger, Ralf, 179 Bush, Vannevar, 18, 58–60 Byfield, Ted, 47, 50 Babbage, Charles, 188 BackOrifice, 152n11 Baker, Fred, 123 Baker, Rachel, 195 Bandwidth, 219–220, 225 Baran, Paul, 4–5, 30n2, 35, 120, 127, 140n43, 200, 204n71 Barbie Liberation Organization, 228 Barlow, John Perry, 168, 229 Barratt, Virginia, 192 Barthes, Roland, 18, 92, 143 Baudrillard, Jean, 58, 69 Baumgärtel, Tilman, 216, 219 Bazin, André, 18, 69, 78 Being Digital (Negroponte), 18 Bell, Daniel, 17 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 123, 182 Benkler, Yochai, 40 Bentham, Jeremy, 31 Berkeley, University of California at, 124. See also Unix, Berkeley Software Distribution Berlin, 225–226 Berlin Wall, 26 Berners-Lee, Tim, 10, 39, 137–139, 142, 242, 246. See also World Wide Web (WWW) Bertillon system, 13, 111 Best Current Practice (BCP), 136 Betamax, Sony, 68, 125 Beuys, Joseph, 81 Bey, Hakim, 18, 33, 151, 158, 161 C, 123–124. See also Programming C++, 108, 123–124, 167. See also Programming California Institute of the Arts, 235 Canter, Laurence, 119 Čapek, Karel, 102, 107n88 Capital (Marx), 87–102 Capital, 227–228, 232 structure of, 56 Index 250 Capitalism, 75, 92–93, 244 late, 24 Castells, Manuel, 11, 24, 33, 61, 158 Cauty, Jimmy, 227n32 CD-ROM, 211, 221, 226, 234 Centralized network.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Caught between the social responsibility it’s given itself as “the paper of record” and its economic responsibilities as a commercial enterprise, it has struck a cumbersome compromise based on the date of publication. So (at least as I write this), you can read the article announcing the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, online and for free.13 If, however, you want to read E. J. Dionne’s article about the presidential campaign from exactly three years before that, the Times shows you the first paragraph and offers to sell you access to the rest for $3.95.14 If you are looking for an article published between 1923 and 1980—perhaps about the twentieth birthday of the “mental hygiene movement” in 192915—the Times won’t show you even a paragraph, but will sell it to you for $3.95.

See also danah boyd’s talk, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” at Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, June 30, 2009, http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html. 13 Serge Schemann, “Clamor in the East; East Germany Opens Frontier to the East for Migration or Travel; Thousands Cross,” November 10, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/10/world/clamor-east-east-germany-opens-frontier-west-for-migration-travel-thousands.html?scp=4&sq=berlin+wall&st=nyt. 14 E. J. Dionne, “The Political Campaign: From Politics Barely a Pause: Candidates Already Living ’88,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/10/us/the-political-campaign-from-politics-barely-a-pause-candidates-already-living-88.html?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt. 15 From the abstract on the New York Times site: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“The United States has arrived at a new consensus,” wrote Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in an influential 1998 book on (what they believed to be) the eternal battle between markets and government: in their minds, markets had won a complete victory.17 It wasn’t the microchip that brought us this togetherness, or optical fiber, or the Internet. The economics department of the University of Chicago didn’t win this victory, nor did the fall of the Berlin Wall bring it about. Not even the election of Ronald Reagan was sufficient, on its own, to make the market consensus happen. It required something else—it required the capitulation of the other side. That the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism is not some perverse conviction held by out-of-touch eggheads like me.

“Burn down business-as-usual,” screamed a typical management text of the year 2000 called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Set up barricades. Cripple the tanks. Topple the statues of heroes too long dead into the street.… Sound familiar? You bet it does. And the message has been the same all along, from Paris in ’68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock and roll!3 The connection between counterculture and corporate power was a typical assertion of the New Economy era, and what it implied was that rebellion was not about overturning elites, it was about encouraging business enterprise. I myself mocked this idea in voluminous detail at the time.


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

But what cannot be done without obfuscation is to avoid choosing between the two positions: Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.3 This debate between nationalism and imperialism became acutely relevant again with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the struggle against Communism ended, and the minds of Western leaders became preoccupied with two great imperialist projects: the European Union, which has progressively relieved member nations of many of the powers usually associated with political independence; and the project of establishing an American “world order,” in which nations that do not abide by international law will be coerced into doing so, principally by means of American military might.

See also tribes and clans Anglo-American conservative tradition, 53 Arab states, 115, 162–164, 172, 209–210, 212–213, 217–218 arbitration, 146 Armenia, 21 Assyria, 17, 21, 162–163, 220 atheism, 52 Atlantic Charter, 1, 29 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 34 Auschwitz, 202–209 Australia, 166 Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary, 116, 139–140, 172. See also Holy Roman Empire authoritarianism, 53 Babylonia, 17, 20–21, 23, 44 balance of power, 126–127, 137, 180–181 Ben-Gurion, David, 2, 202–203 Berlin Wall, 3 Bible, 7, 17–20, 22–26, 30, 34–35, 49, 51–54, 60, 68, 99–100, 149, 151, 160, 164, 171, 221–222, 225 bilateral negotiations, 186 borders, boundaries, 33–34, 44, 115, 119–121, 123–124, 126, 132, 135, 137, 142, 145, 155, 160–164, 181–185, 197, 225–226 liberal internationalism and, 219 Moses setting, 18–20 national or tribal, 162 protections within, 177–179 self-imposed, 128 Bosnia, 179, 182 Britain, England, 1–5, 7–8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 40–42, 46, 48–50, 54, 107, 117–118, 148, 155, 160–162, 166, 171, 202–203, 208, 214–217, 222 Holocaust and, 108 imperialism of, 117 independence from EU, 48–49 moral outrage against, 49, 215, 217 nationalism in, 1, 5–6 Protestant order in, 54–55 Burke, Edmund, 33, 54, 77, 231 Bush, George H.


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

For example, if you could build a wall through a city, then take it away, it might be possible to detect more reliably the effect of such influences as property prices and urban concentration on economic development as people and businesses change on either side and then come together again. No such deliberate experiment is possible. But the Berlin Wall did it for us.5 These ‘cute’ studies, as some call them dismissively, are not the answer to everything, but they are becoming a foundation of economic inquiry. 2. Triangulate. If we are going to experiment, we had better do it right, more aware of the potential pitfalls. The replication saga has shown how easily our experiments and analyses can be flawed, especially that one way of looking at the evidence can be tenuous.

Chapter 9 1 Disciplined pluralism is described in his book The Truth About Markets, London, Penguin, 2004, among other writings. 2 My Radio 4 colleague Tim Harford has suggested we encourage more Kay-like discipline with a prize for the best public change of mind. 3 David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference, London, W. H. Allen, 2015. 4 The Behavioural Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) has useful resources on its website, including papers about experiment in government, such as: ‘Test, Learn, Adapt’. 5 Gabriel Ahlfeldt et al., ‘The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall’, Econometrica, vol. 83, no. 6, 2015, pp. 2127–2189. 6 Lurking behind this sentence is an increasingly fraught argument about the value of randomized controlled trials. I like RCTs, on the whole. Done well, they’re a very good start, and some objections to them seem to me overdone. But they are not perfect, and they often generalize less well than expected, especially in the social sciences.


pages: 308 words: 87,238

Apollo 11: The Inside Story by David Whitehouse

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip

Three months after Gagarin’s flight, Khrushchev invited Korolev and a number of other prominent space figures to meet with him on a vacation in Crimea. Korolev said that a second Vostok mission was in preparation. Khrushchev added that the launch should occur no later than 10 August. Later the reason became clear – the building of the Berlin Wall began on 13 August. Khrushchev had wanted to give the socialist world a morale boost during such a tense time. As the launch date approached there was some trepidation because of higher than usual radiation resulting from intense solar activity, but this declined sufficiently in time for the launch.

Index A Aaron, John 1 AFD Conference Loop 1 Agena target vehicle 1, 2, 3 Agnew, Spiro 1, 2 Aldrin, Edwin (Buzz) after Apollo program 1 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 background 1 oldest moonwalker alive 1 and being first out of Lunar Module 1 Gemini 12 1 Moon landing 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 see also Apollo 11 Aldrin, Edwin Sr 1 Aldrin, Joan 1, 2 Aldrin, Lois 1 all-up testing 1 Allen, Harvey 1 ‘America’ (Apollo 17 Command Module) 1 Anders, William (Bill) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 quotes 1, 2 ‘Angry Alligator’ 1 Anikeyev, Ivan 1 ‘Antares’ (Apollo 14 Lunar Module) 1, 2 Apollo 1 1, 2 Apollo 4 1 Apollo 5 1 Apollo 6 1 Apollo 7 1, 2 Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 9 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Apollo 10 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Apollo 11 abort handle 1 Armstrong chosen as commander 1 astronauts on lunar surface 1 chosen for first lunar landing 1 descent towards lunar surface 1 first man on lunar surface issue 1 journey to the Moon 1 landing site search 1 launch 1 orbiting Moon 1 pre-launch preparation 1 radars 1 return to Earth 1 significance 1 timing of mission 1 touchdown 1 Apollo 12 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Apollo 13 1 abort decision 1 crew selection 1 oxygen tank problems 1, 2 preparation 1 re-entry 1 return to Earth 1 water problem 1 Apollo 14 1, 2 Apollo 15 1, 2 Apollo 16 1 Apollo 17 1 Apollo program announcement 1 as faltering 1 mission cancellations 1, 2, 3 planning for 1 summary 1 White House discussion 1 Apollo-Soyuz docking mission 1 Apollo-Saturn 500-F 1 ‘Aquarius’ (Apollo 13 Lunar Module) 1, 2, 3 Armstrong, Carol (née Knight) 1 Armstrong, Jan 1 Armstrong, Neil after Apollo program 1, 2 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 chosen as commander 1 background 1, 2, 3 death and memorial 1 first Moon landing contender 1 and being first out of Lunar Module 1 first words on Moon 1 Gemini 8 1 LLRV incident 1 and Lovell 1 Moon landing 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4 on Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 recruitment 1, 2 see also Apollo 11 Armstrong, Stephen Koenig 1 Atlas rocket 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘Aurora 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 B Babakin, Georgy 1 Babbitt, Don 1 Baikonur 1 Bales, Steve 1 Bassett, Charles 1 Bean, Alan 1 Becker, Karl 1 Belyayev, Pavel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Beregovoi, Georgi 1, 2, 3 Beriya, Lavrenti 1 Berlin Wall 1 Bibby, Cecilia 1 Blagonravov, Anatoli 1 Block D booster stage 1, 2 Blok E 1 Borman, Frank and Apollo 1 1, 2, 3 Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Gemini 7 1, 2 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 recruitment 1 and returning Moon astronauts 1 Borman, Susan 1 Bourgin, Si 1 Brezhnev, Leonid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Bykovsky, Valeri 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 C capsules, design 1, 2 Carlton, Bob 1, 2 Carpenter, Scott 1, 2, 3, 4 Carr, Gerry 1 Cernan, Gene 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Apollo 10 1 Apollo 17 1 last words on Moon 1 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4 on special few who went to Moon 1 Cernan, Tracy 1, 2 Chaffee, Roger 1 ‘Challenger’ (Apollo 17 Lunar Module) 1, 2 Challenger Space Shuttle accident 1 ‘Charlie Brown’ (Apollo 10 Command Module) 1 Chekunov, Boris 1 Chelomei, Vladimir 1, 2 Chertok, Boris 1 chimpanzees, in space 1, 2 Churchill, Winston 1, 2 CIA 1 Clarke, Rosemary 1 Cobb, Geraldyn (Jerrie) 1 Collins, James L. 1 Collins, Michael after Apollo program 1, 2 on Aldrin 1 and Apollo 8 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 11 1, 2, 3, 4 on Armstrong 1, 2 background 1 Gemini 10 1 Paris Air Show 1 quotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 see also Apollo 11 Collins, Pat 1 ‘Columbia’ (Apollo 11 Command Module) 1, 2, 3, 4 Columbus, Christopher 1 Command Module (CM) 1, 2, 3 Apollo 1 1, 2, 3 Apollo 9 (‘Gumdrop’) 1 Apollo 10 (‘Charlie Brown’) 1 Apollo 11 (‘Columbia’) 1, 2, 3, 4 Apollo 12 (‘Yankee Clipper’) 1, 2 Apollo 13 (‘Odyssey’) 1, 2, 3 Apollo 14 (‘Kitty Hawk’) 1 Apollo 15 (‘Endeavour’) 1 Apollo 17 (‘America’) 1 redesign 1 test in space 1 Command and Service Module (CSM) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Apollo 8 1, 2 Cone crater 1 Conrad, Charles (Pete) 1, 2 Apollo 12 1, 2, 3 Gemini 11 1 quotes 1 recruitment 1 Cooper, Gordon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copernicus crater 1, 2 cosmonauts, first 1 Council for the Problems of Mastering the Moon 1 crawler 1 cryogenics 1, 2 Cunningham, Walter 1, 2, 3, 4 D Debus, Kurt 1 Descartes crater 1 Descartes highlands 1 Dezik (dog) 1 Disney, Walt 1 dogs, in space 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Dönitz, Karl 1 Dornberger, Walter 1, 2 Dryden, Hugh 1, 2 Duke, Charlie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 E E-1 Moon probes 1 ‘Eagle’ (Apollo 11 Lunar Module) 1, 2, 3, 4 communication problems 1, 2 computer alarms 1 landing 1, 2 lift-off and docking 1 Earth, Lunar Orbiter 1 picture of 1 as spacecraft 1 ‘Earthrise’ picture 1 Einstein, Albert 1 Eisele, Donn 1, 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ‘Endeavour’ (Apollo 15 Command Module) 1 Engel, Viola Louise 1 Engle, Joe 1 Evans, Ron 1 Explorer 1 1 F F-1 engines 1, 2, 3 Faget, Max 1, 2 ‘Faith 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 ‘Falcon’ (Apollo 15 Lunar Module) 1 Feoktistov, Konstantin 1, 2, 3, 4 Filatev, Valentin 1 flags, on lunar surface 1, 2 Fra Mauro 1, 2, 3 ‘Friendship 7’ (Mercury capsule) 1 G G levels 1 Gagarin, Alexei 1 Gagarin, Anna 1 Gagarin, Boris 1 Gagarin, Valentin 1 Gagarin, Valya 1 Gagarin, Yuri background 1, 2, 3 chosen as first cosmonaut 1 disciplined 1 first space flight 1 in ground role 1, 2, 3, 4 and Soyuz program 1, 2, 3 and Vostok 6 1 Gagarin, Zorya 1 Gallay, Mark 1 Gazenko, Oleg 1, 2 Gemini program 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gemini 3 1 Gemini 4 1, 2 Gemini 5 1 Gemini 6 1 Gemini 7 1, 2, 3, 4 Gemini 8 1, 2 Gemini 9 1 Gemini 10 1 Gemini 11 1 Gemini 12 1 importance 1 German measles 1 ‘Giant Leap’ tour 1 Gilruth, Robert (Bob) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 GIRD 1, 2 Glenn, Annie 1 Glenn, John at Armstrong memorial 1 first space flight 1, 2, 3 in Mercury Seven 1 quotes 1, 2 on Space Shuttle 1 on women astronauts 1 Glennan, T.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

did not start with Donald Trump’s attempt to keep foreigners out, but with the desperate attempt of communist regimes to keep their citizens in. I grew up with images of people trying to climb over the walls, but younger people have no such memory: they can only learn it from books, and the books give priority to other parts of history. My ten-year-old knows about Hadrian’s Wall but not about the Berlin Wall: try it as a test on your children. Ever since markets began, powerful people have tried to limit competition to their own advantage. Vested interests know far more about the nature of their advantage than public officials can possibly know. Being narrowly defined groups, they find common action in their own interest easier to organize than the diffuse common interest that they oppose.

This is ironic since all the utilities were originally publicly owned monopolies, and the impetus for turning them into commercial companies was public dissatisfaction with their performance. However, the public memory of the inadequacies of public ownership is a decade more distant than memory of the Berlin Wall. Under public ownership, the utilities suffered from capture by their employees, reflected in a very high incidence of strikes, and politicized underpricing of services that caused under-investment. Current discussion has polarized around ideology: ironically, the left wants nationalized industries, but not a sense of nationhood; the right wants a sense of nationhood, but not nationalized industries.


pages: 250 words: 87,722

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

automated trading system, bash_history, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, drone strike, Dutch auction, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, Flash crash, High speed trading, information security, latency arbitrage, National best bid and offer, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the new new thing, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Morgan, Barclays, UBS, Citi, Deutsche Bank. †† Stampfli has not been charged with any wrongdoing. CHAPTER FIVE PUTTING A FACE ON HFT Sergey Aleynikov wasn’t the world’s most eager immigrant to America, or, for that matter, to Wall Street. He’d left Russia in 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but more in sadness than in hope. “When I was nineteen I haven’t imagined leaving it,” he says. “I was very patriotic about Russia. I cried when Brezhnev died. And I always hated English. I thought I was completely incapable of learning languages.” His problem with Russia was that its government wouldn’t allow him to study what he wanted to study.

The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the more people you will have who know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who are skilled at working around the system.” The population was thus well suited to exploit megatrends in both computers and the United States financial markets. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a lot of Russians fled to the United States without a lot of English; one way to make a living without having to converse with the locals was to program their computers. “I know people who never programmed computers but when they get here they say they are computer programmers,” said Constantine.


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

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

This has brought about unmatched attainment of wealth, facilitated through competitive markets and driven by a competitive financial system, which, in turn, has spurred on even greater striving for more innovation, ingenuity, and originality. This is the underpinning of the great American dream, which has been triumphantly exported to the rest of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and rise of the Iron Curtain. Today, for instance, China, India, Brazil, and Poland, with their meteoric growth and the rise of their own meritocracies, are prime examples. That dream, however, has turned into a nightmare. We now have scientific proof that the monoculture of a single type of currency is a root cause of the repeated monetary and financial instabilities that have manifested throughout modern history.

Minorities were used as scapegoats by ethnic leaders to redirect anger away from themselves and toward a common enemy, providing the sociopolitical context for extreme nationalist leaders to gain power in the process. Within days of the 1998 monetary crisis in Indonesia, mobs were incited to violence against Chinese and other minorities. Similarly, in Russia, discrimination against minorities was aggravated by the financial collapse of the 1990s. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, it could be argued that the identified archenemy of the United States has now been supplanted with a new foe, immigrants and the poor. Today in the United States, there are some 1,018 identified hate groups compared to only 602 in 2000.18 Another important lesson, and an expensive one in terms of human misery with regard to cooperative currencies, is revealed by the more recent economic crisis in Argentina.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

(is a rare event).”3 Around the world, many people first learned of Bin Laden’s death and followed the ensuing story not by watching a network newscast or reading a newspaper front page but by reading posts circulated via Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Consider four other recent world-changing events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the tragic events of September 11. In each of these previous events, professional journalists working in the mainstream media played a crucial and even iconic role in delivering and distributing the news to a mass audience. In the case of President Kennedy’s assassination, Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts on CBS News came to stand as a shared cultural experience for millions of Americans.

In the case of President Kennedy’s assassination, Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts on CBS News came to stand as a shared cultural experience for millions of Americans. Who was not moved watching the great journalist choke up while announcing the president’s death? The names of two respected newspaper journalists—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—likewise became indelibly linked to the Watergate scandal. Network television footage of crowds at the Berlin Wall in the darkness of November 9, 1989, provided unforgettable, collective images of the end of the Cold War, echoing President Reagan’s powerful rhetoric a few years earlier: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And burned into the consciousness of many Americans following September 11, 2001, is the television footage of the airplanes plunging into the Twin Towers, not to mention the figure of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, standing at the podium answering questions at press conference after press conference with a mixture of calm, grief, and determination.


pages: 266 words: 85,223

A Time of Birds: Reflections on Cycling Across Europe by Helen Moat

Airbnb, Berlin Wall, hobby farmer

We went to have a closer look at the German king and found an inscription beneath the statue: Never will the Empire be destroyed as long as you are faithful and true. In a truly ironic strike, an American artillery shell had badly damaged the statue in 1945 and it was not until German reunification in 1990 that the statue was reconstructed and reinstated in all its glory, now a symbol of the newly reunified Germany. Next to it, three sections of Berlin Wall sat side by side, commemorating the victims of the divided post-war Germany. When I travelled on a train from Switzerland along the Rhine in 1990, just after the fall of the Wall, an East German student, sitting opposite me, had described her life under Communist rule. She’d explained how limited her freedom had been under the Socialist Unity Party: everything decided on her behalf, from holiday destinations to university – even the subjects she took.

I was already in my twenties. But bit by bit, the Troubles rumbled to an end. Years of negotiations had brought us a peace deal. It was a painful birth into a new era, an uneasy peace. Reunification in Germany was another matter: the events unfolded almost overnight. I watched the crowds chisel away the Berlin Wall on the TV screen of my flat in Switzerland. Could this really be happening? As a friend of a friend was writing a dissertation arguing that the Wall would never fall, it collapsed. Overnight, my East German unit at university became obsolete. Reunited, friends and families in Germany hugged and cried after decades of separation.


pages: 304 words: 84,396

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

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

I look from the face of the man in the shop to the face of the woman in the photo and the truth is strange but unmistakable: they are one and the same person. It took many years for Andreas Krieger—the name Heidi chose following her sex-change operation in 1997—to discover what had been perpetrated at the Berlin Dynamo Club. Top-secret documents relating to the sporting system in East Germany were uncovered only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it took almost a decade to excavate the full, mind-bending story. At the heart of the infamy were those bright blue pills. Krieger discovered that they were not vitamin tablets but anabolic steroids called Oral-Turinabol: powerful prescription drugs that built muscle and induced male characteristics.

One way to eliminate drug cheating, of course, would be to legalize drug taking (without rules to break, cheating would cease to exist by definition), but this would surely be an intolerable solution. Success would be determined not by ability and hard work but by a willingness to trade future life expectancy for present glory. The dangers of excessive doping were comprehensively demonstrated during the doping trials after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as we have seen. The question, therefore, is whether there is a middle road between prohibition and full-scale legalization. According to Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, there is. In a radical new approach, he argues that we should not legalize all performance-enhancing drugs; rather we should legalize safe enhancers.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the USA meanwhile, the participation rate (share of labour force to population) declined by over 4pp during the same time—had it stayed steady, the unemployment rate would have been higher before the pandemic struck. 1.1.2 …and the Re-integration of Eastern Europe But there was yet another boost to the world’s effective labour supply, arising from the collapse of the USSR, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This brought the whole of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic States, through Poland down to Bulgaria, also into the world’s trading system. The population of working age in Eastern Europe rose from 209.4 million in 2000 to 209.7 million in 2010 and is now projected to be 193.9 million in 2020.

Average household size B ‘Baby-boom’ cohort Baby boomers Baby-boomers, retiring Baby boomers saving Babylonia Baby, mean age of first birth Baby, rise in age of having first Bad banks Balance of savings and investment Baltic States Bangladesh Bank capital Bank equity Banking Bank of England Bank of England, Financial Stability Report Bank of Japan (BoJ) Bargaining position of Labour, strengthening Bargaining power Bargaining power, decline for labour Bargaining power, increasing Bargaining power, less for workers in gig economy Bargaining power, of labour, reduced by globalisation Bargaining power, of labour relative to employers Bargaining power of labour Bargaining power of labour, declining Bargaining power of Labour, previously weakened Bargaining power of labour, recovering Barkema, J. Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Basic care Bauer, J.M. Bayoumi, T. BBB debt issue BBC News Belgium Belt and Road Initiative Benetton, M. Benford, J. Berlin Wall Bernanke, B.S. Beveridge, William Bianchi, F. Bio-markers Birkbeck Birth rate Birth rates, declining Birth rates, low BIS Blinder, S. Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate Global Index Bloom, D.E., Live Long and Prosper Blue-collar workers Board members Board of Directors Boehm, C.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

In Koba the Dread, his 2002 book about Stalin and the British left’s historic reluctance to condemn the crimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites, Amis suggests that his old friend began to mature as a writer, his prose gaining in ‘burnish and authority’, only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as if before then he had been aesthetically restrained and compromised by a self-imposed demand to hold a fixed ideological line, even at the expense of truth-telling. My view is different. I think Hitchens was liberated as a political writer long before the fall of the Berlin Wall – through moving, in his early thirties, first to New York and then to Washington, DC. There, after some early struggles, he found his voice and signature style, contributing to Harper’s and the Nation and, later, as a well-paid deluxe contrarian, to Vanity Fair and the Atlantic.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

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

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

Today we know that from the 1990s, the UK was sleepwalking into a debt crisis — one that would end in a much bigger crash than that of 1989.45 But at the time, the country was blissfully unaware of the problems that were being stored up for the future. To many people, the avalanche of cheap credit seemed like a gift from the heavens. This boom coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and a new era of globalisation, during which cheap consumer goods from all over the world would become more readily available than ever before in history. Working people were able to afford plasma screen TVs, mobile phones, and video game consoles. But peoples’ experiences of the long boom differed depending upon their class position.

In its place, new narratives have emerged among new political communities — whether white supremacists on the internet, or climate strikers in their schools. All around the world, people are turning to one another and saying the same thing: “things cannot go on as they are”. The gravity of this moment is hard to grasp for those who lived through the period of stability following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But perhaps the most important lesson to have emerged from the events of the last decades is that no capitalist system can remain stable for long. The global economy does not operate according to the predictable laws of neoclassical economics, thrown off course only by external shocks. Instead, capitalism engenders complexity, meaning that even the best organised capitalist economies inevitably tend towards chaos.


pages: 277 words: 86,352

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

By then the standoff was national news, with the Cable News Network at the head of the pack. In an era when cable TV was relatively new, CNN had scored ratings coups with coverage of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; the rescue of “Baby Jessica” McClure, who fell into a well in Midland, Texas, the following year; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and other breaking events—coverage the three broadcast networks, with their schedules of afternoon soap operas and prime-time dramas and sitcoms, couldn’t match. That evening, Koresh was on national TV. “They came all locked and loaded,” he told CNN anchor David French in a phone hookup.

Koresh and Amen, Jesse American Terrorist (Michel and Herbeck) America Wake Up or Waco (documentary) Anderson, Bonnie angels Anthill antiabortion movement Anti-Defamation League anti-immigration movement anti-Semitism apocalypse Apocalypse Now (film) AR-15s Arizona state legislature Armageddon Arnold, Phillip arson investigation assault weapon ban Assyrians Austin American-Statesman Austin Community College Australia U.S. embassy in automatic weapons Babylon Bain, Sarah Ballesteros, Roland Baranyai, Elizabeth Barry, Linda Baylor University BBC Bellmead Civic Center Berlin Wall, fall of Bethlehem Bible. See also specific books and biblical figures Bible study meetings Biden, Joe Big Spring, Texas Blake, Winston Boykin, William Bradley tanks Branch Davidians Mount Carmel compound. See also Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Koresh, David aftermath of FBI raid Alaniz breaks into, during siege Alaskan malamutes and Alex Jones and Anthill first built by apocalypse awaited and fails to arrive arms stockpiled by arson investigations and ATF investigates ATF obtains search warrant vs.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

On 9 November 1989 a bemused East Berlin press corps were informed that ‘the decision [had been] taken to make it possible for all citizens to leave the country through the official border crossing points … to take effect at once’, news that prompted a flood of East Berliners to the border checkpoints. Unprepared, guards opted not to resist. By midnight all the checkpoints had been forced to open and one of the greatest parties of the century was under way, closely followed by one of its biggest shopping sprees. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was essentially over, though it was not until the failed Moscow coup of August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus, along with the three big Caucasian republics and the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, became independent states.

Brian 300–301 Archimedes 63 Argentina 124 Aristotle 51 De anima 62 Arkwright, Richard 70, 200, 204 Armstrong, Louis 18 art/painting 60, 232 see also individual artists Asia, East 307–8 civilization(s) 3–5, 7, 11, 20 economic growth/output 239–40 science/technology 4, 11 see also individual countries astrology 68–9, 70 astronomy 64, 65, 66 Islamic 68–9 Atahualpa (Inca leader) 100, 101 Atatürk, Kemal (Kemal Mustafa) 90–93, 228 atomic weapons 235 Augustine, St: City of God 60 Austerlitz, battle of (1805) 156, 156n Austria 83, 215 see also Habsburg empire Austrian colonies 144 Aztec empire 99 Bach, Johann Sebastian 18, 80 Bacon, Roger 60 on Islamic science/technology 52 Bakunin, Mikhail 162, 162n ballistics 83–5, 156 banking system 230–31 Beethoven, Ludwig van 18, 159 Behring, Emil von 175 Belgian colonies 144, 176, 191 Belgium 16, 213 Bentham, Jeremy 199n von Berenhorst, Georg Heinrich 81–2 Bergson, Henri 196n Berlin Wall 249, 251 Bernanke, Ben 308 Bernoulli, Daniel 66 Berry, Chuck 18 Best, Werner 194 Das Beste (German magazine) 252n the Bible 62, 263, 278–9 Book of Revelations 293–4 Bingham, Hiram 101 Birmingham Lunar Society 201 von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold 214 Black, Joseph 66 Black Death/plague 4, 23, 25, 54, 169, 175 Blake, William 206 Boehn, General Hans von 185 Bolingbroke, Viscount Henry St John 296–7 Bolívar, Simón 13, 119–24, 128 on American Constitution 123–4 British support for 121–2, 125 Cartagena Manifesto (1812) 123, 124 Decree of War to the Death 120 as a dictator 124 on political systems 123, 124 Bolivia 122 Bonaparte, Jérôme 159 Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon Bonaparte Bonneval, comte Claude Alexandre de 87 Boss, Hugo 233 Boswell, James 201 Böttcher, Viktor 189–90 Boulton, Matthew 201, 202, 206n Boves, José Tomás 120 Boxer Rebellion, China (1900) 282–3 Boyacá, battle of (1819) 122 Boyce, Sir Rupert William 169 Boyle, Robert 66 Boyle’s Law 66, 83 Bozeman, Adda 3 Brabenec, Vratislav 248 Brahe, Tycho 65 Brahms, Johannes xxiii Braudel, Fernand, on civilization(s) xxv–xxvi, 3 Brazil 17, 127, 130, 139 slavery in 130–32, 133 Brazzaville Conference (1944) 195 Britain 12, 14, 161, 201, 202 Simón Bolívar, support for 121–2, 125 Christianity, decline of 267–70 financial system 161, 219 France and 140, 160, 161, 173 Industrial Revolution 10, 13, 21, 28–9, 70, 199–200, 203–5 legal system 202–3 living standards 210–11 London see London political system 202–3 in Second World War 234 see also England; Scotland British army 233–4 British East India Company 38, 83, 161, 201, 278 British empire 142, 164, 263–4 in Africa 148, 168, 173, 176 in America see America, North, British colonies decline of 163, 303 extent of 142 in India 144, 169–70, 264 Jamaica 148 property rights 125 Bruckner, Anton xxiii Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder): The Triumph of Death (painting) 25–6 Brunelleschi, Filippo 60 Burke, Edmund on American Revolution 149 on French Revolution 149, 150–52, 152n, 155, 156 Burnett, Leo 241 Burns, Robert xxiii–xxiv Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de 9, 53 Bush, George W. xvi, xvii Butterfield, Herbert xxi Byron, Lord George 74, 121 Byzantine empire 3, 4, 17, 52 Cajamarca, battle of (1532) 100, 101 Callot, Jacques: Miseries of War (engravings) 12 Canada 116, 119, 125 see also America, North, British colonies Cápac, Manco 100 capitalism 7, 11, 14, 15–16, 205, 207–8, 210–11, 219, 246, 262–3, 288 development of 263; in China 17, 252–3, 277, 304, 306–8 in Great Depression 229–31 Carabobo, battle of (1821) 122, 123 Caribbean area 10, 97, 119, 120, 123, 148 slavery in 131 Carlyle, Thomas, on the cash nexus 206 Cartwright, Edmund 200 Castellani, Aldo 170 Catholicism 17, 61, 259, 260, 263, 266, 269, 278 in Spanish American colonies 113–14, 120, 120n, 131 Cavour, conte Camillo Benso de 214 Caxton, William 61 Celsus: De re medica 62–3 Chancellor, Richard 36 Chanoine, Julien 166 Charles I, King of England 194, 106, 107, 152 Charmes, Gabriel 165 Chávez, Hugo 128 Chesterton, G.

H. 103–4 empires see imperialism; individual empires Encümen-i Daniş (Assembly of Knowledge), Ottoman empire 89 Engels, Friedrich 207, 209, 210–11, 228 England 4, 18, 37 China and 47–9 exploration, voyages of 36 France and 23, 24, 39 Industrial Revolution 10, 13, 21, 28–9, 70 Ireland and 24, 105, 203n London see London slavery (chattel slavery) in 130, 132 see also Britain; British empire English Civil Wars 104, 105, 106, 107, 115, 150, 152 the Enlightenment 76–9, 81 environmental issues 17, 293–4, 299 Epp, Franz Xavier Ritter von 188–9 Erasmus, Desiderius xxiii Erdely, Eugene 190 Eugene of Savoy, Prince 56 eugenics 176–7 in Germany 176–81, 189–90, 191; in German Namibia 176–81; genocide in 179–80, 188 Euler, Leonard 84 Euphrates river/valley 17 Europe competition between states 36–42 geography 36–7 Islamic envoys to 86–7 US and 16 see also individual countries European integration 14–15, 239 Everett, Edward 137 exploration, voyages of 9, 23, 38 Chinese 28–33, 48 English 36 marine chronometers for 70 as missionary endeavours 39 Portuguese 33–5, 39, 53, 130 Spanish 35–6 Faidherbe, Louis, governor of Senegal 164, 165, 166 fashion/clothing 197–8, 219–20, 225, 237, 246, 255 communist attitude to 249–50 in Japan 220–21, 222, 223, 225 jeans 240–44, 246–9, 250 machine made 217–18, 237 for men 216, 220–21, 230 military uniforms 215–16, 229, 233, 234, 237 for women 216, 220, 246; Islamic 253–5, 253n see also consumerism Fashoda incident, Sudan (1898) 173 Feng Youlan: History of Chinese Philosophy 27 Feraios, Rigas 213 Fermat, Pierre de 66 Ferrier, Thomas 121, 122 Ferry, Jules, Prime Minister of France 172 Fertile Crescent concept 17 film industry 230, 231 Filmer, Sir Robert: Patriarcha 108 financial systems 7, 14, 139 in Asia 7, 252–3, 277–8 banking 230–31 capitalism see capitalism cash nexus concept 206–7 consumer credit 238 in Europe 106–7, 161 markets/market economy 205–6, 276–7 money supply 38 monopolies 38 taxation 38, 44, 106, 107, 117, 210–11, 288 see also economic …; Great Depression First World War (1914–18) 16, 92, 148–9, 181, 182, 227 African colonial troops in 181–9; French 183–7; German 182 casualty figures 181, 183, 186, 187 Dardanelles 85 Gallipoli 91, 182 Rudyard Kipling on 187–8 Fischer, Eugen 180–81, 189 Human Heredity … 189 food see diet food supplies 22, 200–201 famine 44, 46 see also agriculture foreign aid, to Africa 145–6 France 4, 16, 36, 37, 83, 85 American Revolution and 117 Britain and 140, 160, 161, 173 economic crises 149–50, 161 England and 23, 24, 39 the Enlightenment 77–8 in First World War 182–3, 185–7 Huguenots 39, 41, 76 Italy and 159 literacy rates 77 living standards 24–5 the Marseillaise 156, 156n under Napoleon Bonaparte 119, 142, 156–61 Paris 5, 77, 215 property rights 152 Russia and 160 Spain and 119 student unrest 245 see also French … Frauenfeld, Alfred 193 Frederick the Great of Prussia 73–4 The Anti-Machiavel 75, 79–80 as an intellectual 79–80 Political Testaments 73, 80 as a scientific patron 71, 79–80, 84 French army, in First World War 182–3, 185–7 mutiny in 186–7 French empire 148, 159, 160, 195 in Africa 163–75, 176, 188, 190–91; segregation in 174–5 colonial armies 164; in First World War 183–7 Ecole Coloniale 165, 166–7, 172 extent of 144 institutional structure 172–3 legal system 165–6 male suffrage in 163 in North America (Louisiana Purchase) 163, 160–61 slavery, abolition of 163–4 unrest in 163, 175 French Revolution 119, 142, 149–57, 161–2 Edmund Burke on 149, 150–52, 152n, 155, 156 causes of 149–50, 153 Declaration of the Rights of Man 150, 151 executions during 152–3 political system during 152–3 as a religious conflict 151, 152, 153, 154 Rousseau and 151–2 the Terror 153, 155–6 Alexis de Tocqueville on 153–4 see also France … French West Africa 170–71, 174, 191 Freud, Sigmund 16 on civilization 272–3 on religion 270–71, 272 Frisch, Otto 235 Galileo Galilei 65, 66, 83, 84 Galton, Francis 176–7 Kantsaywhere 177n Gandhi, Mahatma 217 on Western civilization 141, 144, 171, 195 on Western medicine 146, 149 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 229 Le Gazetier Cuirassé 79 genocide 179–80, 188, 193, 194, 234 see also eugenics German army, in First World War 182–3, 185–7 colonial troops 182 German empire 144 in Africa 176–81, 188–90, 191; legal system 177, racial issues 176, 177–81; rebellion in 178–9 Nazi, in Eastern Europe 189–90, 191–5 German nationalism 213, 214 Germany 11, 16, 38, 159 division of, post-1945 243; Berlin Wall 249, 251 economic growth/output 231, 232–3 eugenics in 176–81 living standards 232–3 Nazi regime 189–90, 191–5, 231–4; see also Hitler, Adolf as a printing centre 61 Reformation 38 Russia and 192, 194, 231–2 as a scientific centre 175–6 Gibbon, Edward 78 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 257–9, 291–2 Gide, André 174 Gilbert, William 65 Ginsburg, Allen 247 globalization 239 gold, from South America 99, 101–2, 130 golf 28 Goltz, Colmar Freiherr von de (Goltz Pasha) 91 Gorbachev, Mikhail 250 Göring, Heinrich (father of Hermann Göring) 176, 189 Göring, Hermann 176, 189, 193 Graham, Billy 273–4 Great Britain see Britain Great Depression 229–31 Greece 15, 17, 21 Greek nationalism 213, 228 Greer, Germaine 246 Gregory VII, Pope 60 Grijns, Gerrit 170 Grimm, Hans: People without Space 189 Grosseteste, Robert 60 Guettard, Jean-Etienne 66 Guizot, François xxvii Gutenberg, Johann 60–61 Habsburg empire 8–9, 53, 144 Ottoman empire’s invasion of (1683) 52, 54–7 Vienna, siege of (1683) 52, 53, 55, 57 see also Austria Haiti 120, 128, 160 Hamakari, battle of (1904) 179 Hammond, Mac 275 Hardy, Georges 166 Hargreaves, James 200 Harrison, John 70 Harvey, William 66 Haussmann, Baron Georges 215 Havel, Václav 248–9 Hawaii 144 Hayek, Friedrich von 301 Road to Serfdom 237 health issues 7, 12, 14, 44, 68, 175–6 antibiotics 148 Black Death/plague 4, 23, 25, 54, 169, 175 death 25–6 definition 13 diet and 170 eugenics see eugenics European diseases, spread of 99, 101 hospitals: Islamic 51 medical schools 53 native medicine/healers 171–2 public health 147, 148, 171–2, 177, 205 sanitation 23, 147, 179 tropical diseases 148, 168–70, 173; mortality rate from 168; research on 169–70, 174 vaccination 14, 147, 148, 170, 173, 175 Western medicine, benefits of 146–8, 168–75, 191 witch doctors 171, 172 health transition concept 147–8 Heck, Walter 233 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 159, 207, 212 Helvétius, Adrien 78 Hempel, Carl xx Hendel, Ann Katrin 250 Henry V, King of England 23, 24, 39 Henry VIII, King of England 72, 103–4 Henry the Navigator, King of Portugal 39 Himmler, Heinrich 190, 192, 193–4 Hirohito, Crown Prince of Japan 220, 225–6 Hispaniola (island) 101–2 history teaching of xviii–xx limitations of xx–xxii Hitler, Adolf 189–90, 194, 231 Hossbach memorandum 233 see also Germany, Nazi regime Ho Chi Minh 167 Hobbes, Thomas 24, 73 on liberty 107–8 Hoffmann, Erich 175–6 Hogg, James xxvi Holbach, baron Paul-Henri Thiry d’ 79 homicide rates 24, 25, 105 Hong Kong 105, 169 Hong Xiuquan 279–80 Hooke, Thomas 67, 70 Micrographia 64 How, Millicent (English migrant to South Carolina) 103, 106, 111–12 Hu Jintao 287–8 Huguenots 39, 41, 76 human rights 8 Hume, David 77, 78 Hungary 251 Huntington, Samuel, on Western civilization 15, 16, 312–13 Hus, Jan 61 Hussein, Saddam xvi Hutton, James 66 Ibrahim, Muktar Said 288–9 illiteracy see literacy rates imperialism 8–10, 13, 14, 15, 142–95, 302–3 in Africa 14, 139, 145, 146, 148, 163–75; see also individual countries in America see America … colonial armies/troops 164, 181–9 communications, difficulty of 170–71, 181–2 as conquest 99–102 European diseases spread by 99, 101 growth/decline of 3, 4, 5, 13, 38, 142, 144–5 impact of 8, 45, 46, 144–6, 173–4, 190–95 institutional structures and 103–5 Lenin on 144 as a term of abuse 144, 145 Mark Twain on 144 Western 14, 15, 96–140, 142–95 Western medicine, benefits of to overseas colonies 146–8, 168–75, 191 see also individual empires Inca empire, Spanish conquest of 98, 99–102 income levels see living standards; wages India 5, 9, 17, 36 as British colony 144, 264 China and 29, 32 as independent state 224–5 Portugal and 34, 35, 39 science/technology 11 textile industry 2245 Indian Medical Service 169–70 Indian Ocean 29, 32, 33 Indo-China, as a French colony 167, 191 Indonesia 240 Industrial Revolution 13, 21, 28–9, 70, 198–205 in Britain 10, 13, 21, 28–9, 70, 199–200, 203–5 consumerism, increase caused by 201–2 definition 198–9 spread of 204–5, 225, 264 industrialization 10, 14, 216–18 in China 225, 284, 285 inequality see living standards infant mortality see life expectancy Inoue Kaoru 226 institutional structures 11–14 cultural 77 financial/economic see financial systems imperialism and 103–5, 112, 172–3, 287 of Islamic fundamentalism 288, 289, 290n Islamic 289, 290, 290n Iran 94–5, 255 Ireland 11, 227, 203n England and 24, 105 iron/steel industry 200–201 Islam 3, 8, 9, 16, 60 calligraphy, importance of 68 Europe, envoys sent to 86–7 health issues: hospitals 51; medical schools 53 the Koran 63 population figures 290 printing, attitude to 68, 86 religious conflict 71 in Turkey 253–5 the West and 39, 50–57, 63, 85–90, 255 women’s clothing 253–5, 254n see also Ottoman empire; religious issues Islamic education 51 Islamic fundamentalism 93–5, 93n, 255, 258, 288–91 institutional structure 288, 289, 290n Islamic migration 290, 290n Islamic science/technology 51–7, 264 astronomy 68–9 attitudes to 67–9 Roger Bacon on 52 modernization of 88–9, 92, 94–5 optics 51–2 Israel 92–5, 246–7 Jerusalem 93, 93n, 94 science/technology in 93–4 see also Jews Italian city-states/Italy 4, 25, 28, 159, 182 France and 159 Under Mussolini 228 Naples 26, 159 as a printing centre 63 Rome 17; March on (1922) 228–9 in Second World War 233–4 Venice 38–9 see also Roman empire Italian colonies 144 Italian unification 212–13, 214–15, 228 Iwakura Tomomi 221 Jamaica 120, 123 as a British colony 148 Jansen, Zacharias 65 Japan 5, 9, 42 China and 226, 233, 234 fashion/clothing 220–21, 222, 223, 225 living standards 45–6 modernization of 90, 218, 221–5, 226, 239, 257; internal opposition to 222 Russia and 226 textile industry 223–4 US and 221; in Second World War 233–5 Western influence on 5, 7, 15, 221–5 women in 222 Japanese armed forces 226, 234 Java 170 jeans, as a symbol of consumerism 240–49, 250 Jefferson, Thomas 134 Jerusalem 93, 93n, 94 Jews 3, 76 as entrepreneurs 216–17, 217n, 262n as intellectuals 235, 235n in Palestine 92–3 persecution of 38–9; in Germany 92, 214, 234, 235 Max Weber on 262 see also Israel Jiang Zemin 287 Jiao Yu and Liu Ji: Huolongjing 28 Jirous, Ivan 248 John Paul II, Pope 252 Johnson, Blind Willie 18 Johnson, Samuel 2, 10 Kahn, Albert 196, 196n Kamen, Dean 145n Kant, Immanuel 76, 79, 80–81 Critique of Pure Reason 76 Kara Mustafa Köprülü (‘the black’), Grand Vizier 52, 54–5, 56, 71, 86 Karaca, Nihal Bengisu 254 Kaufman, Henry xvi Kemal, Mustafa see Atatürk, Kemal Kennedy, Paul: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 298 Keynes, John Maynard 7, 230, 231, 237 Khan, Dr A.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

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

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

The advance of both during and after the Second World War seemed, at least in Europe, to require from governments and employers alike a counter-policy of full employment and systematic social security. 412 Marx and Labour: the Long Century But the USSR no longer exists, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall capitalism could forget how to be frightened, and therefore lost interest in people unlikely to own shares. In any case, even the spells of mass unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to have lost the old power of radicalising their victims. However, it was not only politics but also the economy that proved to require reformism and especially full employment after 1945 – as both Keynes and the Swedish economists of Scandinavian social democracy had predicted.

The state and other public authorities remain the only institutions capable of distributing the social product among its people, in human terms, and to meet human needs that cannot be satisfied by the market. Politics therefore has remained and remains a necessary dimension of the struggle for social improvement. Indeed, the great economic crisis that began in 2008 as a sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall brought an immediate realisation that the state was essential to an economy in trouble, as it had been essential to the triumph of neo-liberalism when governments had laid its foundations by systematic privatisation and deregulation. However, the effect of the period 1973–2008 on social democracy was that it abandoned Bernstein.

., 279 Alexander, Tsar, 33 Australia, 220–2 Althusser, Louis, 125, 334, 337, 339, Austria, 269, 278, 409, 415 366–7, 371–2 and Austro-Marxism, 227 Amendola, Giorgio, 279 and greater Germany, 228–9 American Civil War, 68, 79 and Jews, 228–30 American Revolution, 268, 403 and Marxism, 213, 227–32 Americas, discovery of, 146 Austro-Hungary, 81–2 Amsterdam, 216, 227, 250, 259–60 Austro-Marxists, 123, 230, 239, 373, Anabaptists, 17 375 anarchism, 105, 217–18, 222, 225, 251, Aveling, Edward, 181 359, 416 Aztecs, 173 anarchists, 45, 47, 61, 84, 119, 201, 218 and the arts, 251–3, 256 Babeuf, François-Noël, 22 anarcho-syndicalism, 190, 417 Bagehot, Walter, 243 Andersen Nexö, Martin, 266 Bahr, Hermann, 252 Anderson, Perry, 321 Bakunin, Mikhail, 46, 218, 251, 394 Anderson, Sherwood, 276 Balkans, 81, 235, 278 Anti-Dühring, 27, 39, 49, 53–4, 163, 165, banking, medieval, 139 178–9, 193, 380 Baran, Paul, 363, 371 antisemitism, 228–30, 397 Barbusse, Henri, 266 appeasement, 269 Barcelona, 250 Aragon, Louis, 282 Barmen, 89 architecture, 249–50, 259 Baroja, Pío, 223 Argentina, 124, 195, 271, 403, 411, 415 Barone, Enrico, 9, 240 456 Index Bastiat and Carey, 123 Braudel, Fernand, 374, 391–2 Bauer, Otto, 230, 289, 338, 371 Bray, John Francis, 35 Bauer, Stefan, 230 Brazil, 270, 368, 396, 411 Bazard, Amand, 28 Brecht, Bertolt, 257, 265, 360 Bebel, August, 50, 66, 71, 103, 114, Brentano, Lujo, 240 181, 188 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 22 Belgian Labour Party, 225–6, 249, 251 Britain (England) Belgium, 114, 223, 225–6, 232, 241, appeasement and pacifism, 269, 248–9, 251, 258, 407, 409 274 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 276 bourgeois-aristocratic coexistence, Bengal, 214, 272, 278 71 Benjamin, Walter, 337, 371 and early socialism, 16, 35–6, 42–3, Bennett, Arnold, 223 46 Bentham, Jeremy, 21 economic crisis, 96–7 Berdyayev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, Georgian, 345 213 labour movement, 44, 55, 59, Berlage, H.P., 250, 259 212–13, 220, 400, 402, 410 Berlin, 89, 103, 127, 407 market monopoly, 78–80, 95 Berlin Wall, fall of, 413–14 and markets, 145–6 Berlinguer, Enrico, 336 and Marx–Engels corpus, 192–4, Bernal, J.D., 275, 293, 295 384 Bernanos, Georges, 282 and Marxism, 220–1, 223–4, 237, Bernier, François, 138 259, 266, 276 Bernstein, Eduard, 9, 13, 54, 75, 81, and political refugees, 262–3 183, 188, 190, 370 and revolution, 63, 75–6, 80, 95–6 and Fabianism, 217–18, 406 scientists, 290–1, 381 and twentieth-century reformism, Victorian critics of Marx, 199–210 389, 401–2, 408, 411, 414 and war, 77–9 Bismarck, Otto von, 71–2, 79 working class, 14, 24, 63, 66, 90–1, Björnson, Bjørnstjerne Martinius, 248 97–100, 113–14, 116–17, 361–2, Blackett, Patrick Maynard Stuart, 275 378 Blanc, Louis, 26, 46 British Communist Party, 106, 262, Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 22–3, 46, 56 266–7, 291, 410 Bloch, Joseph, 135 British Museum, 3, 109 Bloch, Marc, 390 Brooke, Rupert, 221 Blum, Léon, 267 Brouckère, Henri de, 226 Blum theses, 299 Browderism, 302, 311 Blunt, Anthony, 279 Bruckner, Anton, 252 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 257, 287 Brussels, 226, 250 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 213, 229, Bryce, James, 243 239 Bucharest, 77 Bolivia, 271 Buchez, Philippe, 46 Bolsheviks, 10, 104, 114, 183, 285, 306, Budapest, 228 312, 329, 386, 405, 410 Bukharin, Nikolai, 287, 371 Bonapartism, 52, 69–71 Bulgaria, 235–6 Bonar, J., 201, 205 Bund, 234 Bonger, W., 227 Buonarroti, Philippe, 22 Bosanquet, B., 204 Buret, Eugène, 42, 91 Bose, Subhas, 272 Burgess, Guy, 279 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 19 Burke, Peter, 342 Bradford, 98 Burns, Mary, 98 Branting, Hjalmar, 223 Buttigeig, Joseph, 338 457 How to Change the World Cabet, Etienne, 17, 19, 24, 27 civil society, 51, 320, 323, 338 Cafiero, Carlo, 181 Civil War in France, The, 103, 178–9, Calcutta, 339 189, 192–3 Calvin, John, 345 Class Struggles in France, 67, 87, 178–9, 193 Cambridge Apostles, 221 class-consciousness, 92, 95, 368, 401–2, Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group, 408, 411–12 275, 291 classical antiquity, 137, 142, 146 Cambridge University, 206–8, 266, 291 Clausewitz, Carl von, 77 Cammett, John M., 340 Cohen, G.A., 372 Campanella, Tommaso, 17, 21 Cold War, 97, 106, 297, 302, 372, 393, Capital, 3, 13, 36, 83, 109, 156, 219, 397–8 367, 380, 394 Cole, G.D.H., 218–19, 226 and Grundrisse, 121–2, 125–8, 136, Colette, 282 187 Colletti, Lucio, 371 and history, 138–9, 141–2 Colman, Henry, 99 and primitive communalism, 162–3 colonial countries, 74, 81, 270–1, 352, publication, 178–81, 185–6, 189, 356–7, 406 193–5, 235 communism and Victorian critics, 202–4, 207–8 ascetic, 22 capitalism, 5–8, 12, 14 babouvist and neo-babouvist, 23, and Communist Manifesto, 110–18 46 and economic crises, 65, 79, 94, 96, Christian, 17–18 117, 414–16 primitive, 19–20 and nations, 73–4 proletarian character of, 23–4 and world market, 354–5 Communist International, see Third Carey, F.S., 207 International, Seventh World Carlyle, Thomas, 28 Congress Carpenter, Edward, 246 Communist League, 22, 50, 60, 64, Cassidy, John, 385 101–3, 109 Castro, Fidel, 356 Communist Manifesto, 5, 22, 36–8, 40, 55, Caudwell, Christopher, 292–3 59, 61, 101–20, 146, 352 Cavour, Count, 71, 318 and communist parties, 108–9 Chamson, André, 282 and interdependence of nations, 73–4 Chaplin, Charlie, 266 and labour movements, 399, 403–4 Charlemagne, 166 language and vocabulary, 107–8 Chartism and Chartists, 42, 78, 95, prefaces, 103–4 97–8, 108 publication, 103–6, 178–9, 185, Chayanov, Alexander, 358 192, 194 Chervenkov, Vulko, 310 and revolutions of 1848, 102–3, 107 Chile, 270, 327 rhetorical style, 110 China, 4, 125, 138, 173, 332, 344, 370, communist parties, 4, 191, 261–2, 386, 411 307–8, 329, 361, 366 Cultural Revolution, 351, 357 American, 106, 410 Japanese invasion, 269, 271 British, 106, 262, 266–7, 291, 410 and Marx–Engels corpus, 191, French, 218, 282–3, 288, 290, 308, 193–4 371, 388, 410 split with USSR, 191, 350, 356 inter-war and post-war, 407, 411 Christianity, 352, 377 Italian, 193, 279, 308, 314–15, 317, Churchill, Winston, 272, 280, 311, 401 326, 335–7, 384, 388, 410, 415 cities, medieval, 145, 147, 149, 153, Soviet, 106, 335, 350 155, 157, 165, 169 Spanish, 383 City College, New York, 280 Third World, 355 458 Index communist regimes, 8, 345–6, 350–2, democracy, 31, 43, 51–2, 72, 84–5, 119, 357–8, 386 345, 406 collapse of, 386, 393, 397 ‘new’ or ‘people’s’, 304, 306, 309–11 Comte, Auguste, 208, 241, 243, 245, Denis, Hector, 226 390 Denmark, 409 concentration camps, 268 Descartes, René, 205 Condition of the Working Class in England, de-Stalinisation, 174, 315, 348, 350 The, 89–100, 177–9 Destrée, Jules, 226, 251 Condorcet, Marquis de, 20 Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, 102 Confucius, 19 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 177 Congresses of Cultural Freedom, 393 Deville, Gabriel, 181 Considérant, Victor, 46 Dézamy, Théodore, 23 Constantinople, 77 Di Vittorio, Giuseppe, 317 cooperative movements, 46, 83–4 Dialectics of Nature, 187, 238, 291, 294 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, 334 Die Neue Zeit, 105, 123, 127, 182, 239, Crane, Walter, 246, 250 244, 248, 255 ‘creative destruction’, 14 Dietzgen, Joseph, 221 credit reform, 36 Dimitrov, Georgi, 284, 310 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 194 Dirac, Paul, 294 Critique of Political Economy, 48, 127, Disraeli, Benjamin, 228 141–2, 178 dissidents, 351–2 preface (introduction), 123, 128–9, Dobb, Maurice H., 158, 353–4 135–6, 147, 150, 168, 182, 319 Dos Passos, John, 265, 276 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 8, 47, 58, Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 248, 252 179, 193 Dreiser, Theodore, 266, 276 Croatia, 235 Dreyfus affair, 224, 300 Croce, Benedetto, 213, 232, 316 Ducpétiaux, Edouard, 42, 91 Cromwell, Oliver, 412 Dühring, Eugen, 202 Crosland, Anthony, 10 Durkheim, Emile, 11, 228, 242, 390 Crusades, 205, 297 Dutch Republic, 345 Cuba, 270, 351, 356–7 Cubists, 256 East Berlin, 123, 185, 190 Cunningham, Archdeacon, 203, 205 Eastern Question, 82 Curie, Marie, 238 Eckstein, Gustav, 230 Czechoslovakia, 125, 269, 328, 359, Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, 181 407 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of Czechs, 75, 82, 228 1844, 127, 186 economics Darwin, Charles, 5, 212, 219, 347 Austrian school, 229 Darwinism, 211–12, 238, 284, 293, Chicago school, 413 352 and Marxism, 237, 239–41, 372–5, Das Kapital, see Capital 380, 384, 389 Dashnaks, 235 Wisconsin school, 240 Dawson, W.H., 202 Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro, 209 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 279 education, 12, 33, 222, 228, 277–8, De Amicis, Edmondo, 231 281, 286, 349, 360–1, 363–7, Deborin, Abram, 288 373, 390 Debray, Régis, 395 Eekhoud, Georges, 251 Debreczen, 77 Egypt, ancient, 137, 170 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 102 Ehrenberg, R., 243 decolonisation, 352, 357 18th Br umaire of Louis Bonaparte, The, 70, Della Volpe, Galvano, 366 178–9, 316, 326, 341 459 How to Change the World Einstein, Albert, 5, 238, 291, 294 feudalism, 55, 138–40, 143–4, 146–52, Eisenstein, Sergei, 265 155–60, 164–9, 171–3, 204 electrical industry, 9 and the Third World, 353–6 Elementarbücher des Kommunismus, 106 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 34, 40 Ellis, Havelock, 246 Finland, 407, 409 Ely, Richard, 202, 220, 240 Fiori, G., 315, 337 Enfantin, Barthélémy Prosper, 28 First International, 3–4, 50, 73, 80, Engels, Frederick 103, 178 biography, 287 Flanders, 145 his communism, 97 Flint, Robert, 205–6, 208 and Communist Manifesto, 101–20 folk music, 281 and Condition of the Working Class, Formen, see under Grundrisse 89–100 Forster, E.M., 221 corpus of works, 176–96, 385 Foster, Rev.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

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

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

You need to have a high degree of leverage by the holders of those assets. In 2008, both elements were present in abundance, just as they were in 1929. THE ROOTS OF THE CRISIS The origins of the crisis can be traced back to the exuberance that followed the end of the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 exposed the grotesque incompetence of the Soviet system of central planning for all but the blind to see. Not only had millions died to build the Soviet regime, the Soviet paradise turned out to be a squalid hell. In the closest thing we’ve seen to a controlled experiment in economic regimes, Communist East Germany—the jewel in the Soviet crown—had achieved only a third of the level of productivity of capitalist West Germany.

In the closest thing we’ve seen to a controlled experiment in economic regimes, Communist East Germany—the jewel in the Soviet crown—had achieved only a third of the level of productivity of capitalist West Germany. The Soviet Union was even further behind the West. All but a handful of fanatics realized that they had been mistaken about central planning and government control. “Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,” a senior Indian mandarin recalled, “I felt as though I were awakening from a thirty-five-year dream. Everything I have believed about economic systems and had tried to implement was wrong.”4 Governments across the world embraced competitive markets as the only alternative.

The result was an explosion of economic growth that sent shock waves through the global economy: real GDP growth in the developing world was more than double real GDP growth in the developed world from 2000 to 2007, as global multinationals opened facilities in the emerging world and emerging-market companies sprang from nowhere. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the world added about 500 million workers to the export-oriented economy between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 2005. In addition, hundreds of millions were brought under the sway of competitive forces, especially in the former Soviet Union. Consumption in the developing world did not keep pace with the surge in income. Most emerging countries had a long tradition of saving, driven by fear of illness and destitution, and systems of consumer finance were rudimentary.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Fine-­tuning of the trade rules of the multilevel system was necessary to allow the signals to move smoothly, thus creating the conditions for the supple and eternal contortion of individual economic actors to the messages of the market. Conclusion A World of P­ eople without a ­People If we ask what men most owe to the moral practices of ­t hose who are called cap­i­tal­ists the answer is: their very lives. —­f riedrich a. hayek, 1989 T wo years a­ fter the fall of the Berlin Wall and one month short of the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, George H. W. Bush granted a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Wilhelm Röpke’s correspondent and the defender of racial segregation in the U.S. South, William F. Buckley. Buckley had “raised the level of po­liti­cal debate in this country,” Bush claimed.

It was a world where the global economy was safely protected from the demands of redistributive equality and social justice. My narrative has traced a line that leads from the end of the Habsburg Empire to the foundation of the World Trade Organ­ization. In the leading neoliberal journal Ordo, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Röpke’s nephew Hans Willgerodt offered C o n cl u sio n 265 a fine summation of the c­ entury of ordoglobalism. ­After citing Hayek and Robbins’s writings from the 1930s, he wrote that “as witnesses of the international declaration of bankruptcy by communism,” it was time that nation-­states realized they had “made too much use of their sovereignty.”5 He wrote that the nineteenth ­century had achieved “world economic integration” through a “fundamental depoliticization of the economic domain.” 6 Quoting Röpke from 1952, he echoed Röpke’s sentiment that if “the developing countries are granted by the UN a right to expropriate foreign property, this means, when they make use of such a ‘right,’ they not only detach themselves from the world-­economic market . . . ​but [take themselves] out of the international ­legal community of the civilized nations.”7 For the road to world economic integration, Willgerodt looked both ahead and back: “The path to the liberation of the world market from national regulation and trade barriers can be facilitated by institutions like GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade].”8 But he also invoked the old template of Hayek and Mises: Central Eu­ro­pean empire: “The international rule of law with curbed application of sovereignty is doubtless a difficult and unfamiliar idea for the proponents of centralist national states.

See also World Bank Bastiat, Frédéric, 134 Basutoland, 96 Baudin, Louis, 78 Bauer, Otto, 44 Bauer, Peter, 172, 199, 221, 326n78, 330n160 Baumann, Ludwig, 30 Bavarian Socialist Republic, 29 Becker, Gary, 173 Bedford, Alfred C., 35 Belgium, 170; Benelux countries, 181; and Eu­ro­pean integration, 184 Bellagio Group, 129, 317n35 Beltrán, Pedro, 165 Berlin, 74, 82; Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, 94, 195; Berlin Wall, 263–264 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 227 Bevan, Aneurin, 139 Beveridge, William, 63, 96 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 219 Bilderberg meetings, 129 Biology, 227; neurobiology, 229; physiology, 238–239, 254; sociobiology, 237 Blacks, as a group, 152, 168–169, 171 Böhm, Franz, 7, 114–115, 189, 205, 248, 355n199; critique of democracy, 251; on cybernetics, 233; on decisionism, 257; on economic constitution, 115, 204, 210–213, 253; on “idea of Ordo,” 268; on role of law, 226; as teacher, 208 Böhm-­Bawerk, Eugen, 75 Bonn, Moritz, 95–99, 113, 118, 310n19 Booth, Willis H., 36 Boulding, Kenneth, 227 Boycotts, 179.


pages: 609 words: 159,043

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Periodicals and Online Articles “About: Biography.” John Denver official website. http://johndenver.com/about/biography/. Aguirre, Jessica Camille. “The Story of the Most Successful Tunnel Escape in the History of the Berlin Wall.” Smithsonian, 7 November 2014. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/most-successful-tunnel-escape-history-berlin-wall-180953268/. Air Force News Service. “New Space Operations Center to Control Satellites.” The Missileer, 18 October 1985. http://afspacemuseum.org/library/missileer/1985/10-18-85.pdf. Aldridge, E. C. Pete, Jr. “Assured Access: ‘The Bureaucratic Space War.’” https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/readings/aldrdg_space_war.pdf.

He netted his private pilot’s license in 1974; flying would be a large part of his life. Like Michael Lampton, Furrer was involved in an activity as a student that gained him some measure of notoriety. Furrer helped fifty-seven of his fellow Germans escape from communist East to free West Berlin in a tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall. Known as Tunnel 57, it measured almost five hundred feet in length and required moving tons of dirt, as well as careful measures to ensure secrecy from the deadly East German police. The tunnel was begun in West Berlin in an old disused bakery located along the contested border and fortuitously emerged into an old outhouse located near an apartment building.


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Basilah and many other Gazans I met refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison,” and it’s difficult to argue with the description. On Gaza’s northern border there is a twenty-five-foot wall separating Gaza from Israel. This barrier is forty miles long, and long stretches of it are thirteen feet higher than the Berlin Wall, and far more heavily fortified. On its eastern border there is a moat, then a low wall, and on top of it an electrified fence, dotted with guard towers manned by Israeli soldiers and patrolled by Israeli tanks. On Gaza’s southern border there is another wall, separating Gaza from Egypt. This wall is ten miles long, and is much like the northern border with Israel.

This passage, with its careful register referencing “unity,” and “countryman,” and “brother,” captures the nationalist and populist ideology behind the building of security walls. There is nothing new or original about walls; they have always been there, from the Wall of Jericho to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall to Donald Trump’s imaginary wall on the Mexican border. There is something visceral and primeval in us that yearns for the protective presence of a wall. But walls aren’t always solely for the protection of citizens; they serve a variety of other functions. They have been used as militaristic symbols of impregnability, and permanence.

So that, walled out twice over, he can go into the village, for example if he wants to do some shopping or pay a visit. Or if he wants to leave Walajeh. You see, that he must do via the official exit. Anyway, from his house he could do nothing but clamber up the steep slopes. And so Walajeh, this village of 2,500 people, will be shut in a coffin just as West Berlin once was. With the distinction that the Berlin Wall was meant to keep the shut-out East Berliners from fleeing into the fenced-off freedom of the West. Whereas here the farmers are being kept from their fields, which even now they can reach only with great effort, by taking detours, and soon, if the whole green valley is turned into a nature park, will no longer be allowed to tend them.


pages: 535 words: 144,827

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

About the Author Frederick Taylor was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, and read History and Modern Languages at Oxford, before postgraduate work at Sussex University. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941 and is the author of several acclaimed works of history, including Dresden, The Berlin Wall and Coventry. He lives in Cornwall. Also by Frederick Taylor Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February 1945 The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Coventry: Thursday, 14 November 1940 First published 2019 by Picador This electronic edition first published 2019 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-5098-5875-0 Copyright © Frederick Taylor 2019 Cover photo © Hulton Deutsch/Getty Images Author photo © Alice Kavounas The right of Frederick Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

What was occurring day by day far away from the diplomatic drawing rooms and the conferences and the cabinet meetings? To gain a deeper insight into this under-reported aspect was my main motivation for researching and writing this book. In my research on the bombing of Dresden, the building of the Berlin Wall, the air raid on Coventry – books dealing with crises in human affairs – I have tried to take a fresh, ‘ground-up’ view of such great and terrible events. The War Nobody Wanted is in that tradition. Yet in building up a vivid, humanly graspable picture of lives that were lived over that fateful year, I have had to hunt more avidly and more widely than ever for sources that enable such an approach to the past.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

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

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

Income per person in Switzerland, still the richest country in Europe, was similar to that in South Korea today.527 Britons were more than twice as rich as they were in 1934, but were still poorer than Hungarians are today. Cars and foreign holidays were no longer the preserve of the rich. While television was now in colour, nobody had a computer at home. By 1994, Europe had made another huge leap forward, but also a step back. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War was over: both Germany and Europe were reunited. Communist dictatorships had given way to democracies; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were freed from the Soviet empire. Only Belarus remained frozen in old-style totalitarianism. Mercifully, the Soviet Union broke up peacefully; tragically, Yugoslavia descended into war and ethnic cleansing.

John Maynard Keynes, The Great Slump of 1930, 1930542 The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Friedrich von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1988543 Change happens all the time. Some of it is reasonably predictable: higher demand for ice cream in summer. Some of it isn’t: out of nowhere, Gangnam Style became a global hit. Big changes often happen unexpectedly. The Berlin Wall falls. The Fukushima earthquake knocks out a big chunk of the Japanese economy and with it crucial links in global supply chains. Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) leads to a shale-gas boom that transforms America’s energy landscape – and Europe’s – within a few years. Apple was left for dead at the turn of the century, then vaulted to being the world’s most valuable listed company.

Warren Buffett, a billionaire investor, has selflessly decided to throw in his billions to a foundation that doesn’t even carry his name. George Soros, another financier turned philanthropist, has pledged billions to advance human rights and open societies, notably in central and eastern Europe. After the Berlin Wall fell, he personally gave more aid to eastern Europe than the British government did. British examples include the Wellcome Trust, which funds medical and scientific research, the Barrow Cadbury Trust, which helps the vulnerable and marginalised, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which funds work on poverty.


pages: 79 words: 24,875

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar

active transport: walking or cycling, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, BRICs, congestion charging, Crossrail, Diane Coyle, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Network effects, railway mania, trade route, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

While the constraints of cost, political opposition and practicality prevented local authorities from adopting the Buchanan thinking in toto, many town centres – ranging in size from Burnley to Birmingham, Leicester to Luton – remain blighted to this day by half-implemented ‘Buchananization’, with ring roads, dual carriageways and even odd short stretches of motorway creating soulless car-oriented environments that encourage motor vehicles to enter city centres or speed through them, cutting cities in half as decisively as the Berlin wall. Poor Leeds even had ‘Motorway city of the seventies’ stamped on all outgoing letters as testimony to its adoption of the Buchanan ethic. Buchanan’s ideas formed the core of advice from central government to local planners for a couple of decades, and some planners and highway engineers are still influenced by it when drawing up transport schemes today.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Unlike that earlier crisis, it has not put the survival of the capitalist system in doubt. Indeed, the Great Recession that began shortly before the Lehman debacle was the first modern crisis in which no systemic alternative to capitalism was on offer. No one, after all, is looking to North Korea for an alternative vision of the future. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the only question has been about the extent of the market orientation of capitalism. What the crisis did do was provoke intense soul searching about the merits and defects of an entrenched capitalist system. The merits are clear enough. Capitalism, by which I mean a market-based system where private ownership of industry and commerce is supported by property rights, has lifted millions out of poverty.

The Austrian-born economist worried that capitalism’s tendency to monopolistic gigantism, inequality and the encouragement of envy would, with the connivance of an anti-capitalist intellectual elite, drive the world to state socialism. What has changed since Schumpeter’s time is that while those tendencies still exist, there is no longer any systemic alternative to capitalism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, comprehensive public ownership of the means of production is discredited. To the extent that systemic choices are available, they lie on a spectrum that runs from the market-driven model of capitalism in the US, via the social democratic models of Europe, to the heavily statist, authoritarian form of capitalism that prevails in China and much of the rest of the developing world – a model nonetheless characterised by extensive exposure to the global trading system.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Further trade expansion came with the fall of the communist governments of Eastern Europe. While President Nixon's policy of détente in the 1970s had helped ease Cold War tensions, ultimately it was internal economic problems and declining living standards that proved the catalyst for the abandonment of centrally controlled economies. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paved the way for the reintegration of these economies into Western Europe and the global trading system, although former German chancellor Willy Brandt feared that the mental barriers would outlast the concrete wall.3 In a parallel development, China cautiously embraced market-based reforms.

The war to end all wars, of course, signaled the end of the first great period of globalization. In 1946, Winston Churchill famously coined the term Iron Curtain to describe the Cold War division of the world, which shaped political and economic structures for over forty years of postwar history.14 The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, its most vivid, visceral manifestation, marked a shift to greater global engagement and integration. Twenty-five years later, the pressure towards autarky, driven by economic and geopolitical factors, may mark another significant change. English politician Lord Palmerston's famous dictum states that nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

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

Since then, despite all the unease about various liberalization and marketization plans, the general direction has not changed. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it in the years when she was reviving the British economy, “There is no alternative.” The ideological shift in economics had been building over the 1970s and 1980s even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conventional economic wisdom, embodied in organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had become far more critical of the quasi-socialist path of countries like India. Academic experts like Jeffrey Sachs traveled around the world advising governments to liberalize, liberalize, liberalize.

., III, 39, 244 Bakiyev, Kurmanbek, 54 balance of power, 79 Bali bombings (2002), 11, 17 Balkans, 20, 29, 117–18, 245, 246, 247 Bangalore, 50 Bangladesh, 60, 159, 281 Ban Ki-moon, 30 banking industry, 36, 43–45, 81, 106, 107, 109, 110, 127, 139, 153, 157 Barma, Naazneen, 38 Barnett, Correlli, 262 “Base Structure Report” (2006), 262 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 20 BBC, 96, 120 Bear Stearns, xi Beijing, 71, 103, 105, 111, 137, 150, 211 “Beijing Consensus, The” (Ramo), 142–43 Beijing Olympic Games (2008), 5, 103, 105, 137 Belgium, 41 Berlin, 103 Berlin Wall, 24 Beveridge Plan, 197 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 158–59, 160, 178, 179–80 Bhutan, 166 Bialik, Carl, 205 Bible, 172 bicycles, 192 bin Laden, Osama, 12, 13, 14–15, 85, 269–70 biological weapons, 18 biotechnology, 201–2, 215 bipolar order, 4 Bismarck, Otto von, 198, 257, 266–67 Blackwill, Robert, 177 Blair, Tony, 274 Blinder, Alan, 230–31 Bloomberg, Michael, 220–21 “blue card,” 224 blue jeans, 88, 89, 91 Boer War, 188–90, 261 Bollywood, 90, 94, 147, 153–55 Bono, 272 Boorstin, Daniel, 69 Bosnia, 272 Brahmans, 74 “brain drain,” 167 brand names, 203 Brazil, xii, 2, 3–4, 19, 23, 26, 28–29, 39, 48, 49, 53, 55, 60, 79, 95, 98, 257, 258, 259, 263 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 253 British East India Company, 60, 80, 82–83 British Empire, 36, 37, 57, 60, 65, 79, 80–83, 84, 89, 94, 97–98, 151, 154, 156, 158–59, 161, 162–63, 164, 170, 173, 179, 184–99, 237, 261–63, 266, 268 British Guiana, 194n broadband service, 28, 224–25 Brookings, Robert, 235 Brookings Institution, 235 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 36 Buck, Pearl, 100 Buddhism, 124, 171, 172 budget deficits, 219, 241–42, 244 Buffett, Warren, 45–46 Bulgaria, 182 Burma, 79, 121, 264, 273 Burns, Ken, 37 Buruma, Ian, 187 Bush, George H.


pages: 276 words: 93,430

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

Perhaps knowing this should make us more sympathetic to each other and our crazy non-rational love lives. For instance there is a Swedish woman who ‘married’ the Berlin Wall in 1979. Her name is Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer – that’s right, she took his name. She’s been interviewed talking about her ‘husband’, and it is easy to laugh at the things she says, like how sexy he was and how much fun they had together. But then I remember that her feelings are as real as anyone else’s and how strange it must have been on the day the Berlin Wall was torn down; everyone in the world celebrating her husband’s murder and the desecration of his corpse while she alone was— ‘Okay then,’ asks Poppy, pointedly getting us back on topic, ‘if this bonding thing is true, why didn’t I fall in love with all the guys I’ve had sex with?’


pages: 295 words: 89,430

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

One generation gravitates toward form-fitting jeans and wide neckties, while the next favors looser-fitting pants and skinny ties. One wave of young men will go through their teens and twenties cleanly shaven, and the next gravitates toward stubble or a scruffy beard. Considering Russia’s history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the issue of imbalance was one I couldn’t help thinking about when I took on a complicated assignment in one of the most remote regions of the world. My trip to the easternmost region of Russia began with a phone call I would describe as cinematic, except that the dialogue could only have been invented by a very bad screenwriter.

Ask most Russians what they like most about visiting other countries and they’ll say it’s the sight of other people having fun. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Russian women weren’t “allowed” to wear cosmetics. It wasn’t a law, but more an unspoken protocol. This all changed in the late 1980s when the Berlin Wall fell, and cosmetics companies like Mary Kay and Maybelline entered Russia for the first time alongside nightclubs, discos, restaurants, gaming companies, car dealerships and high-end stores like Versace. Russia was awash with cash. From the airport all the way into Moscow, the billboards and flashing neon plastering the highway made it look like a colorized Russian version of Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life.


pages: 266 words: 78,689

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Las Vegas by Mary Herczog, Jordan S. Simon

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Saturday Night Live, young professional

They are handsomely appointed with marble floors and surfaces, imported striped and plaid fabrics, and the expected top amenities. Downtown’s surprisingly charming Main Street Station sports a wildly divergent collection of antiques, artifacts, and collectibles, including Buffalo Bill’s private rail car, a fireplace from Scotland’s Preswick castle, 19th-century Brussels street lamps, a piece of the Berlin Wall for guys to pee on outside the brew pub, and woodwork, crystal chandeliers, and stained glass pilfered from various American mansions. The large guest rooms feature “period” touches, including plantation-style window shutters and massive gold-framed mirrors. ACCOMMODATIONS of which have sweeping lake views.

Twenty-somethings enjoy prowling the overhead catwalk and the patio overlooking a grotto-esque pool. The younger professional set hangs out Downtown at the handsome Triple 7 Brewpub at Main Street Station. The look is 1930s warehouse meets Edwardian railway station; guys will dig relieving themselves on the plastic-wreathed section of the Berlin Wall in the men’s room. The draft call at Crown and Anchor Pub, near UNLV, is a virtual United Nations of suds, including beers from the Czech Republic, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Jamaica, Italy, and Mexico. They even do a proper Bondian martini. The British Isles theme is a bit overdone. Actual Brit (and Aussie and Kiwi) sightings are more likely at Downtown’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen—expect to be asked for a fag, mate, and your opinion on whose ruggers and footballers rule.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

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

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

Horrified by the chaos that their potential democratic freedoms were creating (and unwilling to accept Donald Rumsfeld’s blithe “Stuff happens” explanation for the looting and burning in liberated Iraq) a worrying number of countries have rejected democracy for strongmen. Indeed, the story of democracy in the twenty-first century has been a story of hopes dashed and promises cheated. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall everyone assumed that the losing side would embrace democracy. In the 1990s Russia took a few drunken steps in that direction under Boris Yeltsin. But on the very last day of the twentieth century Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Vladimir Putin: a postmodern czar who has been both prime minister and president twice and who has neutered the opposition, muzzling the press, cowing his mainstream opponents, and putting his most persistent critics in prison.

., 182 Arnold, Matthew, 58 Asia: aging population of, 165 economic crisis of 1997 in, 142–43 pensions in, 141–42 in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 34–36 Asquith, Herbert, 61 Australia: civil service in, 215 overlapping areas of government responsibility in, 108 “Austrian school,” 83 automobile industry, 189, 190, 191 Bagehot, Walter, 128 Balázs, Étienne, 40 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 96 ballot initiatives, 127 Bangalore, India, 201, 218 Bank of England, 43 Barboza, David, 162 Bartlett, Bruce, 121 Baruch, Bernard, 233 “basic minimum,” 87 Baumol, William, 19, 110, 178–79, 187, 222 Baumol’s disease, 19, 109–11, 174, 178–79, 183, 222 Becker, George, 84 Beijing, 34–35 Belgium, 228 Bell, Daniel, 157 Bentham, Jeremy, 49, 57, 85 Berggruen, Nicolas, 124, 129, 131, 159 Berlin, Isaiah, 48, 226, 228 Berlin Wall, 253 Berlusconi, Silvio, 12, 128, 196, 227 Bertelsmann Foundation, 143 Best Party, 261 Bevan, Aneurin, 75 Beveridge, William, 74, 75, 78, 90, 97, 245 Beveridge Report, 74 bike sharing, 216–17, 219 Bildt, Carl, 175 Bill of Rights, English (1689), 43 Bill of Rights, U.S., 226, 250 Bismarck, Otto von, 6, 7, 60, 174–75 Blair, Tony, 96, 194, 262 on small government, 95, 211–14 Bleak House (Dickens), 50 Bloom, Nick, 191 Bloomberg, Michael, 196–97, 217 Bloomberg Businessweek, 129–30 Boao Forum for Asia, 153 Bodin, Jean, 29 Boer War (1899–1902), 61 Böhlmark, Anders, 176 Bolsa Família, 206 Booth, Charles, 66 Boston, Mass., 210 Boston Consulting Group, 172 Boston Tea Party, 240 Bourbon Restoration (1814), 46 Bo Xilai, 154, 218 Brandeis, Louis, 263 Brazil, 13, 18, 96, 153 entitlement reform in, 17, 206 breakaway nations, 260 Bright, John, 56 British Airways, 94 British Gas, 94 British Medical Association, 114 British Rail, 213 British Telecom, 94, 234 Brown, George, 134 Brown, Gordon, 99, 130, 215 Brown, Jerry, 10, 91, 106, 119, 125, 219 fiscal reforms of, 118, 129–30 Brown, Pat, 105–6, 124–25 Buchanan, James, 84, 262 Bureau of Corporations, 72 Bureau of Land Management, 236 Bush, George H.W., 95 Bush, George W., 10, 98, 164, 177, 198, 255, 262 business sector: globalization and, 191, 193 innovation in, 194 productivity in, 18–19 reinvention of, 189–92 technology and, 191 Butler, R.A., 75 California, 105–32 ballot initiatives in, 127 Baumol’s disease and, 109–11 constitution of, 107 deficit in, 118–19 education in, 111 as exemplar of Western state failures, 106–7 fiscal reform in, 129–30 old and well-off as primary beneficiaries of public spending in, 122–23 outdated governmental system of, 107–8 pensions in, 113, 115, 119–20, 130 political polarization in, 124–25 population of, 108 prison system in, 112–13 proliferation of regulation in, 116 Proposition 13 in, 91, 92, 107 public contempt for government in, 106, 112 public-sector unions in, 112–15, 120 special interest groups in, 112–15 taxes in, 116, 129 unfunded liabilities in, 119, 129, 130 California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, 116 California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), 112–13 California Environmental Quality Act (1970), 117 California Public Policy Center, 119 California Teachers Association, 113 Cameron, David, 130–31, 158, 199, 215 Canada, 199 Capio, 171–72 capitalism, 50–54 democracy’s presumed link to, 261–62 inequality and, 262–63 state, see state capitalism as supposedly self-correcting, 70 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), 86 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 96 Carlino, Gerald, 218 Carlyle, Thomas, 44, 57 Carney, Mark, 215 Carswell, Douglas, 260 Carter, Jimmy, 198 Carville, James, 97 Castiglione, Baldassare, 33 Catholics, 38 Cato Institute, 238 Cavendish, William, 31, 40 Cavendish family, 31, 47 Cawley, James, 204 CCTV cameras, 182, 226 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 124 Central Party School, 150, 156 Central Provident Fund, 140 Centre for Policy Studies, 92 centrism, 95, 98 Chamberlain, Joseph, 66 Charles I, King of England, 31 Charles II, King of England, 32, 38, 42 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl), 228 charter schools, 212, 214, 215 Chartists, 51, 58 checks and balances system, 226, 250, 255–56, 265 Chidambaram, Palaniappan, 96 Child, Josiah, 39 Childs, Marquis, 169 China, Imperial, 37 bureaucracy of, 37, 40–41 innovation disdained by, 41 in seventeenth century, 34–36 trade with West rejected by, 41 China, People’s Republic of: aging population of, 164, 183 Asian-state model in, 136–37, 145, 149, 152, 156 Communist ideology in, 63, 145 corruption in, 4, 18, 148, 149, 186 Cultural Revolution in, 156 economy of, 3, 146, 163 education in, 147, 148–49, 164 efficiency of government in, 146, 153, 159 elitism in, 161–62 governmental changeover in, 159 health care in, 164 health insurance in, 141, 156 India contrasted with, 146, 153 lack of public confidence in, 13 leadership training in, 105 local government in, 160–61, 217–18 long-term outlook of, 159 mandarin tradition of, 138, 156, 157 meritocracy in, 156–63, 164, 254 pensions in, 156, 183 Singapore as model for, 145 slowing of economic growth in, 164 social-service NGOs in, 158 state capitalism in, 64, 149–56, 234 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in, 150–52, 154–55 urban population increase in, 149 U.S. contrasted with, 147, 153 Western democracy seen as inefficient by, 145 China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong (CELAP), 1–5, 18, 145, 153, 156 China Mobile, 151 China Youth Daily, 148 Chongqing, China, 218 Christensen, Clayton, 203 chronic diseases, 183, 200, 204 Internet and, 209 Chua, Amy, 143 Churchill, Winston, 68, 75, 247 cities: population growth in, 149, 218 working relationships between, 218–19 Citizens United decision, 240 Civil War, English, 6, 31, 38, 43 Clark, Joseph, 77 class struggle, 62–63 Clinton, Bill, 10, 95, 96–97, 98, 142, 217 Clinton, Hillary, 162 Coase, Ronald, 84, 229 Cobbett, William, 49 Cobden, Richard, 56 Code for America, 216 Coggan, Philip, 263 Cohen, Jared, 210–11 Cohen, Leonard, 185 cold war, 76, 252 Colloquies on Society (Southey), 224–25 commerce, nation-state and, 33 Committee on Social Thought, 83 Common Sense (Paine), 44 Communist Party, Chinese, 63, 145, 153 elitism in, 161–62 as meritocracy, 156–57 Organization Department of, 151 Communists, communism, 7, 8, 63–64, 71, 77, 134, 137, 145, 225 successes of, 90–91, 252 compassion, 61 “compassionate conservatism,” 98 competitive advantage, 189 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 222 Confederation of Medical Associations in Asia and Oceania, 204 Congo, 22 Congress, U.S., 16, 100, 228 approval ratings of, 11 dysfunction in, 256 lobbies and, 238–40, 257 Congressional Budget Office, 15, 242 Congress Party, India, 162 Conservative Party, British (Tories), 11, 69, 75 conservatives, conservatism, 10 “compassionate,” 98 see also Right Constitution, U.S., 108, 109, 256 Fourteenth Amendment of, 120 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 92 consumer choice, 191 consumption taxes, 123–24 Corn Laws, 50, 238, 240 corruption, 185–86 crime, Western state and, 181–82 Crimean War, 65 Croly, Herbert, 71 Cromwell, Oliver, 32 Cromwell, Thomas, 6, 37 crony capitalism, 72, 112, 155, 234, 237–38, 246, 269 Cultural Revolution, 156 Czech Republic, 252 Darwin, Charles, 59 Das, Gurcharan, 13 Davies, Mervyn, 215 decentralization, 216–19 defense, spending on, 16 Defense Department, U.S., 20 deficits, deficit spending, 14, 100, 118–22, 177, 231–32, 241 unfunded liabilities and, 119, 232 democracy: in Asian-state model, 17 big government as threat to, 251, 264–69 as central tenet of Western state, 5, 8, 16–17, 22–23, 136, 141, 221 Founding Fathers and, 226, 250, 265 Fourth Revolution and, 249–70 globalization and, 262 imperfections of, 17, 127–28, 141, 143–44, 145, 226–27, 247–48, 251, 269 income inequality and, 263 in India, 136, 146 individual freedom as threatened by, 226, 250–51 nation-states and, 259, 262 presumed link to capitalism of, 261–62 as presumed universal aspiration, 261–62 as rooted in culture, 262 scarcity and, 247–48 self-interest and, 250, 260 short-term vs. long-term benefits in, 260–61, 264 special-interest groups and, 16–17, 111–15, 247, 251 strengths of, 263 twentieth-century triumph of, 252 twenty-first-century failures of, 252–61 uneven history of, 249–50 welfare state as threat to, 22, 142 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 252 Democracy in Europe (Siedentop), 251 Democratic Party, U.S., 97, 240 spending curb approved by, 12 spending cuts opposed in, 100, 255 Democratic Review, 55 Deng Xiaoping, 142 Singapore as inspiration to, 145 Denmark, 22, 210 disability insurance in, 244 “flexicurity” system in, 173, 176 innovation in, 220 1980s financial crisis in, 176 reinvention of welfare state in, 173–74 Depression, Great, 69–70, 85 Detroit, Mich., 218–19 bankruptcy of, 14, 119 Detter, Dag, 236 Dicey, A.V., 57 Dickens, Charles, 50, 57–58 Dirksen, Everett, 192–93 disability-insurance reform, 244 Discovery Group, 211 discretionary spending, 195 diversity, 214–16 DNA databases, 182 Dodd-Frank Act (2010), 117, 239 Doncaster Prison, 214 Downey, Alan, 177 Drucker, Peter, 198 Dubai, 144, 217 Dukakis, Michael, 95 Dundase family, 49–50 East India Company, 36, 40, 47, 48, 50, 56, 150, 240 Eastman Kodak, 190–91 École Nationale d’Administration, 194 economic-freedom index, 174 Economist, 86, 97 Edison, Thomas, 179 education, 7, 9, 16, 48, 58, 197 charter schools in, 212, 214, 215 in China, 147, 148–49, 164 cost/outcome disparities in, 194–95 declining quality of, 111 diverse models for, 214–15 government domination of, 10 international rankings of, 19, 148, 206–7 preschool, 123 reform of, 58–59, 212 in Sweden, 171, 176–77 technology and, 179–80 voucher systems for, 171, 176–77, 220 in welfare state, 68, 69 Education Act (British, 1944), 75 Egypt, 155 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 Mubarak regime overthrown in, 144, 253 Eisenhower, Dwight, 77 elections, U.S., cost of, 257 electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, 205 elitism, 135, 136, 138–39 in Chinese Communist Party, 161–62 in U.S., 162 welfare state and, 77–78 Emanuel, Rahm, 216 emerging world: agriculture in, 238 as failing to grasp technological change, 18 innovation in, 17 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217 need for reform in, 14 urban population shift in, 218 “End of History, The” (Fukuyama), 262 Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR), 182 Enlightenment, 42 entitlement reform, 95, 217, 234, 241–46 beneficiaries’ responsibilities and, 245 conditionality in, 17, 206, 244 disability insurance and, 244 globalization and, 245 information revolution and, 245 in Latin America, 17, 206, 244 means testing and, 243, 245 transparency and, 244–45 entitlements, 9, 10, 15, 16, 79, 100, 127, 141, 222, 228 aging population and, 124, 183–84, 232, 241–42 middle class and, 11, 17 pensions as, 79, 184, 243 as unfunded liabilities, 245–46, 264, 265 universal benefits in, 124, 141, 243–44 equality: capitalism and, 262–63 liberal state and, 69 of opportunity vs. result, 79, 228 sexual, 169 welfare state and, 68–69, 74, 79, 222 Western state and, 221 Equality (Tawney), 69 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 13, 254 Estonia, 121, 210 Euclid, 31, 33 eugenics, 67–68, 78, 169 euro, 99, 100, 258 euro crisis, 12, 100, 126, 130, 258–59 Europe: age of conquest in, 36–37, 39 compulsory sterilization in, 78 contest for secular supremacy in, 38–39 democracy’s failures in, 258–59 dysfunctional political systems in, 126 economic crisis in, 126 Enlightenment in, 42 government bloat in, 98–99 mercantilist policies in, 40 national consolidation in, 38–39 old-age dependency ratio in, 14–15 postwar era in, 78 public spending in, 99–100 revolutions of 1848 in, 54 technocratic bent in, 76–77, 259 transnational cooperation in, 76 wars of religion in, 34, 38 welfare state in, 75 European Atomic Energy Community, 76 European Central Bank, 258–59 European Coal and Steel Community, 76 European Commission, 254 European Economic Community, 76 European parliament, 258 European Union, 13, 16, 17, 76, 99, 108, 109, 258–59, 260 Extraordinary Black Book, The (Wade), 49 Exxon, 154 Fabians, 8, 21, 67, 72, 73, 96, 134, 169, 220 Facebook, 190–91 Falklands War, 94 Farrell, Diana, 132 fascism, 8, 71, 77, 252 Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism, The (Hayek), 134 Federal Communications Commission, 73 Federalist Papers, 5, 265 Federal Register, 117 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 37 filibusters, 256 financial crisis of 2007–8, 100, 164, 263 financial-services industry, 239 Finer, Samuel, 27, 276 Finland, 210 innovation in, 220 1990s financial crisis in, 176 fiscal crisis, as incentive for change, 198 Fisher, Antony, 81–82, 90, 92, 280 “flexicurity,” 173, 176 Ford, Henry, 189, 191, 201 fossil fuels, government subsidies for, 239 Foster, William, 58 Founding Fathers, 108 democracy and, 226, 250, 265 liberal state and, 44–45, 222 Fourteenth Amendment, 120 Fourth Revolution, 5 Asian-state competition as impetus for, 17, 163–64, 247 decentralization and, 216–19 democratic reform and, 249–70 diversity and, 214–16 entitlement reform and, see entitlement reform failure of current model as impetus for, 14–17 freedom and, 247, 248, 268, 270 government efficiency in, 233 ideological foundation of, 21, 28, 221–23, 232 information revolution and, 245, 246–47 infrastructure and, 232 innovation and, 219–20 monetary and fiscal reform in, 266–67 pluralism in, 211–14 as postbureaucratic, 211 pragmatism and, 18–19, 232–33 privatization and, 234–37 security and, 232 small government as principle of, 232, 264–69 subsidy-cutting and, 237–41 technology and, 18, 19–20, 233, 266–67 France, 43, 78 deficit spending in, 14 expanded bureaucracy in, 60 government bloat in, 12 pension age in, 16 public spending in, 75, 99–100 ruling elite of, 194 state capitalism in, 235 Francis I, King of France, 37 Fraser Institute, 174 fraternity, welfare state and, 74, 79 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 38 freedom: balance between security and, 230–31 as central tenet of Western state, 8, 23, 46, 68–69, 222, 256 core elements of, 223–24 democracy as threat to, 226, 250–51 diminished concept of, 225–27, 228–29 Fourth Revolution and, 247, 248, 268, 270 Hobbes and, 33 as ideological basis of liberal state, 69, 223–26 Mill and, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 228, 250, 256, 268 necessary constraints on, 223 welfare state as threat to, 22, 74, 222, 265 see also rights Freedom House, 143, 252 free markets, 49, 59, 142 Friedman as evangelist for, 84, 86 Thatcher and, 93 free trade, 50, 54, 57 Mill’s espousal of, 55 French Revolution, 6, 44, 45–46, 249 Friedman, Milton, 81–87, 89, 93, 106, 128, 171, 280 background of, 82 big government as target of, 82, 84–85, 88 as free-market evangelist, 84, 86 Nobel Prize of, 82, 86, 91 Reagan and, 86 “Road to Hell” lecture of, 84 single currency opposed by, 99 Thatcher-Reagan revolution and, 8, 28, 97, 100 Friedman, Thomas, 163 Friedrich, Carl, 265 Fukuyama, Francis, 142, 143, 256, 262 Future of Freedom, The (Zakaria), 143 G20 countries, 15 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 85, 86 Galtieri, Leopoldo, 94 Galton, Francis, 68 Gardels, Nathan, 124 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 57 Gates, Bill, 97 Gazprom, 152, 153, 154 Geely, 150 General Electric (GE), 205, 243 General Motors (GM), 189, 190, 191, 233 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 70 Geometry (Euclid), 31 George III, King of England, 11, 41 Germany, Federal Republic of (West Germany), 75, 78, 232, 265 Germany, Imperial, 6, 60–61 Germany, Nazi, 71, 232 Germany, unified, 12, 22, 173, 186, 212 gerrymandering, 13, 106, 113, 125, 256–57, 264, 267 see also rotten boroughs Gillray, James, 227 Gladstone, William, 7 economizing by, 51–52, 224 small government as principle of, 51–52, 60 tax policy of, 51 globalization, 10, 191, 193 democracy and, 262 entitlement reform and, 245 government and, 10, 96, 200–207 health care and, 200–201 national determination and, 259–60, 262 Glorious Revolution (1688), 43 GOATs (Government of All the Talents), 215 Godolphin, Sidney, 31 Golden Dawn party, 259 Goldman Sachs, 120 Goldwater, Barry, 80, 86 Google, 189–90, 191, 233 Gore, Al, 95, 131, 198 government: anti-innovation bias of, 194–95, 212, 219 bloat in, 9–11, 18–19, 89–90, 98, 177, 222–23, 227, 229–30, 231, 233 centralization bias of, 192–93, 212, 216 challenges to reform in, 196–98 coercive power of, 198 efficiency of, 18–21, 37, 89, 187, 198–99, 213, 233, 247, 255 entrenched workforce of, 193–94 globalization and, 200–207 in-house bias of, 192, 212 local, 216–19, 267 public contempt for, 106, 112, 227–28, 230, 233, 251, 261 sunset clauses and, 118, 246, 266 technology and, 200, 207–11 uniformity bias of, 193–94, 212, 214 volunteerism and, 216 Government Accountability Office, 235 Grace Commission, 198 Gray, Vincent, 210 Great Britain: asylum seekers in, 54 as capitalist state, 50–54 commercial empire of, 39–40 deficit of, 177 education reform in, 58–59, 79, 212, 214–15 falling crime rate in, 181 fiscal reform in, 130–31 government bloat in, 89–90 health-care spending in, 90 landed artistocracy of, 48, 49 liberal revolution in, 46 low public confidence in, 11 national pride in, 61–62 patronage vs. meritocracy in, 50, 52–53, 222 postwar era in, 78 power of Anglican Church in, 48 public spending in, 9, 75 wars of, 6 “winter of discontent” in, 93 Great Depression, 69–70, 85 Great Exhibition of 1851, 54 Great Society, 77, 192 Great Western Railway, 65 Greece, 16 economy of, 120, 259 public-sector employees in, 115 public spending in, 99 Green, T.H., 61 Green River Formation, 236 Grenville family, 49–50 Grillo, Beppe, 12, 227 gross domestic product (GDP), unreliability of, 121 Grote, George, 54 Guangdong, China, 217 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 31 Hagel, Chuck, 256 Hall, Joseph, 35 Halsey, A.H., 88 Hamilton, Alexander, 5, 150 Hamilton, James, 120 happiness, right to, 48, 49 Hard Times (Dickens), 58 Havel, Václav, 252 Hayek, Friedrich, 10, 83, 85–86, 92, 93, 134, 170 Health and Social Security Department, British, 89 health care, 7, 9, 90, 98, 213 aging population and, 15, 183, 242 in China, 164 cost of, 110, 121, 205, 242–43 cost/outcome disparities in, 195 globalization and, 200–201 government domination of, 10 in India, 17, 18, 200–206 labor productivity in, 200 mass production in, 201–3 Obamacare and, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 role of doctors in, 203–5, 243 single-payer systems in, 205, 233, 243 special interest groups and, 200 in Sweden, 171–73 technology and, 183, 208–9 healthcare.gov, 199 health insurance, 141 health registries, 172, 183, 209 Heath, Edward, 92–93 Hegel, G.W.F., 45, 60–61 71 Helsinki, 220 Heritage Foundation, 92 Hewlett, Bill, 105 Higgins, David, 215 Hilton, Steve, 132 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 250 Hitler, Adolf, 71 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 8, 9, 21, 27–28, 29, 40, 44, 63, 135–36, 181, 219, 268 background of, 30–31 as controversial thinker, 31–32 on human nature, 29–30, 44–45 individual liberty and, 33 as materialist, 33 as royalist, 6, 18, 31–32 social contract and, 32, 34, 42, 222 Hogarth, William, 227 Hollande, François, 12, 16, 153, 184, 194 Holocaust, 78 Homestead Act (U.S., 1862), 62 House of Cards (TV show), 227 House of Commons, 127 House of Representatives, U.S., 97, 127 Howard, Philip, 118, 132, 195 Hu Jintao, 2 Huldai, Ron, 216 Hume, David, 43 Hungary, 254 Huntington, Samuel, 41–42 Hurun Report, 161 Iceland, 261 India, 8, 35, 36 China contrasted with, 146, 153 democracy in, 136, 146 economic stagnation in, 147 education in, 147 health care in, 17, 18, 200–206 infant mortality rate in, 201 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217–18 nepotism in, 162–63 Thatcherite reform in, 96 as weak state, 37 Indonesia, 142–43 health insurance in, 141 industry, landed aristocracy as opponent of, 48 Industry and Trade (Marshall), 233 information, access to, 210–11, 214 information revolution, 245, 246–47 information technology (IT), 18, 19–20 infrastructure: Fourth Revolution and, 232 spending on, 122, 232 innovation, 219–20 in business sector, 194 government bias against, 194–95, 212, 219 nation-state and, 37, 39 Institute for Energy Research, 236 Institute of Economic Affairs, 82, 92 Institute of Medicine, 204 Institute of Racial Biology, 78 interest groups, 16–17, 90, 111–15 Interior Department, U.S., 236 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 15, 76, 90 Asian financial crisis and, 142–43 Internet, 191, 260 health care and, 208–9 self-help and, 209 Iran, China and, 152 Iraq, 253 Iraq War, 143, 253 Ireland, 38 public spending in, 99–100 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 37 Islamic world: antiscientific attitudes in, 41 in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 35 Istanbul, 35 Italy, 196, 259 pension reform in, 130 politicians’ pay and benefits in, 115 public spending in, 99–100 voter apathy in, 12 It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Mann and Ornstein), 125–26, 227 Jackson, Andrew, 55 Jacques, Martin, 163 Jagger, Mick, 90 James I, King of England, 31 James II, King of England, 43 Japan, 15, 17, 36 Jarvis, Howard, 91 Jay, Douglas, 77 Jiang Jiemin, 154 Jiang Zemin, 142 Johnson, Boris, 216–17 Johnson, Lyndon, 77, 80, 87 Joseph, Keith, 92, 93 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 128 Kamarck, Elaine, 131–32 Kangxi, Emperor of China, 40 Kansas, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 224 Kaplan, Robert, 144 Kapoor, Anish, 34 Kennedy, Joseph, 73 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 185 Kerry, John, 96 Keynes, John Maynard, 22, 69–70, 76, 97 pragmatism of, 70–71 Keynesianism, 71, 77, 83, 95 counterrevolution against, 82–84 Khan, Salman, 180 Khan Academy, 180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 79 Kingsley, Charles, 58 Kirk, Russell, 85 Kissinger, Henry, 133, 136 Kleiner, Morris, 118 Knight, Frank, 84 Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), 215 Kocher, Robert, 200 Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 120 Kristol, Irving, 87 Kroc, Ray, 185 Labour Party, British, 68, 69, 70, 77, 93, 94–95, 114 laissez-faire economics, 56, 57, 61, 65–66, 70, 71 Laski, Harold, 68, 134 Latin America: economies of, 8 entitlement reform in, 17, 206, 244 Lazzarini, Sergio, 153 Lee Hsien Loong, 135, 138 Lee Kuan Yew, 4, 17, 53, 133–34, 137, 139–41, 143, 144, 145, 147, 156, 170, 183, 244 authoritarianism of, 137, 138 small-government ideology of, 140, 165 Left, 62, 73, 88, 183 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 20, 187, 213 and growth of big government, 10, 98, 131, 175, 185, 228, 230, 231 subsidy-cutting and, 234, 237–38 Lehman Brothers, 14 Lenovo, 150 Le Pen, Marine, 259 Le Roy, Louis, 276 Leviathan, 10 Leviathan (Hobbes), 29, 32, 33, 34, 42 Leviathan, Monumenta 2011 (Kapoor), 34 Liberal Party, British, 68, 70 liberals, liberalism: and debate over size of government, 48, 49, 232 freedom as core tenet of, 69, 223–26, 232 right to happiness as tenet of, 48, 49 role of state as seen by, 21–22, 222–23, 226, 232 see also Left; liberal state liberal state, 6–7, 8, 220, 221 capitalism and, 50–54 competition and, 247 education in, 7, 48, 58–59 equality and, 69 expanded role of government in, 56–62 Founding Fathers and, 44–45, 222 freedom as ideological basis of, 69, 223–26, 232, 268 industrial revolution and, 246–47 meritocracy as principle of, 50, 52–53 protection of rights as primary role of, 45 rights of citizens expanded by, 7, 9, 48, 49, 51 rise of, 27–28, 269 small government as principle of, 48, 49, 51–52, 61, 232 libertarian Right, 82 liberty, see freedom Libya, 253 LifeSpring Hospitals, 202–3 Lincoln, Abraham, 62, 92 Lindahl, Mikael, 176 Lindgren, Astrid, 170 Lisbon, Treaty of (2007), 258 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 50 Liu Xiaobo, 166 Livingston, Ken, 217 Lloyd George, David, 62 lobbies, Congress and, 238–40, 257 Locke, John, 42, 43, 45 social contract and, 42, 222 Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson), 111 London School of Economics, 67, 74 Louis XIV, King of France, 38 Lowe, Robert, 58–59 L.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Almost everything the United States did during the Cold War, at the height of its powers, was to think about Eurasia, to contemplate its future and to try to determine its final shape. Today too, in the age of Trump, Eurasia is the main question for American political life, which is discovering a world in which relations with Europe, Russia and China are being redesigned and need to be considered as a single whole. The Berlin Wall was but a segment of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe or, more properly, separating Western Europe from the territories controlled by the Soviet Union, and the Iron Curtain was soon replicated by the Bamboo Curtain, a less-often-used expression referring to the demarcation line between communist and capitalist states in Asia.

The map that resulted from these demarcations was one of a Eurasian supercontinent divided into two areas, according to the path of historical development they had embarked upon: the Western European path, to be replicated in countries such as Japan and South Korea at the other end of the supercontinent, and an alternative path and ideal, defined in different measures and in different ways by Moscow and Beijing, about which there was much less clarity and unity and which sometimes meant little more than the negation of the former. The Cold War can be understood as a conflict between Europe and Asia, subtly covered up by the ideologies of capitalism and communism. To see the history of the twentieth century in these terms is to realize that the Berlin Wall was but a small and temporary segment of a much larger and more permanent civilizational wall separating Europe from Asia, a divide whose precise demarcation kept shifting throughout the centuries and one whose nature was, first and foremost, intellectual. It was based, as we shall see in Chapter 1, on different worldviews and a different understanding of human knowledge and human history.


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

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

While these policies were, in part, an effort to root out the corruption that by this time riddled many government agencies in Africa and elsewhere, the budgetary austerity forced on poor nations often led to the gutting of essential services like agricultural extension, infrastructure, health, and education. Despite the broad application of structural adjustment, from the perspective of most African citizens, governance did not measurably improve. Nor did the quality of their lives. HOPE RENEWED: THE END OF THE COLD WAR The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed one of the blockages to development in Africa. African leaders no longer had to pledge allegiance to either the Soviet or the American axis—whether they had an ideological commitment or not. These events put African governments on notice that even they could not continue to deny democratic space to their citizens indefinitely.

In Africa, as elsewhere, democratic space can be created and sustained only when a critical mass of people is aware of the situation and willing to speak out, protest, monitor government actions, and risk harassment, arrest, or even death. That courage, however, also requires a leader (or his backers) who will acknowledge the rights of the people to self-determination and prosperity, and as a result demonstrate leadership that avoids bloodshed or further violence. So although the people of eastern Europe brought down the Berlin Wall, they needed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to send in the tanks. While Nelson Mandela's principled stance led to sanctions against South Africa that brought unbearable pressure upon the apartheid regime, F. W. de Klerk had to concede that the era of apartheid had to come to an end. One of the reasons why success in securing democratic space continues to elude the populace in many African countries is that politicians tend to change with the tide.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

It was only at the last minute that the regime lost its nerve, ordering the paratroopers, some of whom were weeping and visibly distressed, to retire.1 “This was the turning point,” Victor Sebestyen writes in his book Revolution 1989, “when the people knew that the regime lacked the will or the strength to maintain power.”2 Communist dictator Erich Honecker, who had ruled for eighteen years, lasted in power another week. No one, including the leaders of the opposition, expected such a swift and stunning collapse. I was with the leaders of the opposition on the afternoon of November 9, 1989. They said they hoped that within a year there would be free access back and forth across the Berlin Wall. A few hours later, the wall, at least as an impediment to human traffic, did not exist. East Germany’s internal security apparatus had been one of the most pervasive, feared, and intrusive in the world. There was a Stasi officer or regular informer by the mid-1980s for every sixty-three East Germans.3 But the corruption, cynicism, rank opportunism, and deep disenchantment within the institutions of control proved fatal.

Bank of America, 129 Bankruptcy, 69, 88, 204, 237, 239, 265 Banks, Dennis, 48, 50 Banks, Lorenzo “Jamaica,” 65–68 illustration of, 66 Baraka, Amiri, 65 Battle of Blair Mountain, evidence of, 174 (illus.) Beer, sales of, 2, 3 Bellecourt, Clyde, 48, 50 Benitez, Lucas, 218–221 illustration of, 219 Benito, Miguel, 77–78 Benjamin, Brent, 168 Bennett, John, 90 Bennet County, poverty in, 21 Benson, Dee, 260 Berlin Wall, 228 BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Big Coal, enemies of, 119 Big Crow, Lloydelle, 16, 17 Birth defects, 120, 183 Bissonette, Pedro, 50 Black Bloc anarchists, 262 Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk), 1, 56 Black Hills, gold in, 9, 23 Black lung disease, 153, 159, 171, 174–175 Blacklisting, 187, 201, 210, 230 Blair Mountain, 17, 152, 174 civil uprising at, 173 Blake, William, 112 Blankenship, Don: indifference of, 166, 168 Blankfein, Lloyd, 233 Bloods, 62, 64, 73 Bloomberg, Michael: Occupy protests and, 233 Boehner, John: pipeline and, 129 Bonds, Judy, 174 Boone County, 148, 159 Boycotts, 207, 221, 227 Boyle, Tony: criticism of, 170, 171 Bozeman Trail, 23 Brave New World (Huxley), 239 Brewer, Duane, 48, 51, 52 poem by, 53 on Wounded Knee, 50 Brinigar, William, 161 Brinton, Crane, 230–231 Brushy Fork Slurry Impoundment, 128 Bryant, Wayne R.: recovery and, 88 Buff, I.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

Meanwhile, the Cold War froze Asia into a particular set of shapes, a set of ideas that congealed into half-formed positions around 1950, meaning that the scope for heroic reinvention of a grand narrative of history was narrower than in Europe. Europe settled down after 1950 to a “cold” Cold War. Aside from incidents such as the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961, few events occurred to provide a trigger for conventional military conflict. There was time and space in Western Europe, then, to consider the war—the most powerful event influencing discourse within the region—as an important part of the shaping of national identity. This was not a straightforward process: from the French struggle to come to terms with the legacy of the Vichy government to the changing debates about the nature of the German path to Nazism, there was a vast realm of memory and forgetting about the war.

See War of Resistance museum Beijing Olympics (2008), 87, 145, 190 Belarus, 232 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): as China’s Marshall Plan, 240, 243, 244–45; financing of, 246; formal proposal of, 8; motives behind, 236, 245–46, 255; publicity of, 244; security partnerships through, 232; UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and, 242 Berlin Wall crisis, 55 Blair, Tony, 230 Bolsonaro, Jair, 259 Bombing, The (film): actors, 155; budget, 154; cancellation of the Chinese release, 155; plot, 156; production problems, 154; reviews, 156–57; US release, 155–56 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 59 Bo Xilai: downfall of, 192; economic initiatives of, 189–90; leadership ambitions, 221; political career, 189, 190 Bretton Woods settlement, 13 Brexit, 25 Brokaw, Tom, The Greatest Generation, 1 Bu Ping, 103 Burma, 31, 45, 59, 222, 226, 239 Buruma, Ian, 16 Bush, George H.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Berliners and tourists alike ogle the cranes and skyscrapers of the Potsdamer Platz that is rising from the ruins left during the Cold War. They admire the restored Reichstag, which still retains its dedication ‘dem DEUTSCHEN VOLKe’, ‘To the German Nation’, but whose heavy stone dome has been replaced by a light and airy glass one by the British architect Norman Foster. They gaze at the restored Brandenburg Gate, past which the Berlin Wall ran until recently, or at the re-gilded Siegessäule, the ‘Victory Column’, which commemorates the Franco-Prussian War. The mindless triumphalism of former times has gone, but there is no reluctance to recall Prussia’s days of non-military glory. The royal palaces at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are popular destinations; a decision was taken in 2010 to ignore financial prudence and to rebuild the Hohenzollerns’ Stadtschloss or ‘City-centre Palace’, that was demolished by the GDR.

When Gorbachev let it be known that East Germany could not count on the Soviet army to intervene, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, all the Communist leaders of the satellite states (except Ceaus˛escu in Romania) saw the game was up, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Berlin Wall collapsed. Similarly in August 1991, when Gorbachev attempted to relax the terms of the Union Treaty (which defined the role of the USSR’s constituent republics), his own colleagues launched an abortive coup against him. His political credit was exhausted. Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), led a movement to recognize the independence of the fifteen Soviet republics, and in effect to terminate the Soviet story.

In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.77 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage. In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did. In February 1990 elections to a Congress of Estonia turned into a de facto referendum on national statehood.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

‘With my mother, it was completely the other way around,’ says the woman next to her, who comes from the former DDR. ‘She was pregnant too, my father was in the army, and he had family in Rostock. That's how I ended up there.’ Her husband: ‘Almost all of us have a story like that.’ The woman beside me starts talking about the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘I'll never forget it. 13 August, 1961. I was eighteen. I was standing there in Oranienburger Strasse when workers began rolling out the barbed wire and throwing up a wall. Meanwhile, the most amazing things were happening. It's been described so many times, but I saw it with my own eyes: how two friends were standing on the east side, they said goodbye, one of them took a running jump over the wall into the West, the other one started a life in the East.

We climbed onto a platform and suddenly found ourselves standing eye to eye with all those Westerners on the platform on the other side. We stared at each other and saw ourselves, it was insane. Of the 19 million East Germans, 2.5 million left for the West, the great majority of them in the 1950s. Approximately a thousand people were killed while attempting to escape the country, most of them along the Berlin Wall. One particularly spectacular and successful escape was organised by Reichsbahn engineer Harry Deterling, who rammed his locomotive number 78079 (and a few carriages full of family members in the know) past the stunned border guards and into the West. The conductor, an East German policeman and five unwitting passengers walked back to the East in a huff, along the rails.

The Communist Party was never really big here, it never had more than half a million members. Gomulka was never anything but a dim-witted tyrant. And Gierek always kept the door ajar to you people in the West.’ We talk about what came afterwards, about the differences between Poles and the rest, about how the misleading symbol of the Berlin Wall made it seem as though an abrupt end had come to communism everywhere at the same time. In reality, the old communist elites in Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria remained in power for years, although they operated under a new, nationalistic flag. The Hungarians and the Poles, on the other hand, had done away with the old communism long before the wall fell.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

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

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

Hence, it is not complete fantasy to see our democracies as flirting with a peculiar cocktail of hyper-depoliticized technocracy and hyper-politicized populism, each fueling the other in attempts, respectively, to maintain effective government and to reestablish majoritarian sensibility.4 This conjuncture of politics and economics might conceivably end up challenging the basic structures and values of liberal democracy, the dominant model of collective governance since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That system combines liberalism—broadly, constitutionally constrained government under the rule of law—with representative democracy via some form of free and fair elections. In the years following the demise of the Soviet Empire, there have been growing concerns about illiberal democracies, which elect their governments but pay no more than lip service to minority and individual freedoms.

And having become, by doctrine, inclination, and expertise, overly detached from the system’s stability, there was nothing short of a reawakening among central banks to the significance of most monetary liabilities being issued by private businesses (banks). Inflation targeting had no more heralded the End of Monetary History than, twenty years earlier, the collapse of the Berlin Wall had marked the End of History (as Francis Fukuyama had wondered in his paean to Hegel). As the financial and economic crisis broke and deepened, there was unscripted innovation on a grand scale. In addition to finding themselves acting in their institutions’ traditional role as lenders of last resort to the banking system, central banks provided liquidity to “shadow” banks, such as money market funds and finance companies.

See legitimacy autocratic hegemony, 19 autonomy: independent agencies and, 94, 50, 166, 169, 208; insulated agencies and, 274, 283; power and, 79–80, 94, 130, 150, 166, 169, 208, 274, 283, 310, 324, 326–27, 399–401, 407, 439, 449n21, 494, 518; Principles for Delegation and, 130 backward-looking record, 213 Bagehot, Walter, 457, 505–6, 508, 512, 560 bailouts, 6, 139, 393, 451–52, 454, 508, 512, 537 balance-sheet policy: administrative state and, 53; capital market intervention and, 499–501; default-free government instruments and, 492–95; Delegation Criteria and, 491–92; democratic values and, 561; Design Precepts and, 491–92; emergency state and, 504, 512, 516, 521; Fiscal Carve Out (FCO) and, 488–91; fiscal state and, 129–33, 482–502; general principles for, 491–92; helicopter money and, 492, 494, 562; independent agencies and, 113; lender of last resort (LOLR) and, 504, 512, 516; market maker of last resort (MMLR) and, 432, 482, 495–98; monetary regimes and, 432, 435; overmighty citizens and, 526, 533n12, 534–35; parsimony and, 490–91, 500–2; power and, 6, 17, 19, 392; Principles for Delegation and, 129–33, 491–92; private sector instruments and, 495–501; pure credit policy and, 498–99; quantitative easing and, 486, 492–93, 498; restraining exuberance and, 499–501; secured lending and, 496; stability and, 438, 441–42, 457, 460, 466, 469, 481 Banca d’Italia, 21, 164n31 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 46, 398, 446n18, 525, 533, 535 Bankhauss Herstatt, 399–400 Bank of England: administrative state and, 37–40, 78, 87; Baring and, 153n9, 391, 395, 442, 484, 505; Blunden and, x, 270, 470, 475n17, 576; central banking issues and, 439n4, 440n6, 443, 446n18, 448–49, 456, 457n28, 461, 470n12, 473–83, 489n10, 490n11, 493, 496, 497n22, 503–9, 512, 516, 523, 529n5, 543–44; credibility and, 232, 417, 423; democratic values and, 548, 560; as dernier resort, 505; durability and, 251–53; emergency state and, 503–9, 512, 516; George and, 186n30, 252, 407, 409n14, 423, 427, 439n4, 440n6, 446n18, 461, 465, 507, 509, 520n32, 537, 566, 576; independent agencies and, 95, 106, 119, 122–23, 152, 158, 186n30, 343–45; Inflation Report of, 95; King and, 427n2, 433n17, 442n8, 445n15, 493n14, 508–9, 516, 525, 535, 539, 546, 566; legal issues and, 351n4, 355, 365; liquidity and, 505–8; macroeconomic demand management and, 406–8; as market maker of last resort (MMLR), 482; Leigh Pemberton and, ix, 270n42, 406n3, 479, 509n12 monetary independence and, 270–71; Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and, 106, 264, 319, 344–45, 427, 516, 543; monetary regimes and, 433–34; Norman and, 158, 237n4, 391, 430–31, 544; oversight issues and, 368n36, 370, 373–74; power and, 7, 10, 391, 393, 395, 406, 410–12; Principles for Delegation and, 130, 136, 141–42, 237, 252–53, 258n26, 259, 265n37, 270–71, 307n1, 317–19; Second Reading of the Bill and, 259; Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) and, 490n11; tercentenary of, 417, 446n18; turning away market regulation role and, ix–x Bank of India, 535, 566 Bank of Japan, 370, 483, 495, 531 bankruptcy, 133, 248, 457, 463, 485, 487, 494, 506 Barber, Nick, 191n39, 273n2 Baring, Francis, 153n9, 391, 395, 442, 484, 505 Basel Accords, 45, 270n41, 283, 398–400, 466, 470, 476n19 Basel Supervisors Committee, 45, 400, 470 BBC, 25, 99n14, 321 BCCI, 518 Beetham, David, 159, 161, 208, 237 Bell, Daniel, 9 Bellamy, Richard, 189n35, 191n42, 279n13 Berlin Wall, 3, 431 Bernanke, Ben, 30, 375, 449n21, 559 Bernstein, Marver, 34 Bicchieri, Cristina, 112n4, 159n18, 283 Bickel, Alexander, 35, 83n15, 546, 565 Bingham, Lord, 37n33, 176n8, 177n11, 186, 229n13, 337n8, 361 Blair, Tony, ix, 2, 252 Blinder, Alan, 14, 92, 99, 104, 106n24, 264n36, 289n28, 419n13, 423n21 Blunden, George, x, 270, 470, 475n17 Bodin, Jean, 223–24 bond yields, 412, 430, 492 Bradley, Omar, 543 Braithwaite, John, 276n6 Brandeis, Louis, 168 Bressman, Lisa Schultz, 216n38, 310n5, 355n10, 519n31, 555n11.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

“Immediately, right away,” said Schabowski. “The question of travel, of the permeability therefore of the wall from our side, does not yet answer, exclusively, the question of the meaning of this, let me say it this way, fortified border.” It seemed, as far as anyone could tell, that Schabowski had announced that the Berlin Wall was open. Masses of East Germans, long prevented from entering West Berlin, began gathering around the wall’s checkpoints. The guards on duty didn’t know what to do. The high officials who could have explained that Schabowski had blundered—or ordered the guards to use force to disperse the crowds—were stuck in meetings.

See Provopoulos, George Bank of Japan, 86–94 Bernanke on, 84–85, 88–89 currency swaps with ECB (2011), 349–50 Hayami as governor, 87, 89–92 post–World War II power of, 86 quantitative easing by, 90–91, 255 zero-interest-rate policy, 87–88, 90–92 Bank of the Estates of the Realm, 24 Bank of the United States (1791), 37 Banque de France, 55, 115 Barclays, 154 Barker, Kate, 7, 122, 243, 247, 250 Barwell, Richard, 122 Bastasin, Carlo, 316–17 Bater, Jeff, 254 Bean, Charles, 97, 124, 142, 240–41 Bear Stearns bailout, 133–34, 139 collapse of, 132–33 Beck, Glenn, 256, 276 Beer Hall Putsch, 52–53 Benton, Thomas Hart, 38 Bérégovoy, Pierre, 77 Berlin Wall, end of, 76–77 Berlusconi, Silvio bombastic remarks of, 223, 299, 319–20 and ECB bailout conditions, 319–21, 346 successor to. See Monti, Mario Bernanke, Ben background information, 7–8, 115–20 beginning crisis, view of, 7–8, 128 defends Fed actions during crisis, 170–71, 176–77, 181–82 on financial accelerator, 7, 58, 119, 132 financial crisis leadership.

., 39 Friedman, Stephen, 195 Frum, David, 66 Gang Fan, 372 Geithner, Timothy and Bernanke reappointment, 182–83 defends Fed actions during crisis, 177–78 to ECB on bolder moves, 219, 226, 324 and financial reform process, 177–78, 186–87 on first day of crisis, 4, 5 and investment bank bailouts, 42, 133, 140, 142, 146–47 at Jackson Hole (2007), 111–12 -Trichet relationship, 219, 317 George, Edward, 7 Germany bank crisis, beginning of (2008), 160 Berlin Wall, end of, 76–77 central bank. See Bundesbank chancellors. See Kohl, Helmut; Merkel, Angela coordinated plan, rejection of, 159–60 economy (2012), 354, 356 and European unity negotiations, 76–77, 81–82 Franco-German Declaration, 289–92 Great Depression, actions during, 57, 58–60 Greek bailout protests, 210–11, 288–89 Hitler rise and economic conditions, 50–53, 60 inflation rate (1980s), 75 mark as new currency (1923), 53 mark exchange rate fixed (1923), 54 post–World War I reparations, 49–50 prosperity of 1920s, 54 Reichsbank (1914–1918) caused hyperinflation, 47–53 steel and coal production pooling, 74–75 Wall Street crash (1929), impact on, 57, 58–60 Gertler, Mark, 119 Giles, Chris, 249 Gingrich, Newt, 330 GIPSI nations, 213, 217 ECB bond purchases, 286–87 Gladstone, William, 32 Glass, Carter, 44–45 Global economy emerging nations collapse (1990s), 101 during Great Moderation, 94–95 Global Economy Meeting (2010), 223–32 Golden Dawn, 357–59, 378 Gold standard abandoned during Great Depression, 60–61 abandoned during Nixon administration, 62–64 Bretton Woods (1944) gold window, 63 post–World War I, 54–55 Gonzalez, Henry B., 96 Grayson, Alan, 186 Great Britain bank regulation.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

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

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

These exaggerated Nelson mission objectives—cure cancer, end the famine in Ethiopia, and world peace—generated this joke among TFNGs: Question: “Do you know how to ruin Nelson’s entire mission?” Answer: “On launch morning tell him they’ve found a cure to cancer, it’s raining a flood in Ethiopia, and the Berlin Wall is coming down! He’ll be crushed.” Neither Garn nor Nelson should feel abused at being the butt of an office joke. If you’re going to get in the game, you can expect some hits. We’ve all been there. The passenger program didn’t end with Nelson’s landing. Next in line was Christa McAuliffe’s initiation of the teacher-in-space program.

“If the air force and navy are sending its astronauts on a re-bluing, what is NASA going to do for us civilians?” Mark Lee, an air force fighter pilot, looked at the whiner and replied, “You guys are going to get re-nerded.” West Berlin was the best place to get eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, so the air force flew us there. This was 1987 and the infamous Berlin Wall still had two years of life left in it. We attended various classified briefings and got a helicopter tour of the Iron Curtain, flying over death strips guarded from watchtowers and barricaded with razor wire. One evening we donned our uniforms, passed through a border checkpoint, and walked into East Berlin for supper.

In many ways Pat was my clone—the most notable exception being his very good looks. But we did share the same crappy eyesight. As it had for me, his less than 20/20 vision was keeping him from air force pilot training. I had made calls to some general officer friends hoping they might know of a way for Pat to gain a medical waiver, but the Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War was over, peace was going to reign forever, the air force had too many pilots, blah, blah, blah. All I heard were excuses. But I hadn’t left it there. TheChallenger disaster had shown me that dead astronauts had more cachet than live ones. Astronaut widows were consoled by presidents who told them to call if they needed anything.


pages: 538 words: 164,533

1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, feminist movement, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, land reform, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

The satellite transmission of a major story required so many lucky coincidences that they rarely happened in the first few years. In those days, stories from Europe usually aired the next day in the States, after film could be flown in. The first story from Europe to be aired the same day on American television was not a satellite transmission. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall was first erected, the construction started so early in the day that with the time zone advantage, CBS was able to fly film to New York City in time for the evening news. President Kennedy complained that the half day it took to break the story on television had not allowed him enough time to formulate his response.

In 1965, he wanted a live satellite broadcast from somewhere in the world on the Cronkite evening news, which came on at 7:00 P.M. New York City time. Looking for a place in the world that could send to Early Bird at seven New York City time, he found Berlin, which had been a major story for several years. Schorr was placed at the Berlin Wall, always a good visual, and it was—live! Schorr’s entreaties that nothing was happening at the Wall in the middle of the night were useless. He was missing the point. The point was that it would be live. “So indeed, I stood there,” Schorr recounted. “This is the wall, behind here is where East Germany is, and all.

Through the cold, humid, gray streets of West Berlin, they carried with them a curious blend of cultures—portraits of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Rosa Luxemburg, the Jewish leftist from Poland killed in Germany in 1919. They shouted the chant always heard at American antiwar marches—“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!” They marched to the Opera House, where Benno Ohnesorg had been shot, and then to the Berlin Wall for more speeches. Dutschke said to a cheering crowd, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” But for all his apparent anti-Americanism, Red Rudi, said to be the most important student revolutionary in Europe, was married to an American theology student from Chicago.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In a show of the continued value placed on bilateral relations between Thailand and the United States, the two governments cooperate in joint military training exercises, codenamed Cobra Gold.21 The exercises have taken place every year since 1982, whether in tandem with a military junta or an elected civilian government. â•… When the Berlin Wall collapsed, however, Western governments pressed Thailand to democratize further. Thailand made progress toward that goal, a paragon of counterfeit democracy that, at times, flirted with a more consolidated form during repeated bouts of elections, but never quite got there. Even after the rise of Thaksin, an elected populist, extrajudicial killings, corruption, and bad governance persisted.22 The West initially pressed Thailand more aggressively on these issues, exposing key human rights abuses and warning Thailand it needed to improve in order to stay in the good graces of the West. â•… But, over time, Western governments (and the United States in particular) have become increasingly timid in condemning Thailand’s government.

€ € € 256 INDEX Air Force One, 58 Ajax, 22, 38, 230 Alert, Nunavut, 231 Alfonso IX, King of Léon, 30–1 Algeria, 155 Aliyev, Ilham, 82–5 Allende, Salvador, 45–7 amplification effect, 57 Anaconda Copper, 48 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 38 Angola, 112–13 Antananarivo, Madagascar, 7, 85, 86 Apple, 20, 83, 135–6, 145, 151 Arab Spring (2011), 2, 10, 12–16, 18, 65, 94, 124–6, 130, 132–3, 163, 168, 218 Argentina, 34–5, 149, 156 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 114–15, 117 Aristogeiton, 28 Aristophanes, 29 Aristotle, 29 Armenia, 59–60, 209 Armitage, Richard, 53 Asghabat, Turkmenistan, 25 Ashkelon, Israel, 102 Asian financial crisis (1997), 196 Abbas, Mahmoud, 100 Abbottabad, Pakistan, 53 Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, King of Saudi Arabia, 172 Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 18, 214 Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, 19, 105, 106–7 Abraham, 124 Achilles, 22, 230 Afghanistan, 2, 5, 20, 49, 54, 67, 69, 70, 78, 98, 136–8, 213 1982 arrival of Bin Laden, 78 2001 US-led invasion, 70, 71, 84, 98 2009 presidential election, 70–1 2014 presidential election, 71; power-sharing agreement, 75–6; USAID announces women’s empowerment project, 136–8, 145 Afifi, Omar, 163–4, 247 African-Americans, 176, 207, 250 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 168 Ahmed, Mohammed, 123–4, 126, 130, 224 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 116, 207 257 INDEX al-Assad, Bashar, 120 AT&T, 135 Athena, 22 Athens, 20, 27–30, 31, 156 Australia, 29–30, 112, 153, 156 Azerbaijan, 20, 82–5, 90, 209, 211, 238 Ba’ath party, 63, 72, 77, 124, 128 Badawi, Raif, 16 Baghdad, Iraq, 72 Bahrain, 59, 155, 209, 225 Bangkok, Thailand, 198, 200, 202, 203, 223 Bangladesh, 106 Bardo Museum attack (2015), 131 Barraket Essahel affair (1991), 123, 126, 224 Basra, Iraq, 72, 73 beheadings, 11, 12, 16, 19 Beijing Consensus, 206–7 Belarus, 3, 19, 60–7, 154, 192–5, 205–6, 212, 218, 222 1991 dissolution of Soviet Union; independence, 192–3 1994 presidential election; Lukashenko comes to power, 193–4 1996 Commonwealth with Russia established, 194 2002 proposal for re-integration with Russia, 194 2004 US passes Belarus Democracy Act, 63, 194; referendum on Lukashenko’s third term; Western sanctions, 63 2006 presidential election, 61; EU asset ban on Lukashenko, 63 2010 presidential election, 61–2, 65; Statkevich impris- 258 oned for organizing protest, 61–2, 222 2015 economic crisis, 64; release of political prisoners, 65, 222; presidential election, 64–5; pressured by Russia to host military base, 65, 195 2016 EU suspends sanctions, 65, 67, 195 Belarus Democracy Act (2004), 63, 194 Belgian Congo (1908–60), 42 Belgium, 43–4, 90, 220 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 13, 123–33, 155 benign dictatorship, 215, 220 Benin, 23, 27, 156 Berlin Wall, 35, 201 Bermudo II “the Gouty”, King of Léon, 30, 231 Bever, James, 101 Bhumibol Adulyadej, King of Thailand, 165 Biamby, Philippe, 117 Bible, 179 Big Brother, 180 Bin Laden, Osama, 18, 50, 52–3, 78 Binti Salan Mustapa, Sumiati, 12 Biya, Paul, 121 Black Hawk Down incident (1993), 116 Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), 211 blackballing, 29 Blagoy, Ivan, 208 Blair, Anthony “Tony”, 6, 92 Blueberry Hill (Fats Domino), 207 Boehner, John, 181 Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen), 121 Boko Haram, 177 Bolivia, 143, 154 INDEX Bolšteins, Ludvigs, 147 Bono (Paul Hewson), 92 Boston University, 111 Botswana, 149 Bourguiba, Habib, 126 BP (British Petroleum), 38 Bradley effect, 176, 250 Brazil, 56, 149, 152, 156 Bremer, Lewis Paul, 72 Brexit, 1 bribery, 170–1 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 94 Brunei, 155, 229 bubonic plague, 6 BudgIT, 171 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 34 Bulgaria, 149 Burkina Faso, 177–8 Burundi, 95 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 115, 121, 190 Bush, George Walker, 54–7, 63, 69, 99, 100, 101, 190, 194, 201 Bush, Sarah, 59 Cairo, Egypt, 9–10, 13, 163–4, 218 California, United States, 26, 188, 209 Cambodia, 59 Cameroon, 121 Canada, 94, 112, 143, 153, 155, 156, 230–1 Caravana de la Muerte, 47 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 52, 73 Carothers, Thomas, 52, 73, 141, 144, 189 Carter Center, 89, 238 Carter, James Earl “Jimmy”, 116, 120, 238 Caspian Sea, 84 Castro, Fidel, 49 Castro, Raul, 49 caudillos, 33 Cédras, Raoul, 115–20 censorship, 161–3, 165 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 20, 39–49, 59, 98, 201, 207, 208 Chan-ocha, Prayuth, 164, 203 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 31 Chemonics, 58, 138 Chicago, Illinois, 182 Chile, 27, 36, 38, 45–8, 153, 220, 225 Chiluba, Frederick, 190 China, 4, 23–7, 105–6, 109, 168– 70, 176, 190, 191–2, 196–212, 215–16, 218, 221, 223, 229 1958 launch of Great Leap Forward, 24 1990 Deng Xiaoping’s “24-Character Strategy”, 206 1992 propaganda-industry tax introduced, 209 2003 SARS outbreak, 25–6 2013 endorsement of Azerbaijani election, 211; monitoring of Malagasy election, 211 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, 168–9, 176, 221; rail deal with Thailand, 203 2016 Lunar New Year celebrations, 208; Mong Kok riots, 169 China Central Television (CCTV), 207–9 Chow, Holden, 169 Christianity, 105, 179 Churchill, Winston, 22, 190, 215 259 INDEX Ciftci, Bilgin, 20, 161–3, 165, 176 citizen journalism, 135 citizen participation, 27 Citizens United v.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Had they retired, only to leave the rest of us to pay their future medical bills and ogle their underfunded pensions, to cope with the manipulated political system they’d sued into existence? Or had they left a legacy of tolerance, a firming of American confidence? But anyhow, Generation X? By comparison, irrelevant: a collection of sad, passive slackers. But the great Internet companies were largely built by Generation X. The foundational experience of 1989—the fall of the Berlin Wall—bred optimism. It created, in fact, the possibility of a new exploration. Jon Postel’s idea to “be liberal in what you accept” seemed reasonable. This encouraged new links in trade and finance and friendship. Wi-Fi and TCP/IP and other advances made wiring the world possible, but the context? The two decades between the collapse of the Wall and the 2008 financial crisis had a magical aspect for a lucky few.

It won’t surprise you that in recent years, for instance, the world has seen an acceleration in the construction of physical barriers, of fences and walls running between nations. Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg, two American political scientists, scored the pace of global wall building and found that of fifty-one national enclosures built since the end of World War II—the Berlin Wall being the most famous example—more than half were constructed in a rush between 2000 and 2014. More are coming: Hungary, Kenya, Algeria, and India now posthole their borders in initial exploration of what might be built. There’s a frantic urgency to some of this. The Spanish government, for instance, raised a ten-foot-high razor-wire-and-camera-topped fence around their Saharan footholds in 1998.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

The median male wage in 2000 was still below the 1979 level after the late-nineties boomlet, though productivity was 45 percent higher, one sign of the sharp shift toward benefits for capital that is being accelerated more radically under Bush II. The potential contributions of Eastern Europe to undermining quality of life for the majority in the West was recognized immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The business press was exultant about the “green shoots in Communism’s ruins,” where “rising unemployment and pauperization of large sections of the industrial working class” meant that people were willing “to work longer hours than their pampered colleagues” in the West, at 40 percent of the wages and with few benefits.

Index Abbas, Abu (Mohammed), 195 ‘Abd al-Shafi, Haydar, 169, 170 Abramowitz, Morton, 135 Abrams, Elliott, 106 Acheson, Dean, 14, 16 Afghanistan, 78, 142, 161, 162, 179, 208 Russia and, 110–11, 211, 225 US war on, 27, 129, 108, 198–205 Africa, 93–94, 150, 207 African Americans, 69, 101 African National Congress (ANC), 110, 190 Agha, Hussein, 172, 174 Albanian Kosovars, 55–57 Albright, Madeleine, 57 Algeria, 45, 114–15, 163, 165 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), 155 Al Qaeda, 19, 35, 111, 192, 200, 210–11 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28–29, 124 American Association for World Health, 88 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 107 American Enterprise Institute, 179 American Jewish Committee, 160 American Society of International Law, 14 Americas Watch, 102 Amnesty International, 108 Angola, 93–94, 110 Annan, Kofi, 232 anthrax, 233 anti-Americanism, 44–46 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, 226, 234 antinuclear movement, 226 anti-Vietnam War protests, 38–39 Arab League, 169, 174 Arafat, Yasir, 168, 169, 179 Argentina, 107, 137 Arkhipov, Vasili, 74 Arkin, William, 222, 229 Aronson, Geoffrey, 172 Articles of Confederation, 102 Ash, Timothy Garton, 55 Ashcroft, John, 26, 154 Asia, 148–56, 222 Ayalon, Ami, 213 Aznar, José Maria, 33, 44, 134 Azores, 33, 141 Bacevich, Andrew, 57–58, 227 Bacon, Kenneth, 126 Baker, James, 30 Balkin, Jack, 27 ballistic missile defense (BMD), 223, 225–28, 231 Barak, Ehud, 170, 172, 175 Bar-Lev, Haim, 166 Batista y Zaldívar, Fulgencio, 80 Bay of Pigs invasion, 81, 82, 86, 87, 91 Beirut, 194, 208 Belgium, 62 Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 170 Ben-Gurion, David, 164, 180 Benjamin, Daniel, 123 Bennet, James, 168 Beria, Lavrenti, 224 Berlin Wall, fall of, 146 Berlusconi, Silvio, 44, 46, 131, 134 Bernays, Edward, 8 Besikci, Ismail, 198 Betts, Richard, 122 Bidwai, Praful, 160 bin Laden, Osama, 19, 42, 193, 209, 211, 212 biological and chemical weapons, 2, 77, 121, 122, 221, 232–33. See also weapons of mass destruction Biological Weapons Convention, 121, 233, 234 Bishop, Maurice, 88 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 63 Blair, Tony, 17, 23, 27, 30, 33, 57, 62, 130, 158 Blanton, Thomas, 74 Bolsheviks, 69–70 Bolton, John, 234 Boot, Max, 44, 45, 134 Borge, Tomás, 97 Boron, Atilio, 138 Bosch, Orlando, 86–87 Bosnia, 35, 57, 208 Bowles, Chester, 82 Boxer Rebellion, 101 Brazil, 45, 92–93 Bremer, Paul, 142 Bretton Woods system, 138 Britain Afghanistan and, 206 Beirut and, 194 Cambodia and, 23 colonization and, 62 control of opinion in, 5–6 Cuba and, 79, 81 dossier on Saddam Hussein, 130 economy of, 146 fascism and, 67–70 imperialism and, 43–45, 149, 153 India and, 44–45, 155, 182–83 Iran and, 162 Iraq and, 34, 127, 130–31, 163 Jefferson on, 48 Kenya and, 183 Kosovo and, 56 Kuwait and, 164 Middle East and, 150, 161, 162, 197 New Labour party, 130 Russia and, 76 Smith on, 29 terrorism and, 188 UN and, 30 Venezuela and, 64 British Foreign Office, 149, 161 British House of Commons, 56 British Ministry of Information, 8 Bruce, David, 148 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 110 B’Tselem, 172 Bulgaria, 162 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 73 Bundy, McGeorge, 78–80, 124, 125, 223 Bunker, Ellsworth, 93 Burmese workers, 155 Burns, John, 195 Burns, William, 115 Bush, George H.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it. But improve people’s economic outlook and chances are you will make them happier. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, former East Germans remained unhappier than their fellow citizens from the western side. They would have been even less satisfied were it not for the income boost following unification. East Germans’ satisfaction with life rose about 20 percent between 1991 and 2001. Much of that jump was due to the freedoms gained with the demise of their police state.

In the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, four decades of government control over all production and distribution instilled a worldview that is quite different from opinions common in the West. East Germans are more likely to say that success is the product of external social circumstances, while West Germans attribute it to individual effort. In 1997, nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Ossies” were much more likely than “Wessies” to say government should provide for people’s financial security. But views are changing along with economic realities. Researchers suggest that the differences in preferences between East and West are likely to disappear entirely within the next twenty years.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

In Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, the historian Tony Judt credits different factors for the success of liberation movements in each country of Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Judt explains, a youthful reform movement within the Hungarian Communist Party pushed the government at its weakest points. In East Germany, the decision to alter a solidly analog technology—the Berlin Wall—and allow Berliners to travel back and forth had by late 1989 created a political tide the Communist Party could not withstand. All of this change in the satellite nations was reinforced by the progressive weakening of the Soviet state, caused in part by its futile war in Afghanistan. In addition, change was rapid within Soviet society itself.

See Wolfram Alpha AltaVista, 19, 57, 233n71 Amazon, 11, 31, 82, 112, 157, 163 America Online (AOL), 47 Anderson, Benedict, 137 Anderson, Chris, 113, 196 anonymization, of IP addresses, 86 Anti-Defamation League, 65, 66 anti-Semitism, 47, 64–66, 130 antitrust laws, 11, 45, 153, 162, 196 Apple corporation, 11, 29 Aptocracy, 68–69 Argentina, 142 Association of American Publishers, 152, 161 Atlantic magazine, 179 257 258 IND EX AT&T, 49 attention of users, as Google’s chief product, 26, 27, 70 Australia, 134, 146, 147 Authors’ Guild, 152, 161, 202 automotive technology, 4–6 aviation technology, 4–5 Bacon, Francis, 149 Baidu (search engine), 127, 132–33 Band, Jonathan, 169 Barron, Peter, 106–7, 110 Basque nationalism, 146 Beacon program, on Facebook, 90–92 Belgium, 106, 141 Benhabib, Seyla, 147, 148 Benkler, Yochai, 71, 137, 188, 245n54 Bentham, Jeremy, 111, 112 Berlin Wall, fall of, 122 bibliometrics. See citation-review systems Bing (search engine), 21, 24, 25 Blair, Tony, 40, 104, 108 Blogger, 16, 47, 86, 118, 129, 148, 183 blogs: and free rider problem, 34; and Google’s AdSense service, 34; hyperlinks used in, 62; and present author’s Googlization of Everything blog, 234n71 Bloomberg news service, 78, 79 BoingBoing, 234 books: digitization of, 11, 157, 172; online access to, 11, 150–51, 157.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Flux, on the other hand, is more like the Hindu god Shiva, a creative force of destruction and genesis. Flux topples the incumbent and creates a platform for more innovation and birth” (10). Thomas L. Friedman makes a similar argument in his 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat, explaining that digital connectivity produced rapid changes in the last two decades—including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the Netscape Web browser, and employment practices such as outsourcing and off-shoring—that act as flattening and leveling forces, creating broad-based equity across the globe. He writes, “[F]lattening forces are empowering more and more individuals today to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and this is equalizing power—and equalizing opportunity, by giving so many more people the tools and ability to connect, compete, and collaborate” (x).

Technology training curricula available in formal learning environments—schools, colleges, vocational training programs, and even many community organizations—often favor disarticulated skill training over generalized, problem-posing education (Macedo in Freire 1998, xii–xiv). 15. In this I follow Nancy Fraser’s lead in exploring “actually existing democracy” in her 1997 work, Justice Interruptus. She writes in its introduction, “In the wake of 1989 [the collapse of the Berlin Wall] we have heard a great deal of ballyhoo about ‘the triumph of liberal democracy’ and even ‘the end of history.’ Yet there is still quite a lot to object to in our own ‘actually existing democracy’” (69). 16. One of Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic actors, the Modest_Witness can be seen as a stand-in for the kind of situated, provisional knowledge claim Franklin sanctions.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

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

But Mexico’s economy had been in a tailspin throughout most of the 1980s as the result of a global debt crisis and the government’s own mismanagement, and newly elected president Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) was looking for a way to turn it around. A decade before, American president Ronald Reagan had proposed a trade agreement with Mexico but was rebuffed. Now Salinas proposed the idea to Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush. The timing worked in Mexico’s favor. The Berlin Wall had come crashing down just months before, and the Soviet Union was in the process of imploding. Bush was a strong believer in free trade, but he also saw a new world order emerging after the end of the Cold War, and he wanted to ensure a close relationship with America’s two closest neighbors.

See, for example, Sidney Weintraub, United States–Latin American Trade and Financial Relations: Some Policy Recommendations (Santiago, Chile: CEPAL, 1977). In his memoirs, former president Salinas says that President Bush had also raised the idea of NAFTA with him in 1988 but that he had wanted to pursue free trade with Europe. Not until the Berlin Wall came down and Salinas realized that Europe’s focus would be elsewhere did he come back to President Bush to suggest the idea from the Mexican side. See Carlos Salinas de Gortiari, México: Un paso dificil a la modernidad (Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2000). In fact, it only passed: Frederick Mayer, Interpreting NAFTA: The Art and Science of Political Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

Maybe, but I think there would still be people like me who would see everything through the filter of geography, because of the spatial way our brains are wired. The sense of place is just too important to us. When people talk about their experiences with the defining news stories of their generation (the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the Berlin Wall, 9/11), they always frame them as where-we-were-when-we-heard. I was in the kitchen, I was in gym class, I was driving to work. It’s not relevant to the Challenger explosion in any way that I was in my elementary school cafeteria when I heard about it, but that’s still how I remember the event and tell it to others.

Borders may divide us, but, paradoxically, they’re also the places where we’re nearest to one another. Borders on a map may start out as a useful way to separate Us from Them, but then they become symbols of our own complacency; by their very existence, they dare us to cross them. The breaching of a border doesn’t have to be the result of an invading barbarian horde; when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, it was gleefully sledge-hammered into the past by those on both sides of it. Even Chile and Argentina signed a Tratado de Paz y Amistad (“Treaty of Peace and Friendship”) at the Vatican in 1984, ending the century-long Beagle Channel conflict for good. “We’ll meet on edges soon,” as Bob Dylan once sang.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

He was beset by legal troubles, his marriage alternated between indifference and contempt, and he was taking too many drugs—which he planned to kick, in the words of his friend and housemate Iggy Pop, “in the heroin capital of the world.” “It was a dangerous period for me,” Bowie reflected over twenty years later. “I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity.”1 Bowie put down roots near the Berlin Wall. Hansa Studios, where he and Iggy Pop recorded a series of groundbreaking albums, were overlooked by East German machine gun nests. Bowie’s producer, Tony Visconti, remarked that everything about the place screamed “you shouldn’t be making a record here.”2 But amid Berlin’s great museums, legendary bondage clubs, and tormented geopolitics, Bowie found what he needed: new ideas, new constraints, and new challenges.

(Whittaker), 240 Amazon, 124–27, 136–41 Ambulance response time, 159–61, 170–71 Anderson, Laurie, 17n Andreessen, Marc, 242, 243 Anechoic chambers, 75 Annealing, simulated, 10–11 Another Green World (Eno album), 9, 16 Apgar score, 153–55, 157 Apple (company and products), 63, 69, 139 Aquinas, Thomas, 93 Architecture, 68 modernist, 61–63, 72 playground, 269–70, 273 workplace, 70–73, 80, 85 Architecture of Happiness, The (de Botton), 62 Argentina, 216 Ariely, Dan, 248, 255, 256 Armitage, Simon, 31 Artificial intelligence, 252 Asch, Solomon, 47–48, 272n16 Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 18 Attentional filters, 17 Australia, 55, 68–69, 192, 207 Automation, 177–204, 258 disasters caused by, 177–86 human overreliance on, 192–98 unreliability of, 186–92 See also Computers Autonomy in childhood, 264 in workplace, 67–68, 80–84, 87–89 Avalanches, 165–66, 169 Aztec Empire, 34 Baar, Roland, 33 Bahns, Angela, 53–54 Bali, 190 Ball, David, 262 Banking regulations, 161–67, 169–74 Bardeen, John, 26 Barnes & Noble, 136–39 Basel Accords, 161–65, 169–70 Beagle (ship), 27 Beatles, 98 Beckmann, Johann Gottlieb, 150–53, 191, 205, 206 Belew, Adrien, 20–22, 97 Bentham, Jeremy, 170, 171 Beranek, Leo, 75–76 Berger, Warren, 71 Berkowitz, Aaron, 275n23 Berlin Wall, 8 Bevan, Gwyn, 172 Bezos, Jeff, 124–27, 129, 132, 136–41, 143–44, 146, 264 BHP Billiton, 68–69, 86 Big Sort, The (Bishop and Cushing), 217 Biodiversity, 155, 157, 206 Birmingham (England), 213–14 University of, 156 Bishop, Bill, 217 Blair, Tony, 149–50, 152, 155, 159, 170, 172, 173 Blaser, Martin, 208–9 Bletchley Park (England), 147 Blitzkrieg, 128 Blyton, Enid, 45 Bohlin, Peter, 63 Bolt, Beranek and Newman, 75–76, 78 Bombardier Inc., 51 Bonding, 36–39, 41, 57, 60 Bonin, Pierre-Cédric, 178–82, 185–86, 199 Borges, Jorge Luis, 234–39 Bose Corporation, 76, 78 Bösendorfer piano, 1–2 Boston, Route 128 technology cluster in, 214–15 Boston Attention and Learning Lab, 16 Boulder (Col.), 46–47 Bowie, David, 7–9, 16, 17n, 20, 25, 28 Boy Scouts, 42 Boyd, John, 132–35, 137, 140, 144, 264 “Boys Keep Swinging” (Bowie), 21, 22 Bradley, Sarah, 92 Brailsford, Dave, 58 Brand, Stewart, 79 Brandes, Vera, 1–3, 5 Braun, Allen, 99–100 Bridging, 38–39, 41, 57 Brin, Sergey, 81 Britain.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Communication also allows the world to take advantage of its most valuable resource: the growing numbers of human beings who are increasingly educated and literate.6 The second example of global connectivity relates to the political and ideological changes that have both defined and facilitated the latest wave of globalization. The political revolutions that tore down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War were fundamental. In the same decade that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union splintered, the West normalized relations with China’s 1.3-billion-person economy. Authoritarian regimes collapsed in more than 65 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe and were replaced with democratic systems that were more open to global trade, finance, and ideas.7 In many but clearly not all countries, along with open borders came democratic institutions, intellectual property rights, and an economic paradigm shift toward market capitalism and more open economies.8 The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and reforms of macroeconomic policy brought more countries and people than had any previous wave of globalization into the global exchange of goods, services, and ideas.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Mastery of space in turn was seen as a vital tool in the power struggle between the two superpowers. After the failure of Kennedy’s covert plan to topple Fidel Castro, the Soviets increased their military support for Cuba. In Europe, American and Soviet tanks were facing off across the newly constructed Berlin Wall. When the Soviets prepared to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, it felt as if the world had come to the brink. The United States had more than 30,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was rapidly catching up. The deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction” was scant solace.

Able (monkey), 47–48 Aboriginal Australians, 8 abstract thinking, 13–17, 18–19 Abu Dhabi, UAE, 106 Adams, Mike, 82 adenine, 6 Advanced Robotic Development Lab, 206 aerodynamics, 26, 66–73, 82–83 aesthetic judgment, 15 A4 rocket, 33 Africa, 15–16, 120 as origin site for early human dispersion, 5, 7–8, 11, 15, 118, 186, 202, 218, 262 Air Force, US, 239 covert projects of, 69, 72 in rocket development, 36–37, 48, 71, 85 Rutan’s work for, 82 in space exploration, 50, 73, 272 airplanes: development of, 69–72, 83, 262 safety of, 108, 109 Albert (monkey), 47 Alcubierre, Miguel, 229–30 Aldrin, Buzz, 108, 170 aliens, extraterrestrial: aggressive, 259 hyperintelligent, 258, 260, 260, 262 hypothetical categorization of, 252–57 lack of evidence of, 236–37, 239–44, 257, 291 potential to communicate with, 52, 189, 234–35, 238, 239, 246 potentially dead civilizations of, 243–44 search for, 186–91, 189, 236–44, 246, 291 aliens, extraterrestrial (continued) speculative number of, 188, 233–35 as unrecognizable, 216, 244 Allen, John, 192–93 Allen, Paul, 84–85, 188 Allen Telescope Array, 188–89, 243 Alling, Abigail, 194 Alpha Centauri system, 132, 133, 215, 216, 219–20, 222, 225–26 Alzheimer’s disease, 115 Amazon, 79, 103 Americas: European settlement of, 204, 243, 250 population dispersion into, 8, 218 amino acids, 8 Amish, 203 ammonia, 125, 173 Anaxagoras, 17–18, 17 Anderson, Eric, 275 Anderson, Laurie, 76 Anders, William, 270 Andes mountains, 172 population adaptation to altitude in, 119 Andreessen, Marc, 79 Andrews, Dana, 223 animals: in Biosphere 2, 193 evolution of, 172 human beings compared to, 186, 262 minimum viable population in, 201 in religious sacrifice, 119 in scientific research, 46–49, 250–51 Anonym, Lepht, 207 Ansari, Anousheh, 91 Antarctica, 169 Antares rocket, 275 anthropocentrism, 244, 291 antimatter, 221–22, 254 ants, 193 apes, human beings compared to, 10 Apollo 1, loss of crew of, 43, 107 Apollo 11, 13, 30, 45, 56 Apollo program, 30, 42–44, 49–51, 55, 64, 108, 157–58, 158, 170, 176, 196, 219, 270, 271, 272 Arabs, use of rockets by, 23 Archon Genomics X Prize, 93 Archytas, 19, 22 Area 51, 238, 240 Arecibo Observatory, 239, 243, 292–93 Ares, 163 Ariane 5 rocket, 113 Arianespace, 106 Aristarchus, 19 Aristotle, 19–20 Arizona, University of, 193 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of, 156 arms race, 24, 36, 139 Armstrong, Neil, 43, 45, 56, 71, 74, 108, 158 Army, German, Ordnance Department, 32 Army, US: in rocket development, 35, 36 in space exploration, 50 Art of Electronics, The (Horowitz), 237 artificial intelligence (AI), 179, 208, 245, 249, 259 human intelligence surpassed by, 258 Artist in Space program, 74, 76 Artsutanov, Yuri, 149 Asia, population dispersion into, 7–8, 11, 15, 218 Asimov, Isaac, 94 Asteroid Redirect Mission, 104–5, 146, 156 asteroids: capture of, 104–5, 146, 173, 276 impacts by, 245 mining of, 155–56, 182 astrobiology, 123–24 astronauts, 141, 272 physiological effects on, 114–17 selection criteria for, 73–75 sex and, 200 see also specific individuals Atacama Desert, population adaptation to dry environment in, 119 Athene, 163 Atlantic Ocean, first non-stop flight over, 90–91 Atlas rocket, 36–37, 71, 72 atmosphere: of Earth, 8, 70–71, 70, 118, 167, 172, 174 of exoplanets, 216 habitability requirements for, 132–33, 216–17 of Mars, 124, 164–66, 173–74, 216 of Venus, 171 atomic bomb: Soviet, 35, 36 US development of, 35, 36, 239, 244 atomic energy, 219, 244 Atomic Energy Commission, 99, 222 Atomists, 18 atoms, 19 manipulation of, 258 in nanotechnology, 151 rearrangement of, 229–30, 232 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 11, 12, 86 Australia: isolation in, 204 population dispersion into, 7–8 Autonomous Nanotechnological Swarm (ANTS), 182 aviation industry, 91, 99 accident rate for, 108 Aviation Week, 71 B-2 bomber, 70 Babylonians, 163 Bacon, Roger, 23 bacteria, 172, 180 Baikonur Cosmodrome, 65–66 Bailey, Ronald, 207 Baker, David, 169 ballistic missiles (ICBMs): Chinese, 141 intercontinental, 36–37, 65 long-range, 30–34, 33 balloons: flight principles for, 68–69 high-altitude, 32 hot-air, 47, 68, 89 Barrow, John, 258 Bass, Ed, 192–93, 285 Baumgartner, Felix, 68, 272 Baum, L. Frank, 188 behavioral b’s, 15 Bell X-1, 71 Bell, Alexander Graham, 78 Bell Labs, 153 Benford, Gregory, 223–24 Benford, James, 223–24 Bennett, Charles, 230 Bering Strait, land bridge across, 8, 120, 218 Berlin Rocket Society, 32 Berlin Wall, 41 Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–79 Bernoulli, Daniel, 68 Berserker series (Saberhagen), 177, 259 Bezos, Jeff, 103 Bible, 148–49 big bang theory, 131, 255 “Big Ear” telescope, 237 Bigelow, Robert, 102–3 binary stars, 126 biohackers (grinders), 207 biomarkers, 216–18 Biosphere 2 experiment, 192–97, 193, 285–86 black projects, 69–70, 72, 144 Blade Runner, 204, 208, 259 Blue Origin, 103 Boeing X-37, 72, 85 Bohr, Niels, 213, 288 Bostrom, Nick, 207, 245–47, 260–61 Bounty, HMS, 202 Bradbury, Ray, 164 brains: computer interfaces with, 205–7 human, 12–17, 203, 283 of orcas, 190 radiation damage to, 115 simulation of, 259–61 “brain in a vat” concept, 260 Branson, Holly and Sam, 89 Branson, Richard Charles Nicholas, 80, 86–89, 95, 97–98, 101–2, 106 Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, 290 Brezhnev, Leonid, 42 Brightman, Sarah, 102 Brin, Sergey, 275 British Airways, 87 British Interplanetary Society, 221 Brokaw, Tom, 74 Brother Assassin (Saberhagen), 177 Bryan, Richard, 238 buckyballs, 151, 231 Buddhism, 20, 267 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 197 Buran, 72 Burnett, Mark, 75 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 164 Burrows, William, 35–36 Bush, George W., administration of, 93 Bussard, Robert, 222 butterfly effect, 195 By Rocket into Interplanetary Space (Oberth), 31 California, population dispersion into, 8 California, University of: at Irvine, 112, 223 at Los Angeles, 78 Calvin, William, 15 camera technology, 53, 176–77, 205 Cameron, James, 92, 120, 176 Canada, 142 canals, on Mars, 163 canards, 82–83 cancer, 180 cannonball, Newton’s experiment with, 25, 267 cannons: acceleration force of, 26 smooth-bore, 24 carbon, 172 in nanotechnology, 151–52, 182 as requirement for life, 123–24, 256 carbon dioxide, 132, 171, 172–73, 182, 193–94, 196, 218, 278 carbon nanotubes, 151–52 carbyne, 152 Cassini spacecraft, 52–53, 125, 182 Castro, Fidel, 41 casualties, early Chinese, 22 cataracts, 115 cats, 48–49, 251 causality principle, 230–31 cave paintings, 15 celestial property rights, 145–47 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 158 centrifuges, 114 Cerf, Vinton, 67 Chaffee, Roger, 43 Challenger, explosion of, 55–56, 56, 74, 107, 271 Chang’e 3 lunar probe, 143, 162 chemical fuels, 219–21, 220 chickens, research using, 26 chimpanzees, 14 genetic diversity of humans vs., 202 China: as averse to innovation, 109 in early attempts at space travel, 21–22, 22, 68, 139, 141 population dispersion into, 7 revolution in, 141 rocket development in, 23–24, 113 space program of, 139–44, 140, 161, 162, 195, 276 US relations with, 144 Christian, Fletcher, 202 Christianity, 20 Chuansheng Chen, 11 civilization: Type I, 253, 254, 257 Type II, 253–54, 254, 257 Type III, 253, 254, 257 Type IV, 253, 254, 255 Clarke, Arthur C., 149–50, 164, 185, 201, 252 climate change, 197–98, 286 Clinton, Bill, 154 cloning, 251 Clynes, Manfred, 205 Cocconi, Giuseppe, 187 Colbert, Stephen, 74, 117 Cold War, 35–39, 41–43, 50, 55, 73, 76, 139, 145, 197 Columbia, disintegration of, 55, 56, 107 Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, 107 Columbus, Christopher, 243 comets, 183 Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), 275 Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, 145 communication: with alien species, 52, 189, 234–35, 238, 239, 246, 253, 255, 259 by digital data transmission, 66–67, 77–80 latency and, 178 space technology in, 153–54 Compaq, 95 computation, future technology of, 258–62 confinement, psychological impact of, 169–70 Congress, US: legislation in, 78, 144 on space programs, 38, 41, 75, 156, 158 consciousness, simulation of, 259–61 conservation biology, 201 conspiracy theories, 238, 240 Constellation program, 104 Contact (film), 236–37, 242 Contact (Sagan), 236 contraception, 200 Copernicus, 19, 20, 127 Coriolis force, Coriolis effect, 152 cosmic rays, 115, 160, 160, 164, 167, 168, 204 cosmism, 27 cosmonauts, 141 disasters of, 108 records set by, 115 selection criteria for, 74 Cosmos 1, 184 cosmos, cosmology, ancient concepts of, 17–20 Cosmos Studios, 184 Cosmotheoros (Huygens), 163 counterfactual thinking, 14 Cronkite, Walter, 74 cryogenic suspension, 250–51 cryptobiosis, 123 cryptography, 231, 291 Cuban missile crisis, 41–42 CubeSat, 184–85 Cultural Revolution, Chinese, 141–42 Curiosity rover, 165, 167, 176, 181 cybernetics, 206–7 Cyborg Foundation, 288 cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), 204–8, 288 Cygnus capsule, 100 cytosine, 6 dark energy, 256 d’Arlandes, Marquis, 68 DARPANET, 78 Darwin, Charles, 265 “Darwin” (machine), 227 Death Valley, 118–19 deceleration, 222, 223 DeepSea Challenger sub, 120 deep space, 126–29 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 78, 224 Defense Department, US, 38, 78, 90, 153 De Garis, Hugo, 258 Delta rockets, 72, 113 Delta-V, 111 Democritus, 19 Destination Mir (reality show), 75 Diamandis, Peter, 90–94, 97–98, 147, 156 diamonds, 131, 231 Dick, Philip K., 204–5 Digital Equipment Corporation, 213 DNA, 6–7, 9, 19, 189, 202, 228, 251, 263, 265, 266 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick), 205 dogs: brains of, 13 in scientific research, 251 in space travel, 40, 47 Dolly (sheep), 251 Doomsday Clock, 197–98, 246, 286 dopamine, 10, 98 Doppler method, exoplanet detection and characterization by, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 215 Doppler shift, 127 Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, 33 Downey, Robert, Jr., 95 drag, in flight, 68, 83, 223 Drake, Frank, 187–88, 235, 237 Drake equation, 188, 189, 233–35, 237, 241, 243, 244, 253, 291–92 DRD4 alleles, 7R mutation in, 10–12, 11, 15, 98 Drexler, Eric, 226 drones, 180–81 Druyan, Ann, 184 Duke, Charles, 45 Dunn, Tony, 225 Dyson, Freeman, 226–27, 253 Dyson sphere, 253–54, 254 Earth: atmosphere of, 8, 70–71, 70 early impacts on, 50, 172 geological evolution of, 172 as one of many worlds, 17–20 planets similar to, 122, 124–26, 129–33, 224, 235 projected demise of, 197–98 as round, 19 as suited for human habitation, 118–22, 121, 234 as viewed from space, 45, 53, 121, 185, 270 Earth Return Vehicle, 169 “Earthrise” (Anders), 270 Earth similarity index, 215–16 eBay, 79, 95 Economist, The, 105 ecosystem, sealed and self-contained, 192–97, 193, 285 Eiffel Tower, 27, 149 Einstein, Albert, 220, 228, 256 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 36–39, 73, 79 electric cars, 96 electric solar sails, 186 electromagnetic waves, 186 e-mail, 78 embryo transport, 251 Enceladus, 177, 182, 227 potential habitability of, 125, 278 Encyclopædia Britannica, 95, 283 Endangered Species Act (1973), 201 energy: aliens’ use of, 190 civilizations characterized by use of, 252–57, 254, 258 dark, 256 declining growth in world consumption of, 257 Einstein’s equation for, 220 production and efficiency of, 219–24, 220 as requirement for life, 123–24 in rocket equation, 110 Engines of Creation (Drexler), 226 environmental disasters, 245 environmental protection: as applied to space, 147 movement for, 45, 235, 263, 270 Epicureans, 18 Epsilon Eridani, 187 Eratosthenes, 19 ethane, 52, 125 Ethernet, 213 eukaryotes, 172 Euripides, 18 Europa, 52, 97–98 potential habitability of, 125, 125, 161, 278 Europa Clipper mission, 98 Europe: economic depression in, 28 population dispersion into, 7–8, 11, 15 roots of technological development in, 23–24 European Southern Observatory, 133 European Space Agency, 159, 178–79 European Union, bureaucracy of, 106 Eustace, Alan, 120, 272 Evenki people, 119–20 Everest, Mount, 120 evolution: genetic variation in, 6, 203, 265 geological, 172 of human beings, 16–17 off-Earth, 203–4 evolutionary divergence, 201–4 exoplanets: Earth-like, 129–33, 215–18 extreme, 131–32 formation of, 215, 216 incidence and detection of, 126–33, 128, 233 exploration: as basic urge of human nature, 7–12, 109, 218, 261–63 imagination and, 262–63 explorer gene, 86 Explorer I, 38 explosives, early Chinese, 21–23 extinction, 201–2 extraterrestrials, see aliens, extraterrestrial extra-vehicular activities, 179 extremophiles, 122–23 eyeborg, 205–6 Falcon Heavy rocket, 114 Falcon rockets, 96, 97, 101, 184 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 82, 93, 105–7, 154 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, 272 Felix and Félicette (cats), 48–49 Fermi, Enrico, 239–41 Fermilab, 254 “Fermi question,” 240–41, 243 Feynman, Richard, 179–80, 230, 270, 280 F4 Phantom jet fighter, 82 51 Peg (star), 126, 133 55 Cancri (star), 131 F-117 Nighthawk, 69 fine-tuning, 256, 294 fire arrows, 23, 68 fireworks, 21–24, 31 flagella, 180 flight: first human, 68 first powered, 69 principles of, 67–73 stability in, 82–83 “Fly Me to the Moon,” 45 food: energy produced by, 219, 220 in sealed ecosystem, 194–95 for space travel, 115–16, 159, 170 Forward, Robert, 223 Foundation series (Asimov), 94 founder effect, 202–3 Fountains of Paradise, The (Clarke), 149 France, 48, 68, 90 Frankenstein monster, 206, 259 Fresnel lens, 223 From Earth to the Moon (Verne), 183 fuel-to-payload ratio, see rocket equation Fukuyama, Francis, 207 Fuller, Buckminster, 151, 192 fullerenes, 151 Futron corporation, 155 Future of Humanity Institute, 245 “futurology,” 248–52, 249 Fyodorov, Nikolai, 26, 27 Gagarin, Yuri, 40–41, 41, 66, 269 Gaia hypothesis, 286 galaxies: incidence and detection of, 235 number of, 255 see also Milky Way galaxy Galileo, 49–50, 183, 270 Gandhi, Mahatma, 147 Garn, Jake, 114 Garn scale, 114 Garriott, Richard, 92 gas-giant planets, 125, 126–29 Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 238 Gazenko, Oleg, 47 Gemini program, 42 Genesis, Book of, 148–49 genetic anthropology, 6 genetic code, 5–7, 123 genetic diversity, 201–3 genetic drift, 203 genetic engineering, 245, 249 genetic markers, 6–7 genetics, human, 6–7, 9–12, 120, 201–4 Genographic Project, 7, 265 genome sequencing, 93, 202, 292 genotype, 6 “adventure,” 11–12, 98 geocentrism, 17, 19–20, 49 geodesic domes, 192 geological evolution, 172 George III, king of England, 147 German Aerospace Center, 178 Germany, Germans, 202, 238 rocket development by, 28, 30–34, 141 in World War II, 30–35 g-forces, 46–49, 48, 89, 111, 114 GJ 504b (exoplanet), 131 GJ 1214b (exoplanet), 132 glaciation, 172 Glenn Research Center, 219 global communications industry, 153–54 Global Positioning System (GPS), 144, 153–54 God, human beings in special relationship with, 20 Goddard, Robert, 28–32, 29, 36, 76, 78, 81–82, 94, 268 Goddard Space Flight Center, 178 gods, 20 divine intervention of, 18 Golden Fleece awards, 238 Goldilocks zone, 122, 126, 131 Gonzalez, Antonin, 215 Goodall, Jane, 14 Google, 80, 92, 185, 272, 275 Lunar X Prize, 161 Gopnik, Alison, 10, 13 Grasshopper, 101 gravity: centrifugal force in, 26, 114, 150 in flight, 68 of Mars, 181, 203 Newton’s theory of, 25, 267 and orbits, 25, 114–15, 127, 128, 149–50, 267 in rocket equation, 110 of Sun, 183 waves, 255 see also g-forces; zero gravity Gravity, 176 gravity, Earth’s: first object to leave, 40, 51 human beings who left, 45 as obstacle for space travel, 21, 105, 148 as perfect for human beings, 118 simulation of, 168–69 Great Art of Artillery, The (Siemienowicz), 267 Great Britain, 86, 106, 206, 227 “Great Filter,” 244–47 Great Leap Forward, 15–16 “Great Silence, The,” of SETI, 236–39, 240–41, 243–44 Greece, ancient, 17–19, 163 greenhouse effect, 171, 173 greenhouse gasses, 132, 278 Griffin, Michael, 57, 147, 285–86 grinders (biohackers), 207 Grissom, Gus, 43 guanine, 6 Guggenheim, Daniel, 81, 268 Guggenheim, Harry, 81 Guggenheim Foundation, 30, 81–82, 268 gunpowder, 21–24, 267 Guth, Alan, 257 habitable zone, 122, 124–26, 130–31, 132, 188, 241, 246, 277–78, 286, 291 defined, 124 Hadfield, Chris, 142 hair, Aboriginal, 8 “Halfway to Pluto” (Pettit), 273 Hanson, Robin, 247 haptic technology, 178 Harbisson, Neil, 205, 288 Harvard Medical School, 90 Hawking, Stephen, 88, 93, 198, 259 HD 10180 (star), 127 Heinlein, Robert, 177 Heisenberg compensator, 229 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 229–30 heliocentrism, 19 helium, 68 helium 3, 161–62 Herschel, William, 163 Higgs particle, 256 High Frontier, 146–47 Hilton, Paris, 88, 101–2 Hilton hotels, 145 Hinduism, 20 Hiroshima, 222 Hitler, Adolf, 32, 34 Hope, Dennis M., 145, 147 Horowitz, Paul, 237–38 hot Jupiters, 127–28, 130 Hubble Space Telescope, 56–57, 65, 218, 225 Huffington, Arianna, 92 human beings: as adaptable to challenging environments, 118–22 as alien simulations, 260–61, 260 creative spirit of, 73, 248 early global migration of, 5–12, 9, 11, 15, 19, 118, 120, 186, 202, 218, 262, 265 Earth as perfectly suited for, 118–22, 121 exploration intrinsic to nature of, 7–12, 109, 218, 261–63 first appearance of, 5, 15, 172, 234 impact of evolutionary divergence on, 201–4 as isolated species, 241–42 as lone intelligent life, 241, 243 merger of machines and, see cyborgs minimal viable population in, 201–2, 251 off-Earth, 203–4, 215, 250–52 requirements of habitability for, 122, 124–26, 129, 130–31 sense of self of, 232, 261 space as inhospitable to, 53–54, 114–17, 121, 123 space exploration by robots vs., 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 space travel as profound and sublime experience for, 45, 53, 117, 122 speculation on future of, 93, 94, 204, 207–8, 215, 244–47, 248–63, 249 surpassed by technology, 258–59 threats to survival of, 94, 207–8, 244–47, 250, 259–62, 286, 293 timeline for past and future of, 248–50, 249 transforming moment for, 258–59 Huntsville, Ala., US Space and Rocket Center in, 48 Huygens, Christiaan, 163 Huygens probe, 53 hybrid cars, 96 hydrogen, 110, 156, 159, 161, 187, 219, 222 hydrogen bomb, 36 hydrosphere, 173 hyperloop aviation concept, 95 hypothermia, 251 hypothetical scenarios, 15–16 IBM, 213 Icarus Interstellar, 224 ice: on Europa, 125 on Mars, 163–65, 227 on Moon, 159–60 ice ages, 7–8 ice-penetrating robot, 98 IKAROS spacecraft, 184 imagination, 10, 14, 20 exploration and, 261–63 immortality, 259 implants, 206–7 inbreeding, 201–3 India, 159, 161 inflatable modules, 101–2 inflation theory, 255–57, 255 information, processing and storage of, 257–60 infrared telescopes, 190 Inspiration Mars, 170–71 Institute for Advanced Concepts, 280 insurance, for space travel, 106–7 International Academy of Astronautics, 152 International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), 37 International Institute of Air and Space Law, 199 International MicroSpace, 90 International Scientific Lunar Observatory, 157 International Space Station, 55, 64–65, 64, 71, 75, 91, 96, 100, 102, 142, 143, 144, 151, 153, 154, 159, 178–79, 179, 185, 272, 275 living conditions on, 116–17 as staging point, 148 supply runs to, 100–101, 104 International Space University, 90 International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 105–6, 144 Internet: Congressional legislation on, 78, 144 development of, 76–77, 77, 94, 95, 271 erroneous predictions about, 213–14 limitations of, 66–67 robotics and, 206 space travel compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), 78 interstellar travel, 215–18 energy technology for, 219–24 four approaches to, 251–52 scale model for, 219 Intrepid rovers, 165 Inuit people, 120 Io, 53, 177 property rights on, 145 “iron curtain,” 35 Iron Man, 95 isolation, psychological impact of, 169–70 Jacob’s Ladder, 149 Jade Rabbit (“Yutu”), 139, 143, 161 Japan, 161, 273 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), 184 Jefferson, Thomas, 224 Jemison, Mae, 224 jet engines, 69–70 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 141 Johnson, Lyndon, 38, 42, 45, 158, 269 Johnson Space Center, 76, 104, 179, 206, 229, 269 see also Mission Control Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, 74 Joules per kilogram (MJ/kg), 219–20, 222 Journalist in Space program, 74 “junk” DNA, 10, 266 Juno probe, 228 Jupiter, 126, 127, 177, 217, 270 distance from Earth to, 50 moons of, 97, 125, 125 probes to, 51–52, 228 as uninhabitable, 125 Justin (robot), 178 Kaku, Michio, 253 Karash, Yuri, 65 Kardashev, Nikolai, 253 Kardashev scale, 253, 254, 258 Kármán line, 70, 70, 101 Kennedy, John F., 41–43, 45 Kepler, Johannes, 183 Kepler’s law, 127 Kepler spacecraft and telescope, 128, 128, 129–31, 218, 278 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42, 47 Kickstarter, 184 Killian, James, 38 Kline, Nathan, 205 Knight, Pete, 71 Komarov, Vladimir, 43, 108 Korean War, 141 Korolev, Sergei, 35, 37 Kraft, Norbert, 200 Krikalev, Sergei, 115 Kunza language, 119 Kurzweil, Ray, 94, 207, 259 Laika (dog), 47, 65, 269 Laliberté, Guy, 75 landings, challenges of, 51, 84–85, 170 Lang, Fritz, 28, 268 language: of cryptography, 291 emergence of, 15, 16 of Orcas, 190 in reasoning, 13 Lansdorp, Bas, 170–71, 198–99, 282 lasers, 223, 224, 225–26, 239 pulsed, 190, 243 last common ancestor, 6, 123, 265 Late Heavy Bombardment, 172 latency, 178 lava tubes, 160 legislation, on space, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 Le Guin, Ursula K., 236–37 Leonov, Alexey, 55 L’Garde Inc., 284 Licancabur volcano, 119 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett “Lick,” 76–78 life: appearance and evolution on Earth of, 172 artificial, 258 detection of, 216–18 extension of, 26, 207–8, 250–51, 259 extraterrestrial, see aliens, extraterrestrial intelligent, 190, 235, 241, 243, 258 requirements of habitability for, 122–26, 125, 129, 131–33, 241, 256–57 lifetime factor (L), 234–335 lift, in flight, 68–70, 83 lift-to-drag ratio, 83 light: from binary stars, 126 as biomarker, 217 Doppler shift of, 127 momentum and energy from, 183 speed of, 178, 228–29, 250, 251 waves, 66 Lindbergh, Charles, 30, 81–82, 90–91, 268 “living off the land,” 166, 200 logic, 14, 18 Long March, 141 Long March rockets, 113, 142, 143 Long Now Foundation, 293 Los Alamos, N.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But as the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore. The media began a frantic search for parallels. Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told me: ‘It’s a revolutionary wave, like 1848.’ Others found analogies with 1968 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In late January 2011 I sat with veteran reporters in the newsroom of a major TV network and discussed whether this was Egypt’s 1905 or its 1917. As I will argue, there are strong parallels—above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. But there is something in the air that defies historical parallels: something new to do with technology, behaviour and popular culture.

Paul Mason November 2012 Index Abdelrahman, Sarah, @sarrahsworld 11–12, 14, 135 Abdul, Rifat 22 academic research 146 activism: dynamic of 138; social networks impact on 138–41 affinity groups 136 age war 39 Agha-Soltan, Neda 35–36, 37 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 33–34 Al-Ahly, ultras 16–17 Alba, Celia 198 Ali, Ben 11 Alien (film)110 Al-Jazeera 14 American Civil War 172, 182 analogies 65 anomic breakdown 103–4 anti-capitalist demonstrations 33, 109 anti-globalization movement 45, 48, 189 anti-road movement 56 Antista, Larry 160–61, 170 Antista, Michelle 160–61 anti-war demonstrations 33 April 6th Youth Movement 10, 83, 147–48 Aquino, Benigno 198 Arabists, failure of 25–27 Arabs: image of 25; youth radicalization 33 Arab Spring, economics of 119–22 Architecture for Humanity 199 Arizona 164–67, 183 Arpaio, Sheriff Joe 165, 167 @AsmaaMahfouz 11, 177 asset price inflation 106–8 Associated Press 39 Athens 94; austerity protest, 15 June 2011 90; December 2008 uprising 32–33, 73, 76; general strike 99; Hotel Grande Bretagne 87, 101; the indignados 88, 100–1, 104; police tactics 95; protesters control 94–95; Syntagma Square 96; Syntagma Square protest, 14 June 2011 87–90; Syntagma Square protest, 29 June 2011 99–102; tax collectors protest 96–97; tear gas attacks 93–94, 100–1 Austria 172 automation, Marx on 143–44 autonomism 144 autonomy, personal 131, 139 Avatar (film) 29 Bahrain 25, 139 Baldera, Oliver 197 Barings Asset Management 121–22 Beck, Glenn 116, 117, 157, 158, 163, 181, 184, 186–87, 190, 192 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine 25–26 @benvickers_ (art activist) 1 Berardi, Franco 144 Berlin Wall, fall of 65 Berlusconi, Silvio 17 Bernanke, Ben 118, 120–21, 123 Bernstein, Jared 117 Besson, Eric 17 Binay, Jejomar 204 Black Bloc, the 1, 58–59, 60–61, 94, 151 Black Jacobins, The (James) 149 Blair, Tony 17, 114, 178 Blanc, Louis 187 bloggers: American radical 184; Middle East arrests 76 Bouazizi, Mohamed 32, 71 bourgeois ideology 29 Brand, Stewart 140–41 Brandzel, Ben 184, 186 Brazil 120, 122 Brown, Gordon 109 Brussels 90 Busch, Ernst 152 Cabagauan, Agnes 206–7 Cairo: balance sheet 5; baltagiya 6–7,17; Coptic Christians 6; Copt/ Muslim relations 7; Day of Rage, 28 May 15–17; freedom 5; garbage processing 6, 7–8; military coup 17; Moqattam slum 6–10; Naheya 12, 13; policing 7; poverty 9; Qasr al-Nil bridge 15–16; recycling 8–9; security 7; swine flu epidemic 9; Tahrir Square 6, 10–14, 69, 89, 139, 191, 211; waste collection privatization 8–9; zabbaleen 6–10 California 168–70 Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall 51–52 capitalism 27, 30, 80, 188; Greek model 102; Marx on 142–43, 145 capitalist realism 28–32, 39 Carcellar, Father Norberto 205 Castells, Manuel 131, 138–39, 148–49 Cavafy, C.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

And Russia’s cyber team came together for a new mission, with some new methods the world had yet to see and still doesn’t quite comprehend. 6 Putin’s Plan Soldiers surrender, sign armistices, and lay down their weapons when they’re defeated. Intelligence officers—spies—burn files when their country loses, giving up their weapon: hard-won secret information on their enemies. That was exactly what Vladimir Putin did when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989: he burned the Kremlin’s files from his KGB outpost in Dresden, Germany. Putin’s assignment outside Mother Russia focused on spotting, assessing, and recruiting East Germans with access to the West. He employed spycraft to buy, compromise, and coerce people into doing the Kremlin’s bidding, focusing largely on “stealing Western technology and NATO secrets,” in part by recruiting agents trained in “wireless communications.”

Rather than adapt and upgrade Communism’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the Western world, these liberalization efforts brought about the country’s unraveling. Openly available information didn’t free the Soviet economy; it crumbled it. Eastern European Communist dictatorships dissolved rapidly in 1989, marked by the epic fall of the Berlin Wall. Less than two years later, on Christmas Day 1991, the Russian flag replaced the Soviet flag atop the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin understood relationships: how to mold them and manipulate them. Not surprisingly, his return to St. Petersburg led to his becoming a behind-the-scenes fixer for a controversial mayor before quickly climbing into Russia’s leadership.


pages: 328 words: 97,711

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, crack epidemic, disinformation, Ferguson, Missouri, financial thriller, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, Snapchat

(The Cuban delegation had a similar arrangement in the United States.) Before his debriefing began, Aspillaga said, he had one request: he wanted the CIA to fly in one of the former Havana station chiefs, a man known to Cuban intelligence as “el Alpinista,” the Mountain Climber. The Mountain Climber had served the agency all over the world. After the Berlin Wall fell, files retrieved from the KGB and the East German secret police revealed that they had taught a course on the Mountain Climber to their agents. His tradecraft was impeccable. Once, Soviet intelligence officers tried to recruit him: they literally placed bags of money in front of him. He waved them off, mocked them.

The Mountain Climber, for his part, argues that the tradecraft of the CIA’s Cuban section was just sloppy. He had previously worked in Eastern Europe, up against the East Germans, and there, he said, the CIA had been much more meticulous. But what was the CIA’s record in East Germany? Just as bad as the CIA’s record in Cuba. After the Berlin Wall fell, East German spy chief Markus Wolf wrote in his memoirs that by the late 1980s we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start. On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Anarchism also has a significant online presence and the libraries of academic literature are rapidly expanding. Anarchists argue about the ideological soundness of the newest social movements, but there’s little dispute that there has been a change in grass-roots activism, particularly since the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Significant movements of the left – from Antifa to the Zapatista uprising – are routinely discussed with reference to anarchism. In 1968, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, Daniel Cohn-Bendit suggested that anarchism deserved recognition as an important current within leftism.

u=loughuni&sid=DLBC [last access 17 February 2018]. 2 Muñoz, Anarchists. 3 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism 1864–1892 (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2009); Pietro Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 4 Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); ‘Gustave Courbet: A Biography’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, online at http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/courbet-dossier/biography.html#c19275 [last access 5 March 2018]. 5 Muñoz, Anarchists. 6 George Engel, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/engel-george-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]. 7 Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2006 [1980]). 8 Samuel Fielden, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/fielden-samuel-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]; Blaine McKinley, ‘Samuel Fielden’, in Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (eds), Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Co., 1986). 9 Adolph Fischer, ‘Autobiography’, online at https://libcom.org/library/fischer-adolphe-autobiography [last access 25 February 2018]. 10 Muñoz, Anarchists. 11 Shulman (ed.), Red Emma Speaks. 12 Louis Patsouras, The Anarchism of Jean Grave: Editor, Journalist and Militant (Montreal: Black Rose, 2003); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 13 Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 14 Philip S.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

Bookshelves in the leafy English village where I grew up groaned under the weight of volumes about Italian cuisine or the difficulties of assimilating in rural France, but when it came to the gastronomically and climatically challenged Netherlands, most people were completely uninformed. Those well versed in the history of the Berlin Wall or the French Resistance often knew nothing about swathes of Dutch history: the vast land bridge that once connected the Netherlands to England; the famine that devastated the country in the 1940s; the Catholic traditions of the carnival-loving south; the long battle for independence from Spain; the bloody wars against the English navy; the engineering marvel of the Delta Project; the poisonous politics of the Dutch far right.

There were even persistent rumours that government job centres encouraged unemployed women to enter the sex trade. A city once synonymous with free love had become synonymous with paid-for sex. However, as with the drugs trade, recent years had brought increasing concern about the practical implications of such a tolerant approach. In the late 1980s, the collapse of the Berlin Wall had sent a wave of young women from Eastern Europe to Amsterdam. In the 1990s, the Schengen agreement meant a citizen of any EU country could set up (or be set up) as a sex worker, without needing a work permit or visa. By 1999, just a third of Amsterdam’s prostitutes were Dutch, with the rest coming from Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

British worries grew following German reunification in 1990, and they were also shared by France. While the latter had been a long-term ally of Germany in European policy, it had seen its position undermined with the spread of capitalism into what it feared was to be a German-dominated Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. A UK Cabinet Office report of a meeting in January 1990 between the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand brought the point home sharply. It described the concerns each leader had about a Germany on the verge of reunification: President Mitterrand said that he shared the Prime Minister’s concerns about the Germans’ so-called mission in central Europe.

Gupta, Partha Sarathi 1975, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964, London: Macmillan Press Newsinger, John 2006, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, London: Bookmarks Index Page numbers in bold refer to charts, page numbers in italic refer to charts. 1 per cent, the 76, 102 ABN AMRO 51 ABP 82 Acland, Richard 32 advances 78 Afghanistan 220 Amsterdam 51 Anglo-American euromarkets 40–4 Anglo-American financial relationships 21, 27–8, 36, 59 transition, post-1945 29–30 Anheuser Busch InBev 121 anti-monopoly policies 119–20 Apple 77, 118, 118–19, 121–2, 155 Arab-Israeli War, 1973 55 Asian financial crisis, 1997–98 101, 166–7 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) 18, 226 asset managers 80–1 austerity 152, 219 Australia 31, 58, 60, 109, 206, 226 automobile production 121 Aviva 82 Bahamas, the 209 balance of payments 187, 188, 200, 203, 207 balance of power 52 bank deposits 93 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 108, 191, 192, 214 bank loans, international 66 Bank of America 125 Bank of America International xi Bank of England 44, 47, 56–7, 62, 64, 99–100, 116, 158–9, 173 Bank of Japan 157–8 banking capital 136 banks American 132–3, 193 American fragmentation 40 American regulation 36 assets 4, 85, 122–3, 141–4, 143, 214 borrowing 206–8 broking activity 80 business 79–80 Chinese 225–6 City of London trade 45 clients 79 creation of revenue-earning assets 137, 137–8 credit creation 83–5, 86, 104 dealing revenues 146 dealing spreads 191 derivative assets 140–1 Eurodollar deposits in American 41–2 existing loan assets 140 financial assets 139–47, 143 financial power 92 financial services revenues 191–7, 192, 194, 196 fines 79–80 foreign exchange deals 79 foreign exchange turnover 193–5, 194 fund buy backs 198 Hilferding’s analysis 92–5 interest-bearing capital advances 79–80 international assets 108 international business volume 192–3 Islamic 221 lending 142–4, 208–10 leverage ratios 131–4, 133, 134, 138 liabilities 108, 141, 141–4, 143 monopoly position 139 net interest income 138 networks 205–6 offshore operations 208–9 private 116 reserve requirements 40 role of 9, 136 short-term money-market instrument assets 144 start-ups 139 transaction volume 134–5 UK 4, 116, 134, 191–7, 192, 194, 196, 206–10, 214 UK assets and liabilities 141–4, 143 unsecured loans between 46 Banque de France 100 Barclays Bank 4 Barclays Global Investors 125 Barclays-Lehman deal, 2008 125 Barclays plc 123, 125 Bayly, Christopher 30 beer production 121 Belgium 1 Berkshire Hathaway 81–2 Berlin Wall, fall of 63 Bevan, Aneurin 32 Big Bang, the xi, 7, 54, 66–70 BlackRock 80, 125 Blair, Tony 64, 112 bond markets 49, 146 bond ownership 102, 144, 146 bond securities, characteristics 86 booms 104 borrowed money 78 borrowing banks 206–8 bond-market 146 interest rates 146 repo 46 risk 130 UK 201–2, 204–5 UK bank 206–8 BP plc 3, 111–12, 114, 190 Brazil 18, 106, 107, 222 Bretton Woods world monetary system 10, 26–7, 29, 31, 39 break up of 16, 52, 53, 66 BRICS 222–3 British Empire 23–6, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30–3, 52, 105 brokers 68, 80, 96, 99 Browne, John 112 Brown, Gordon 210 Brunei 220 Bündchen, Gisele 164–5 Bundesbank 57, 62 Burn, Gary 43, 74 Bush, George W. xii busts 104 Cameron, David 211, 220–1 Canada 4, 31, 60, 66 capital access to foreign 68 accumulation 19, 149 and financial securities 89–90 and imperialism 19–20 interest-bearing 77–8 manufacturing 43 money-dealing 79 organic composition of 148–9 ownership 93 parasitism 228 productive 90 capitalism crisis 12, 215 and finance 76 financial mechanism of 9 and financial system 8–9 global 4 and monopoly 100 moribund 159–60 and the rate of profit 147–50 and the state 111–15 UK 44–7, 49 capitalist business 74 capitalist market system, and finance xiii capitalist power 86 capitalist production 9 rate of profit measurement 153 capital movement, national controls on 51 capital values, destruction of 151–2 Carlsberg 121 Carney, Mark 213–14 cash flows, financial securities 88 Cayman Islands, the 209, 211 central banks 5, 47, 83, 85, 116 CHAPS 84 Chesnais, François 19–20 Chicago 37, 42, 185, 195 China 2, 15, 171 automobile production 121 bad debt 224 banks 225–6 challenge of 222 challenge to America 17–18 currency trading 225–6 cyber attacks 18 equity market capitalisation and turnover 181, 182 export prices 224–5 FDI 107–8 financial services exports 176–7 foreign direct investments 18 foreign exchange reserves 167, 224 foreign exchange trading 109 FX swap arrangements 225 GDP 106, 106–7, 224 growing financial role 73 military spending 109 millionaires 99 mobile phones 122 New Development Bank funding 18, 222–3 rise of 18, 221–7 and Russia 223 security threat 18 status 110, 111 stock exchange prices 182 stock exchanges 18 US dollar-denominated debt 18, 221 wages 155 China Mobile 222 China Resources Snow Breweries 121 Churchill, Winston 60 as Chancellor of the Exchequer 23, 24–6 Iron Curtain speech 29 ‘City–Bank of England–Treasury’ nexus 54 City bonuses 211 City of London 37, 228 advantages 37, 40, 47, 49–50, 52 casino analogy xii Chinese currency trading 225–6 competitiveness 68 deregulation xii, 7 development 44–7 domination 194–5 earnings 49 and economic policy 8 euromarket 44–5, 47–51 European rivals 46–7, 51 expansion 40 financial system 37–40 geographical scope 37 Gowan’s analysis 11–12 growth 44–5 international reach 4 international role 47–51, 73–4 market 45 networks 205–6 operations 185–212 Panitch and Gindin’s analysis 15 relationship with America 73 role xii–xiii, 45, 49, 69 status 28, 35, 50, 185, 206, 210–11 strength 99–100 Clinton, Bill 122 Clinton, Hillary 18 clipping coupons 97–8 Cold War, the 37 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) 90, 140 colonial marketing boards 32 commercial capitalists 76 commodities, circulation of 78 Common Agricultural Policy 58 communism, threat of 30 Competition Commission 119–20 constructive parasitism 213–14 cooperation 16, 28 corporate control 183 corporations headquarters 114–15 nationality 111–13 stock market listings 113 cost of living 155 costs 77 Court of Justice, European Union 216 credit bubble 156 credit creation 21, 76, 150–1 banks 83–5, 86, 104 currency dealing costs 162 seigniorage 163–6 and trade 162–3 current account balance, UK 188–90, 189, 190 current account deficit, UK 200, 202, 211, 217 current account deficit, USA 167–8 current account surplus, UK 33, 34, 69 cyber attacks 18 Czech Republic 10 Darling, Alistair 125 dealing costs 162 dealing revenues 146 dealing room screens xi dealing spreads 191 debt crisis 151–2 Deepwater Horizon oil spill 190 de Gaulle, Charles 34, 47 Dell 77 Denmark 1 deregulation 45, 54, 65–70 derivatives 140–1 dealing in 142 definition 141 money-market 141 over-the-counter 185, 195, 196 derivatives markets 135 Deutsche Bank 215 Dollar–Wall Street Regime 12 domestic politics, economics and 217–19 Dubai 172 Dublin, International Financial Services Centre 178 earnings, City of London 49 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) 59–61 advantages 63 five conditions for membership 64 threat to UK financial power 64–5 UK opt-outs 61–4 Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, The (Keynes) 23–4 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (Keynes) 23 economic crises 151–2 economic growth 53, 60–1 economic influence 3 economic output 106 economic policy 8 economic power 101 concentration of 91–2 financial privileges of 7 and financial securities 85–92 global 3–6 hierarchy of 97 manifestation of 88–92 UK 2 economic privilege 104 economic relationships, in global capitalism 4 economics, domestic politics and 217–19 economic system, dysfunctional 8 elevators and escalators 121 employment, financial sector 186 End of History thesis 15–16 English language, role of 37 equity capital, valuation 179 equity markets 179–81, 181–3 capitalisation and turnover 181–3, 181 equity securities 86 eurobonds 41, 47–8 euro crisis, 2010 62, 65 eurocurrency bonds 49 eurodollars 40–1, 43, 48 euro financial system 72–3 euromarkets 28, 40, 51, 52, 66 Anglo-American 40–4 City of London 44–5, 47–51 definition 40 growth 40, 42, 43 interest 41 operation 40–1 origins 42–3 regulation 40–1 scale 43 UK earnings 43–4 European Central Bank (ECB) 64, 65, 72, 100, 159, 173 European Commission 162 European Economic Community (EEC) 33, 34, 57–8 European Free Trade Association (EFTA) 34 European integration 58 European Monetary System 67 European Union 16–17, 21, 54 anti-monopoly policies 120–1 Court of Justice 216 financial policy 69–70 financial services sector integration 72–3 GDP 70 UK membership referendum 218–19 UK opt-outs 61–2 euro system 57 euro, the 162–3, 164, 165, 166 status 72–3, 109 exchange controls, abolition of 54, 66–7 exchange rates 156, 163 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) 57, 62 existing loan assets 140 exorbitant privilege 166–9 Facebook 5, 91 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation charge (US) 41 Federal Reserve System (US) 40 fictitious capital 87, 88, 90, 91, 183 ownership 92 pricing 147 and securities prices 145 as wealth 147 fictitious deposits 83 finance access to 6 and capitalism 76 and capitalist market system xiii definition 5 and imperialism 8–10 and power 7–8 role of 161 finance capital 92–5 finance ministries 5 financial account, UK 197–200, 199 balance of payments 200 flows 198–9, 199 surplus 199 financial aristocracy 90, 96 financial assets banks 139–47, 143 ownership of 102–3 and profit 137 financial capitalists 78 financial crises 6, 10, 19, 101–2 America and 12 causes 147–8 and profit and profitability 135 financial crisis, 2007–8 20, 65, 72, 132, 134, 154, 157–8, 168, 198, 214 financial dealing 76 financial excess 154 financial institutions, and money-capitalists 76–7 financial market shares 70–3, 71 financial markets, state policy 65–70 financial operations xiii financial parasitism 95–7, 227–8 financial policy American 11, 65–6, 67–8 European Union 69–70 Japanese 67 UK 14, 65–70 financial power 101, 109 American 6, 11–12, 14–15, 55, 170–3, 183 banks 92 EMU threat to 64–5 global 3–6 individuals 90–1 UK 2, 3, 64–5 financial prices 8 financial privilege 7, 22 financial revenues 144–6 financial scandals 216 financial sector 5 employment 186, 213–14 scale 4, 213–14 tax revenues 186 financial sector capitalists 91 financial securities 21, 104 as assets 91–2 and capital accumulation 89–90, 139–40, 179 cash flows 88 cash value 89 characteristics 86 creditors 88–9 and economic power 85–92 markets 89 price 87–8, 145–6, 147 price currency 181 role of 76 and surplus value 144–6 value xi, 87–8 financial services exports 173–9, 175 financial services revenues 190–7, 192, 194, 196 Financial Stability Board 214 financial system 4, 4–5, 20, 104, 227 and capitalism 8–9 growth 75–6 hierarchy 6, 105–11, 111 and imperialism 8–10 state regulation 115–16 Financial Times xii, 75, 214 Top 500 global corporations 3 financialisation 20 First World War 23–6, 29 fixed assets, and profit 137 floating-rate notes 48 Ford Motor Company 5 Ford Motor Credit 5 foreign currency risk 168 foreign direct investment (FDI) American 3, 42 Chinese 18 outward 107–8 and status 107–8 UK 3, 66, 200, 205 foreign exchange deals, banks 79 foreign exchange (FX) market 71, 72, 193–5, 194 foreign exchange trading 108–9, 123 foreign investment revenues 9–10, 22, 189–90 foreign operations, expanding 101 foreign securities 47–8 Fox Broadcasting Company 113 France 2, 4, 13, 63, 93 China policy 226 FDI 107 GDP 106, 107 international banking index 108 international banking position 192, 192 Keynesianism in one country 67 military spending 109 monetary policy 67 seigniorage 165 trade pattern 60–1, 61 Frankfurt 51, 64, 72 free market 13, 15–16 FTSE 100 113 Fukuyama, Francis 15–16 functioning capitalists 77–8 G4S 120 GDP Chinese 224 European Union 70 and status 106 UK 4, 106, 107, 155–6 GE Capital 5 General Electric 5 General Motors 121 Gent, Chris 180 Germany 2, 4, 63, 66, 94–5, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 China policy 226 domination 64 equity market capitalisation and turnover 181, 182 GDP 106, 107 Hilferding’s analysis 93–95 international banking share 71, 71 reunification 62, 63 seigniorage 165 status 54 trade pattern 60–1, 61 GIC 177 Gindin, Sam 14–17, 18 Glass-Steagall legislation 36 Glencore 122 global capitalism, economic relationships in 4 global finance 2 globalisation 13, 114 global market trading, location 49 global system, centre of gravity 73–4 global value chains 118 Goldman Sachs 161, 222 gold prices 39 gold standard 23–6, 54 Google 5 government debt 87, 89 governments, financial role 5 government spending, cuts 59 Gowan, Peter, The Global Gamble 11–12 Greece 65, 72, 101, 151 greed 148 Group of 5, the 68 Group of 7, the 70, 71 Harper, Tim 30 Harvey, David 19 Healey, Denis 58–9 Heath, Edward 57–8 hedge funds 12, 81, 131 Heineken 121 Helleiner, Eric 12–14, 70 Hilferding, Rudolf 136 Finance Capital 92–5 Holcim 75 Hong Kong 18, 176–7, 206, 209 household debt 103 Howe, Geoffrey 66 HSBC 3–4, 225 idiocy 148 Iksil, Bruno 135–6 imperialism 5–6, 160, 161–84 American 12, 14–15, 166–9 and capital 19–20 currency 162–6 definition 117–18 domination network 21 economic definition 116–17 economic mechanism 117–21 equity markets 179–83 exorbitant privilege 166–9 and finance 8–10 financial power 170–3 financial services exports 173–9, 175 Lenin’s analysis 117–18 methods 117, 118 and monopoly 100, 117–21 parasitism of 97–9 power 126 predatory 19 and the state 119 UK 7–8, 186, 228 imports 155 India 18, 30, 222 GDP 106, 107, 224 individuals, financial power 90–1 Indonesia 101 inflation, 1970s 58 inflation rates 132, 164 innovation 135–6 insurance companies 81–2, 99 insurance premiums 81–2 insurance revenues 191 intellectual property rights 126 interbank market 46 interbank payments, value 84 interbank payment systems 84 interest and interest rates 78, 88, 130, 132, 138, 142 American 168 bond-market borrowing 146 derivatives turnover 195, 196 ERM fiasco 62 euromarkets 41 and profit 156–7 UK 203 interest-bearing capital 77–8 bank advances 79–80 dealing in 79–80 division of labour 99 Lenin’s analysis 98–9 Marx on 95–7 parasitism 95–7 Interest Equalisation Tax (US) 39–40, 48 international banking index 108 international banking share 50, 70–1, 71 international community 117 international companies 112 international finance, drivers 51 international financial revenues, UK 10 International Financial Services Centre, Dublin 178 international financial transactions 98 international investment position, UK 200–1, 201 International Monetary Fund 14, 19, 27, 29, 56, 58–9, 73, 101, 164, 223 investment, advance of money 86–7 investment mandates 80 investment returns 131 Iran 59, 113, 172 Iraq, invasion of, 2003 7, 220 Ireland 4, 178, 205 Islamic bonds 220–1 Islamic finance 22, 219–21 Islamic Finance Task Force 221 Italy 4, 106, 107, 226 Japan 2, 4, 15, 38, 93, 163, 167 equity market capitalisation and turnover 181, 182 financial crisis 71 financial policy 67 foreign exchange trading 109 GDP 106, 107 international banking index 108 international banking share 50–1, 71, 71 Offshore Market 67 seigniorage 165 threat of 29 zaibatsu 94 jobbers 68 Johnson Controls 121 JP Morgan Chase 135–6 Juncker, Jean-Claude 175 Kennedy, John F. 34 Keynesianism in one country 67 Keynes, John Maynard 23–4, 30, 35 labour exploitation of 74 international division of 99 surplus 149 labour costs 98, 118–19, 155 Labour Party Conference, 1956 32 Tanzanian groundnut scheme 32 Lafarge 75 Lafont, Bruno 75 Lear Corporation 121 Lee, Jennie 32 legal tender 115 Lehman Brothers 125, 210 lender of last resort 116 Lend-Lease policy 29 Lenin, V.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

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

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

In contrast, Sandy Jencks’s thought experiment about red-headed children, which I described in the last chapter, is asking a different question, about a different set of alternative possible worlds: What if your genotype were the same, but the social and historical context changed? That is not just a rhetorical question. In 1989, when the Berlin wall fell, Philipp Koellinger, the lemon-chicken-loving economist that you met in chapter 3, was fourteen years old. He had, up to that point, spent his entire life in East Berlin, but after the wall came down, Koellinger and other East German students had access to a whole new world of educational opportunities.

4 Would Koellinger’s probability of getting a PhD been different if he had inherited a different combination of genetic variants? Yes. We know this is true from sibling comparisons of polygenic indices and from twin and measured DNA studies of heritability. But even if there are genetic causes of educational outcomes, would Koellinger’s probability of getting a PhD have been different if the Berlin wall had not come down? Also yes. Heritable phenotypes are not immune from social change. Unfortunately, the mistaken idea that genetic influences are an impermeable barrier to social change is also widely endorsed not just by those who are trying to naturalize inequality, but also by their ideological and political opponents.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The theory was taught as orthodoxy in every business school and economics faculty despite numerous worrying weaknesses in it: why were stock prices more volatile than you would expect based on the data that the market would use to derive them? How could the US stock market be correct at one price at the start of trading before the crash on 19 October 1987 and still be correct 20 per cent lower at the end of the day, in the absence of any significant new data?4 In a strange way, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of my career reinforced the general faith in markets. One American colleague of mine at Merrill Lynch even went so far as to claim, on the subject of rational markets, that ‘markets must be efficient because without them society fails – just look at Russia’.

A Ackermann, Josef, 226 Admati, Anat, 211 ‘agency’ model, 7 agency-like risk, 119, 127 aggressive prices, 14–15 AIG, 90, 174 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Alpari, 83 alternative assets, 146–7 American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation, 89 amputation analogy, 128, 129 analytic formula, 106 Apple, 234 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 44, 54, 70, 72, 91, 133, 142, 152 Asia, 3, 37–8, 56, 58, 106, 114, 117–18, 135–7, 146, 228 Financial Crisis (1997), xi, 114, 135–7, 139, 146, 228 Asian options, 106 assets, 6, 89, 92–5, 97, 104, 108, 112–14, 116, 117, 123, 136, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154–7, 160, 166–74, 203, 211, 223, 228, 233 alternative, 146–7 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 Atom Bank, 233 atomic bomb, see nuclear bomb Australia, 30, 65 dollars, 28, 75 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 B back testing, 149 BaFin, 200, 202 bandwidth, 71 ‘banging the close’, 190 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 73, 77, 80, 208 Bank of America, 174 Bank of England, 32, 173, 182, 233 bank runs, 89 bank tax, 216 Bankers Trust, xi–xii, 3–6, 24, 29–37, 40, 44, 46, 48, 65, 68, 103–14, 116–35, 137–143, 149, 166, 168, 169 carry trade, 108–10 Deutsche Bank takeover, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Emerging Markets, xi, 29–30, 116–17, 130–1, 143 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 Gibson Greetings suing, 109 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14, 150 Procter and Gamble suing, 109 quantitative analysis, 103–8, 110–14, 126, 150 Risk Management, 122–31 risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), 126–7, 131 rouble-denominated bonds (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Russian Financial Crisis (1998), 115–16, 124, 137–143 Spreadsheet Solutions Framework (SSF), 111, 121, 138, 153 value at risk (VaR), 127–31, 135, 139, 169 Barcelona, Spain 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Barclays, 63–6, 67, 68, 167, 186–7, 197 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 BARX, 64, 65 Basel Accords, 124, 125, 130, 166, 207–9, 211, 217, 231 basis points, 12 basis risk, 152 Bear Stearns, 88–9, 90, 172, 230 Bentham, Jeremy, 199 Berlin Wall, 204 Bernanke, Ben, 90 bid-offer spreads, see spread ‘Big Are Getting Bigger, The’, 41, 145 Big Bang (1986), 201 big figure, 13 binomial tree, 112–14 Bitcoin, 234 Black Monday (1987), 108, 138, 204, 207 Black–Scholes formula, 94–5, 97, 99, 105, 128, 219 Black, Fischer, 94–5, 97, 134, 135 BlackBerries, 169 Blackpool, England, 33 Blair, Tony, 120 Bloomberg, 9, 22–3, 142, 187, 189, 191, 197 Bohr, Niels, 43 bonds, xiv, 8, 23, 28, 33, 38, 89, 108–10, 118–43, 146–7, 151, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 197, 211, 224–5 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 credit default swaps (CDSs), 151 mortgage-backed, xiv, 197 rouble-denominated (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 US government, 119, 129, 133, 147 bonuses, 5, 117, 161, 210, 216 boxes and arrows, 159 Brazil, 167, 231 Breuer, Rolf, 42 Bristol, England, x British Bankers Association (BBA), 182, 187 British pound, 9, 13, 28, 53, 184 Bruno, Philip, 234 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Businessweek, 170 C Cable, 9, 13, 28 California, United States, 234 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 Cambios, 21, 123 Cambridge University, 165 Canada, 88, 172 dollars, 28 Cannes, France, 35, 41, 44, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 carry trade, 108–10 Case–Schiller index, 163, 170 cash settlement, 109 ‘CDO-squared’, 161 central banking, 79, 102–3, 187, 193, 220 Central Counterparties (CCPs), 209, 213–15, 229 chain of command, 224–6 Chase Manhattan, 51, 168, 169 Chemical Bank, 168, 169 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), 193, 209 China, 78, 149, 229 Chopin, Frédéric, 61 circuit breakers, 80 Citigroup, 23, 27, 36–7, 47, 51, 68, 167, 216, 226, 229 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 Cold War, 204 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 multi-sector CDOs, 155 risk 154, 156, 158–63 sub-prime mortgages, 159–60, 170–2 synthetic, 163–4 tranches, 154–9, 161, 174, 208 colocation, 71 colonial currencies, 28 commodities, viii, xii, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 174, 223, 231–2 commodities indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163 commoditisation, 110–11 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 202 commodity futures, 92 Communism, 199 complex risk, 159, 222 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), 212 computers, ix–x, xii–xv, 6, 21–8, 32–55, 56–84, 89–90, 99–114, 116, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 147, 150, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 169–70, 172, 190–200, 209, 213, 218–24, 225, 228, 231–5 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BARX, 64, 65 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 decentralisation, 232–5 efficiency improvements, 169–70 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 190–2 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Piranha, 48 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 regulation, 209, 213 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 rogue systems, 79–80 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 simplification, 231–2 spoofing, 192–3 spot trade automation, 23–8, 31–3, 42, 48–55, 56–84, 111, 199, 201 spreads, 80–3 concentration risk, 213 Conservative Party (UK), 201 correlation, 14, 79, 129–30, 142, 156–8, 160, 163 cost–benefit analysis, 41 Costello, Elvis, 140 counterparty credit risk, 141–2, 172, 201, 209 Countrywide, 90 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 credit risk, 7, 8, 62–3, 123, 125–6, 130, 141, 151, 209 counterparty, 141–2, 172, 201, 202–3, 209 Credit Suisse, 140, 198 credit trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 crowd-funding, 235 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 Currenex, 59 CVIX, 74 D D:Ream, 120, 121 daisy-chaining, xiv DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decentralisation, 232–5 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 delta hedging, 97 ‘dentists, the’, 82–3 deposits, 124 derivatives, xi, xii, xiv, 44–5, 87, 91–114, 118, 119, 121, 127, 132, 134, 138–43, 144–5, 150–74, 182–6, 189, 196, 209, 210, 214, 218–25, 231 Asian options, 106 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 commoditisation, 110–11 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 delta hedging, 97 democratisation, 108, 219 double knockouts, 107 exotics, 105–11, 127 foreign exchange, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 gamma, 97–8, 100 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 interest rate derivatives, 8, 92, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 lattice methods, 112, 150, 157 lookbacks, 107 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 power options, 107 pricing, 91–5, 107, 111–14, 128, 133, 150 range trades, 107, 108 rho, 98 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 spoofing, 99, 192–3 strike price, 94, 95, 104, 113, 218 swaps, 8, 92, 119–20, 121, 125, 126, 132, 134, 136, 141, 148, 149, 152, 173 theta, 98, 140 time decay, 98 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 tree approach, 112–14 vega, 98 volatility, 94, 98, 128–9 weather, 144–5, 146 zero coupon bonds, 118–31, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 173 desk real estate, 25 Deutsche Bank, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 144–74, 179–80, 187, 190, 195–6, 199, 200, 201, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 222, 224–6, 231 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BaFin audits, 200, 202 Bankers Trust acquisition, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Barcelona Conference, 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Commodities, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 165, 175, 223, 231–2 Complex Risk, 159, 222 Compliance, 195, 196 Corporate and Investment Banking division, 166 Credit Trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 CVIX, 74 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 Foreign Exchange, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 165, 175, 210, 212–13, 224, 225 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 187, 190 Global Currencies and Commodities, 165–6 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), 174–5 Liquid Commodity Index (DBLCI), 148, 149 market share, 36, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77 MortgageIT acquisition, 160 offsites, 35–41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Plankton Strategy, 38, 40, 55, 58 production credits, 49, 50 regulation, 200, 202, 209–10, 212–13 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Risk Management, 175, 206–7, 209, 226 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166 simplification, 231–2 small deals team, 52, 55 spot trade automation, 48–55, 56–77 video messaging system, 71 weather derivatives, 144–5, 146 Deutschmark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Dewar, Sally, 197 Dickens, Charles, 162 Digital Reasoning Systems Inc., 197–8 dividends, 91, 147, 212 Dodd–Frank Act (2010), 209, 230 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 30 dot-com boom (1997–2000), 37, 146, 207 double knockouts, 107 Dow Jones, 79, 138, 147 Dresdner Bank, 20, 48 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 E e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 efficiency improvements, 169–70 efficient market theory, 203 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 email, 169, 191, 195, 197, 199 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43, 147, 228 Empire State Building, New York, 130 ‘Engine’, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 engineering, x–xi, 10 Enron, 156 equities, viii, 23, 50, 66, 71, 74, 80, 89, 95, 146, 193, 207, 211, 235 circuit breakers, 80 colocation, 71 sales-traders, 50, 78 euro, 22, 28, 31, 37, 53, 69, 80, 81–3, 189 Euromoney, 36, 41, 47, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 233 Europe, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) markets, 117–18 European Union (EU), 102, 196, 201, 203, 207, 210, 212, 230 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), xi, 22, 102–3, 106, 123, 130, 136, 207, 224 Liikanen Report (2012), 230 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 102 Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), 209 ‘Every Day I Write the Book’ (Elvis Costello), 140 Excel, 107, 221 exchange rates, 9, 11–13, 14, 17, 32, 100 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 F ‘F9 monkeys’, 221 Fannie Mae, 90 Federal Reserve, xii, 90, 109, 143, 187, 202–6, 212 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 193 fibre-optic cables, 77, 84 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), 167 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), 190 Financial Services Act (2013), 210 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 212, 214, 216 Financial Times, 116, 187 financial transactions tax, 216 fines, 181, 190, 196 First Chicago, 168 Fitch, 155 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 Flannery, Mark, 215 Flash Crash (2010), 79–80, 193 Florence, Italy, 78 Florida, United States, 116 football, 10–11, 43, 83, 117, 167, 195 Forbes, 234 foreign direct investment (FDI), 136 foreign exchange (FX), viii, xi, xii, xiv, 3–28, 29–55, 56–84, 89, 90–1, 95–114, 115–44, 145, 158–9, 165, 174, 175, 180, 181–94, 196–7, 210, 213, 222–3, 224, 225, 233 aggressive prices, 14–15 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 banging the close, 190 BARX, 64, 65 bidirectional flows, 69 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 carry trade, 108–10 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 colocation, 71 complex risk, 159, 222 corporations, 9, 36, 61, 76, 96, 109–10 costs, 42 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 hedge funds, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 120, 123, 131–5, 141–3 hedging, 97, 108, 117–18, 190, 225 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 LIBOR scandal (2012), 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 liquidity, 18–19, 21, 27, 80–1, 83, 233 making rates, 13–21, 27, 38–9, 50, 96 market makers, 18–19, 21, 83 market shares, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 65, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 169 ‘mine-and-yours’, 15–16, 18, 19, 192 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14 off system trades, 111 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 passive v. active strategies, 17–19 pay, 43 pension funds, 9, 61, 76, 96 pips, 13, 18, 41, 65, 73, 77 Piranha, 48 pre-deal services, 8 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 production credits, 49–50 proprietary trading, 22, 31, 39, 46–7, 125 relative value trades, 72–3 retail trade, retail aggregators, 21, 61, 66, 74, 75, 79, 82–3 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 risk, 15, 16, 19, 20–1, 24, 29, 31, 38, 39, 40, 44–5, 49, 51, 53, 62, 77, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135, 192 risk management systems, 24, 40, 44–5, 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135 rogue systems, 79–80 salespeople, 8–9, 11, 13–15, 20, 24, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 46, 47–52, 68, 96, 120 settlements, 5, 24, 40, 44, 51, 61, 101, 209 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 skewed prices, 18, 19, 73, 96, 98 slippage, 188–9 speculation, 21, 31, 102–14 spot, 3–28, 33–4, 42–4, 46, 48–55, 67, 76, 77, 91, 96, 97, 98–9, 108, 111, 118, 122, 159, 165, 169, 188, 189, 199, 201, 222 spread, 12, 14–15, 16, 18, 19, 31, 41–2, 44, 45, 53, 55, 61, 64, 68, 69, 75, 80, 96, 225 traders, 3–28, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 50, 52–4, 67, 73, 76, 78, 96, 99, 122, 189 Triangle arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 54, 91, 122 two-way pricing, 11–21, 23, 99 volatility, 14, 26, 46–7, 74–5, 80, 98, 137 wallet, 40 window, 118, 137, 188 WM/R, 187–8 zero coupon bonds, 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 Four Seasons, The, 3–5, 9 France, 6–7, 35, 37, 41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77, 102, 140, 159, 207 Freddie Mac, 90 free market economics, 202–6 FTSE 100, 147 Fuld, Dick, 226 FX All, 59, 78 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 181, 187–92, 198 FXCM, 82–3 G G20 nations, 209, 212, 216 gambling, 31, 102–14 gamma, 97–8, 100 Gaussian copula, 158 geekiness, x, 10, 43, 223 geopolitics, 229 Germany, vii–x, xii, xiii, 16, 28, 36, 44, 54, 75, 144–5, 159, 167, 180, 200, 204 mark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Gibson Greetings, 109 GKOs (rouble-denominated bonds), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 168, 201, 230 globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs), 216 Goldman Sachs, 23, 146, 198, 216, 230 Commodity Index (GSCI), 148 Google, 78, 234 GQ, 141 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (1999), 168, 201 Great Depression (1929–39), 168 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), xiii, xiv–xv, 74–5, 87–90, 114, 124, 163, 172–5, 179–80, 196, 204–6, 207, 217, 219, 220, 223, 227–8 Greece, 82, 92, 181 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 Greenspan, Alan, 202–6 GSA, 233 Gulf War (1990–1), xi, 22, 95 Gulliver, Stuart, 231 H ‘haircuts’, 132 Haldane, Andrew, 173 hand signals, 16 Hang Seng, 137 Harrison, William, 168 Harrow School, London, 149 Harvard University, 166 La Haye Sainte, Belgium, 10 hedge funds, xi, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 97, 114, 116, 122, 123, 131–5, 141–2, 164, 171, 172, 201, 229, 233 hedging, 94, 95, 97, 108, 117–18, 144, 145–6, 157, 190, 225, 226 delta hedging, 97 Hellwig, Martin, 211 Henry, John, 28 Herrhausen, Alfred, 226 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 Hodgkin, Howard, 195 Holder, Noddy, 232 Hong Kong, 137 Hotspot, 59 Hounslow, London, 193 HSBC, 216, 229, 231 Hussein, Saddam, 22, 95 I ICAP, 73 Iceland, 167, 174 identity theft insurance, 231 Immendorff, Jörg, 56 indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163, 190 India, 149 Indonesia, 135, 137, 139 IndyMac, 90 initial margin, 120, 132 insurance, 93, 151, 164, 168, 172, 174, 229 Intelligent Flow Monster, 146 interest rates, viii, 7, 10, 92, 108–10, 135, 225 carry trade, 108–10 derivatives, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 futures, 182 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 109, 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 swaps, 8, 92, 182–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 132, 135, 140, 211, 214, 230 International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA), 152, 153 Internet, xii, 5, 42, 76, 78, 169, 191–2, 195, 197, 199, 228, 233–5 investment banking, 36, 87, 110, 133, 145–6, 151, 158, 165–8, 229–30 iPhone, 5, 228 Iran, 181–2 Iraq, xi, 22, 95 Israel, 29, 138 Italy, 10, 13, 22, 78, 115–16, 141 lira, 22, 102–3, 123 iTraxx, 153 J Jagger, Mick, 87 Japan, 61, 72, 79, 159 yen, 9, 14, 17, 28, 71–2, 75, 79, 80, 136, 184 JPMorgan Chase, 131, 150, 158, 163, 168, 182, 197, 216, 229, 231, 23 J.


Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey

His publications include T h e End of History and the Last M a n ( 1 9 9 2 ), which received the Premio Capri and the Book Critics Award (from the Los Angeles T i m e s ) , and Trust : T h e Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), which was named “business book of the year” by European. LECTURE I. THE GREAT DISRUPTION Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to the interrelated issues of social capital, civil society, trust, and social norms as central issues for contemporary democracies. The propensity for civil society was said to be an essential condition for the transition to stable democracy in Eastern Europe, and the decline in social capital in the United States is said to be a major problem for American democracy today.


pages: 93 words: 30,572

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) by Nick Clegg

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, sceptred isle, Snapchat, Steve Bannon

For Spain (which found its initial attempt to join the EEC rejected, because of objections to Franco’s authoritarian rule), EEC membership, when it finally came in 1986, was a symbol of democracy’s victory over fascism. And for the many central and eastern European nations that began the process of applying for membership after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, becoming part of the EU was a demonstration of their new-found freedom from the grip of Soviet-era communism. In all these cases, formally agreeing to work with European neighbours, to build partnerships and to strengthen institutional and economic ties was both a symbolic and a practical step towards a brighter and better future.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

This claim (albeit decided to be false in British court) demonstrates how easily such lines can invert themselves when an inversion suits the strategic perspective at hand. The line may be drawn on the ground as clear as clear can be, but the quality of the space that it draws—what is inside and what is outside, and who or what governs either side—is always in question (especially for those who die on one side of the wire). As the utopia/dystopia of the Berlin Wall (known as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall in East Germany) also made clear, the camp and the bunker, detention and the enclave, are inversions of the same architectural form. One is an architecture of internalization and the other of externalization, but they share the same material profile. While one works to contain the danger within its walls, the other draws the same physical partition to keep the world at bay and expelled outside its safety membrane.

Is the whole favela one vast shared envelope, or should we look instead at each individual construction? Should we assume that its politics of the envelope can be deduced by measuring operations at the aggregate scale or the individual? To add a fifth wall to the taxonomy, we might also nominate the elongated wedge, exemplified by the US border fence, the Israeli security barrier, parts of the Berlin Wall, or any of the hundreds of similar geopolitical membranes that have appeared in recent years. It is, in some ways, our moment's most characteristic political envelope, and at least as much as the original four typologies, its spatial, political performance is guaranteed by an animal physicality irrespective of whatever ideological symbolism may accompany that concrete posture's purpose.

Just as progress in the Cloud depends on Users’ ability to opt out of one platform and opt in to another that provides more robust, trustworthy, and well-designed services, he asks, doesn't the same apply to governing platforms called states? Leaving iOS for Android does not involve navigating the armed guards at the Berlin Wall, or walking across the Sonoran desert (as of this writing), so why can't movement between platforms of political sovereignty work the same way? We note that he does not specify the convergence of Cloud platforms absorbing traditional functions of the state with states rotating and evolving into Cloud platforms.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

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

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

As recently as 1964 the satirist Tom Lehrer expressed a common fear at the prospect of West Germany participating in a multilateral nuclear coalition. In a sarcastic lullaby, the singer reassures a baby: Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, But that couldn’t happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918 And they’ve hardly bothered us since then. The fear of a revanchist Germany was revived in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys made plans to reunite. Yet today German culture remains racked with soul-searching over its role in the world wars and permeated with revulsion against anything that smacks of military force. Violence is taboo even in video games, and when Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it.

In fact, there will be no wars between major nations at all. The peace in Western Europe will continue indefinitely, and within five years the incessant warring in East Asia will give way to a long peace there as well. There is more good news. East Germany will open its border, and joyful students will sledgehammer the Berlin Wall to smithereens. The Iron Curtain will vanish, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe will become liberal democracies free of Soviet domination. The Soviet Union will not only abandon totalitarian communism but will voluntarily go out of existence. The republics that Russia has occupied for decades and centuries will become independent states, many of them democratic.

In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States expressed its displeasure by withdrawing its team from the Moscow Summer Olympics. The Cold War, to everyone’s surprise, ended without a shot in the late 1980s shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power. It was followed by the peaceful tear-down of the Berlin Wall and then by the mostly peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union. • Zero is the number of times that any of the great powers have fought each other since 1953 (or perhaps even 1945, since many political scientists don’t admit China to the club of great powers until after the Korean War). The war-free interval since 1953 handily breaks the previous two records from the 19th century of 38 and 44 years.


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

Some want to return to an idealized traditional past; others dream of a libertarian future where frontier virtues will be reborn and Internet speeds will be awesome. Things are more serious in Europe, especially in the east, where old maps of Greater Serbia in cold storage since 1914 were pulled out and posted on the Internet as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and Hungarians began retelling old tales about how much better life was when there weren’t so many Jews and Gypsies around. Things are critical in Russia, where all problems are now attributed to the cataclysmic breakup of the USSR, which allows Vladimir Putin to sell dreams of a restored empire blessed by the Orthodox Church and sustained by pillage and vodka.


pages: 121 words: 34,193

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Thomas Piketty

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, dematerialisation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, high net worth, income inequality, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, transfer pricing

Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes,” Tax Justice Network, July 2012, http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf. 16. Ruth Judson, “Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011,” IFDP working paper of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, November 2012, http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2012/1058/ifdp1058.pdf. 17. Adam, “Impact de l’échange automatique d’informations.” 18. See, for instance, Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2013, https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?


pages: 102 words: 33,345

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

“Beyond a legacy of old books and old buildings . . . there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.”8 At the time, Debord and Deleuze were writing against the grain. The “short twentieth century” was coming to an abrupt end, between 1989 and 1991, with what to many seemed like hopeful developments, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of a bipolar, Cold War world. Along with the triumphalist narratives of globalization and the facile declarations of the historical end of competing world-systems were the widely promoted “paradigms” for a post-political and post-ideological era. Twenty years later, it is difficult to recall the seriousness with which these fatuous claims were made on behalf of a West that seemed poised to effortlessly occupy and refashion the entire planet.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

Both the United Nations and the United States experienced this surge in nation-building demand throughout the 1990s and beyond. During the first 45 years of its existence, from 1945 to 1989, the United Nations mounted a total of 13 peacekeeping operations. In the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it launched 41 new such missions. During the Cold War, American military interventions had occurred on the average of once per decade, in the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama. During the 1990s, the frequency of such American ventures increased to • 219 • • James Dobbins once every 30 months.

., 166 Army War College, 102 Asia, 21, 27, 43, 44, 60 Asian Development Bank, 131, 155 Asia Society, 25 Association of Muslim Scholars, 194 Atomic Energy Commission, 26 authoritarian regimes, 67 authority, delineation of, 88, 89–91 Ayub Khan, 57 Ba’ath Party (Iraq), 182–83, 194, 205, 236 Badr Organization, 181 Baghdad, 178, 181, 182, 192, 210, 235, 239; bombings in, 203, 209; central government in, 190; U.N. headquarters in, 185, 186; U.S. capture of, 224, 243 Bagram, 149 Balad, 192 Balkans, 10, 64, 108, 211, 232 Bangladesh, 97 BAPPENAS, 51 Barclays Bank, 29 Barno, David W., 151, 165, 240 Barton, Frederick, 215n25 Basra, 184, 192, 210 Bechtel Corporation, 26 Bell, David, 56 Benomar, Jamal, 188 Berkeley mafia, 51, 60 Berlin Conference, 131, 136, 156, 164 Berlin Wall, fall of, 219 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 58 Biden, Joseph, 93, 104 bilateral donors, 241, 242 bill of rights (Iraqi), 189 • 252 • Bin Laden, Osama, 148, 164 Bin Sayeed, Khalid, 52 Black, Eugene, 30 black special operations forces, 138–39 Blackwill, Robert, 188–89 Bonn Accords, 12, 136, 146, 157, 158, 161, 165, 238 Bonn Conference, 109, 110–12, 114, 115, 120, 135, 243 Bosnia, 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 35, 64, 67, 83n2, 86, 146, 166, 198, 218, 224, 225, 228; calculated inexperience in, 226; coordination problems in, 240; military force population in, 174; missed exit deadline in, 220; NATO forces in, 97, 222, 223; peace enforcement failure in, 233; security in, 222, 237 Botswana, 49, 51, 52 Bowles, Chester, 27, 53 Brahimi, Lakhdar, 12, 188, 189, 209 Brazil, 25 Bremer, L.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Once market participants saw war was inevitable, they acted in the same mechanical way as the generals with their mobilization plans and timetables. The period of the classical gold standard immediately preceding the war, 1870–1914, is best seen as a first age of globalization, a simulacrum of the second age of globalization that began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. New technologies such as the telephone and electricity tied diverse financial centers together in a dense web of credit and counterparty risk. In 1914, global capital markets were no less densely connected than they are today. With the advent of war, French, Italian, and German investors all sold stocks in London and demanded proceeds in gold shipped to them by the fastest available means.

What they shared was a thirst for government control; the only difference was whether control came from fiscal or monetary authorities. The neoliberal consensus favored both. The ascent of globalized elites occurred after 1989, the dawn of a second age of globalization, a distant echo of the first age of globalization from 1870 to 1914. In 1989, the cold war ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Washington Consensus was announced in a seminal article by John Williamson, an English economist working in Washington, D.C. Williamson’s article summarized views that had been evolving since the 1970s. He condensed these views into a playbook for a newly globalized world. Williams called for free trade, open capital accounts, direct foreign investment, and protection of intellectual property.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

As Gott elaborated, other than the fact that we are intelligent observers, there is no reason to believe we are in any way specially located in time. The Copernican Principle allows us to quantify our uncertainty and recognize that we are often neither at the beginning of things nor at the end. It allowed Gott to estimate correctly when the Berlin Wall would fall and has even provided meaningful numbers on the survival of humanity. This principle can even anchor our location within the many orders of magnitude of our world: We are far smaller than most of the cosmos, far larger than most chemistry, far slower than much that occurs at subatomic scales, and far faster than geological and evolutionary processes.

But it also happens that recursive structure is fundamental to the history of architecture, especially to the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture of Europe—covering roughly the five hundred years between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. The strange case of “recursive architecture” shows us the damage one missing idea can create. It suggests also how hard it is to talk across the cultural Berlin Wall that separates science and art. And the recurrence of this phenomenon in art and nature underlines an important aspect of the human sense of beauty. The reuse of one basic shape on several scales is fundamental to Medieval architecture. But, lacking the idea (and the term) “recursive structure,” art historians are forced to improvise ad-hoc descriptions each time they need one.


pages: 459 words: 109,490

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

Viktor Bout emerged as a player in the international arms trade in the early 1990s, the unsettled post-Cold War era when most foreign policy experts assumed that the primary threat to U.S. national security was still posed only by nations with nuclear forces and standing armies, fixed borders, and traditional ideological and pragmatic interests. The notion that transnational threats—the Clinton administration’s phrasing for terrorists, narcotics cartels, global organized crime, and other dangerous “nonstate actors”—might prove as dangerous as hostile nations was an idea still in its infancy. But when the Berlin Wall fell, so did that paradigm. Decentralized, far-flung organizations created first by drug cartels and then by ethnic-based crime syndicates that emerged from Russia and China rendered international boundaries and traditional loyalties meaningless. Al Qaeda took center stage in the late 1990s as the most infamous and dangerous transnational threat, but Africa’s guerrilla armies and local warlords fit that rubric as well, seizing control of large swaths of territory, terrorizing and killing thousands for private gain, and leaving millions of survivors homeless and destitute.

In Bulgaria, according to U.S. officials, Bout dealt with Petar Mirchev, an arms broker who operated out of Burgas, a free trade zone where several arms factories were based for easy air access.28 Experienced former Soviet pilots and flight crews, grounded by the lack of aircraft flying, were available for work at rock-bottom wages. The Soviet Air Force had fourteen thousand pilots and five thousand aircraft when the Berlin Wall fell, and thousands faced unemployment as the service shrank.29 A base salary of $900 per month and the chance to avoid Russia’s harsh winters lured many former Russian aviators to fly in dangerous and remote regions. The task of moving weapons was made even easier because many of the far-flung weapons factories and arsenals had landing strips built on the premises, designed to make loading the cargo fast, efficient, and cheap.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

German regulations on citizenship were of only scholastic interest so long as few foreigners migrated to the country. By the mid 1950s the economic miracle required an expanded labor pool and in 1955 the federal government signed its first employment contract with Italy to recruit workers to agricultural and construction jobs. The erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the subsequent cutoff of East German labor led to additional employment contracts negotiated with Greece, Spain, Turkey, and, later, Portugal and Yugoslavia. By 1973, 12 percent (some 2.5 million) of the total German workforce was made up of guest workers. By 1980, Germany had granted resident alien status to an additional one million people.

And were it not for those million ‘niggers’ from Angola, who, incidentally, bred ‘like rabbits,’ were it not for Gypsies, Romanians, Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs, that East European scum which had learned nothing from communism except to avoid work, steal, get involved in petty crime and gorge themselves for nothing on Portuguese bread, life in Portugual would be quite satisfactory.”97 Alongside transnational xenophobia is the division of labor in Europe that produces bizarre results. “The Pakistani standing in the place where the [Berlin] wall stood a short time ago selling cheap souvenirs [Russian fur hats with a red star, sickles, and hammers] of a vanished epoch is perhaps the most precise and condensed metaphor of the times in which we are living.”98 Finally, there is the ideal of a cosmopolitan identity of the future. Referring to the children of Tomás and Tereza, characters in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tanja, the protagonist of The Ministry of Pain, says enviously: “They will have multiple identities: they will be cosmopolitan, global, multicultural, nationalistic, ethnic, and diasporic all in one.


Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

Reserve online ($6.25 fee) to ensure admittance. (%202-426-6924; www.fords.org; 511 10th St NW; h9am-4:30pm; mMetro Center) F Newseum Museum Map Google Map This six-story, highly interactive news museum is worth the admission price. You can delve into the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage and perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs. The concourse level displays FBI artifacts from prominent news stories, such as the Unabomber’s cabin and John Dillinger’s death mask. (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $23/14; h9am-5pm; Wc; mArchives, Judiciary Sq) White House Visitor Center Museum Map Google Map Getting inside the White House can be tough, so here is your backup plan.

The Revolutionary War begins. 1781 General Washington leads his ragtag troops to victory at Yorktown as the British surrender. 1787 US Constitution establishes a democratic form of government, with power vested in the hands of the people. 1803–06 France sells the US the Louisiana Purchase; Lewis and Clark then trailblaze west through it to reach the Pacific Ocean. 1849 An epic cross-country gold rush sees 60,000 ‘Forty-Niners’ flock to California’s Mother Lode. 1865 The Civil War ends, though celebration is curtailed by President Lincoln’s assassination five days later. 1870 Freed black men are given the vote, vote, but the South’s segregationist ‘Jim Crow’ laws remain until the 1960s. 1880–1920 Millions of immigrants flood in to the US’ cities from Europe and Asia, fueling a new age of urban living. 1917 President Woodrow Wilson plunges the US into WWI, pledging that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy.’ 1920 The 19th Amendment is passed, giving US women the right to vote. 1920s The Harlem Renaissance inspires a burst of African American literature, art, music and cultural pride. 1941–45 The US enters WWII, deploying more than 16 million troops and suffering around 400,000 deaths. 1954 In Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court ends segregation in public schools. 1959–75 The US fights the Vietnam War, supporting South Vietnam against communist North Vietnam. 1963 President John F Kennedy is assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. 1964 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. 1974 President Richard Nixon resigns after being connected to the Watergate burglary of Democratic headquarters. 1989 The 1960s-era Berlin Wall is torn down, marking the official end of the decades-long Cold War. 1990s The internet revolution creates the biggest boom and bust since the Great Depression. 2001 The September 11 terrorist attacks destroy NYC’s World Trade Center and kill nearly 3000 people. 2005 Hurricane Katrina ruptures levees, flooding New Orleans and killing more than 1800 people. 2008–9 Barack Obama becomes the first African American president. 2012 Hurricane Sandy devastates the East Coast.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Palchinsky’s secret execution was unusual – perhaps because, stubborn to the end, he refused to recant. His persecution was not. The Soviet Bloc began to fall apart in the late 1980s, punctuated with famous events such as the victory of the newly legalised Solidarity movement in the Polish elections of June 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year. In the heart of the iet Union itself, a momentous but less famous revolt was also taking place: the first major strike in Soviet history. In July 1989, a quarter of a million coal miners walked away from their jobs. Part of the protest was about grotesquely dangerous conditions: the death rate for Soviet miners was fifteen to twenty times higher than it was for their American equivalents, with the local pits claiming the lives of over fifty men every month.

Index Abizaid, Lt General John, 44–5, 52, 55 , 65–6, 71 Académie des sciences, 107–8 ACCION International, 117 Admiralty, 122 aeronautics, 80–2, 84–5, 87–9, 112–14 Afghanistan, 67, 137; Operation Anaconda, 72, 74 AIG (American International Group), 189, 193–5, 215–16, 228 Air Ministry, British, 80–1, 85, 104 air travel, long-haul, 94 air-traffic control systems, 195 Allan, Maud, 87 Allen, Paul, 112 Allen, Vernon, 48–9 Allende, President Salvador, 69–72, 76 Amazon, 143–4, 223, 238 Amerian Brands, 9 Anaconda, 9 Ansari X Prize, 112 anthrax, 96–7 Apache Software Foundation, 230 Appert, Nicolas, 107 Apple, 11–12, 19 Ariely, Dan, 237–8 army, US: in Afghanistan, 72, 74; counterinsurgency strategy and, 52, 53–8, 59–61, 63–5, 66–7, 74, 75, 76–7, 79, 256, 262; first Gulf War and, 44, 53, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72–3, 74, 79; Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in Iraq, 51–3, 57, 65; Haditha killings (19 November 2005), 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 52; local adaptation and, 53, 57–8, 66–7, 73, 74, 75, 76–8, 79; Donald Rumsfeld’s refusal of advice from, 43–4, 45, 46, 50, 57, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 223, 256; turnaround in Iraq, 35, 40, 46, 50–1, 53–6, 57–8, 59–61, 63–5, 78; Vietnam war, 46–7, 49–50, 56, 62, 64, 68, 69, 78, 244 Asch, Solomon, 47–8, 49 automobile industry, 10, 46–7, 94; CAFE standards in USA, 172–3, 176; niche cars, 90; Toyota Prius, 159, 161, 165 Aylwin-Foster, Brigadier Nigel, 61 Ayres, Ian, Supercrunchers, 235, 236 Azoulay, Pierre, 102 Bangladesh, 115–16, 117–18 Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), 117 Bank of England, 195, 198–9 Bank of Scotland, 214 Barabási, Albert-László, 145 Barder, Owen, 141, 142 Barings Bank collapse (1995), 184–5, 208 Battersea Power Station, 171 Battle of Britain, 81–2, 89 Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), 41, 62–3 Bayer, 96–7 the Beatles, 260 Beattie, Geoff, Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet?, 165 Bechtel Corporation, 76, 77 Beer, Stafford, 69, 70, 72 Beinhocker, Eric, 3, 164 Belot, Michele, 30 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 26 Berners-Lee, Mike, How Bad Are Bananas?, 165 Bertrand, Marianne, 135 Bhopal disaster, 184 Billing, Noel Pemberton, 87–8 biomass systems, 170–1 bird flu, 97 Björkman, Martina, 142–3 Blair, Tony, 20, 30, 141 Boulton-Paul Defiant aircraft, 85 BP, 216–19, 245 Bradley, James, 106 Branson, Sir Richard, 112, 243 Brazil, 117, 148 breeding, selective, 175–6 Bremer, Paul, 1700000140345 >58 Brin, Sergey, 232 Bromgard, Jimmy Ray, 252 Buiter, Willem, 205 bulldog, British, 175–6 Bulow, Jeremy, 205 Bunting, Madeleine, 130 Burroughs 3500 computer, 69–71 Bush, Laura, 119 Bush, President George W., 20, 59, 64 business world: evolutionary theory and, 14–15, 16, 17, 18–19, 174–5, 233–4; failure in, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; see also corporations and companies; economics and finance Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate, 165 CAFE environmental standards in USA, 172–3, 176 Canon, 241 Capecchi, Mario, 97–101, 102, 114, 140, 152, 223 Carbon Trust, 163–5 Cardano, Gerolamo, 83 Carlsmith, James, 251> Case Foundation, 119 Casey, General George W., 55, 59, 71 catastrophe experts, 184–6, 191, 194–5, 208 Cave-Brown-Cave, Air Commodore Henry, 81, 83, 85, 88, 114 centralised decision making, 70, 74–5, 226, 227, 228; warfare and, 46–7, 67–8, 69, 71, 76, 78–9 centrally planned economies, 11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70 Challenger shuttle disaster, 184 Charles, Prince, 154 Chernobyl disaster, 185 Chile, 3, 69–72, 76, 148 China, 11, 94, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152 Christensen, Clayton, 239–40, 242, 245 Chuquicamata mine (Chile), 3 Churchill, Winston, 41–2, 82, 85 Citigroup, 205131 Clay Mathematics Institute, 110 climate change, 4, 20; carbon dioxide emissions and, 132, 156, 159–65, 166–9, 173, 176, 178–80; ‘carbon footprinting’, 159–66; carbon tax/price idea, 167–9, 178–80, 222; environmental regulations and, 169–74, 176, 177; ‘food miles’ and, 159, 160–1, 168; governments/politics and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; greenhouse effect and, 154–6; individual behaviour and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; innovation prizes and, 109, 179; methane and, 155, 156, 157, 159–60, 173, 179, 180; new technologies and, 94–5; simplicity/complexity paradox, 156, 157–8; Thaler-Sunstein nudge, 177–8; uncertainty and, 156 Coca-Cola, 28, 243 Cochrane, Archie, 123–7, 129, 130, 140, 238, 256 cognitive dissonance, 251–2 Cold War, 6, 41, 62–3 Colombia, 117, 147 complexity theory, 3–4, 13, 16, 49, 72103, 237 computer games, 92–3 computer industry, 11–12, 69, 70–1, 239–42 corporations and companies: disruptive technologies and, 239–44, 245–6; environmental issues and, 157–8, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; flattening of hierarchies, 75, 224–5, 226–31; fraud and, 208, 210, 212–13, 214; innovation and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; limited liability, 244; patents and, 95–7, 110, 111, 114; randomised experiments and, 235–9; skunk works model and, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; strategy and, 16, 18, 27–8, 36, 223, 224–34; see also business world; economics and finance cot-death, 120–1 credit-rating agencies, 188, 189, 190 Criner, Roy, 252 Crosby, Sir James, 211, 214, 250, 256 Cuban Missile Crisis, 41, 63 Cudahy Packing, 9 dairy products, 158, 159–60, 164–5, 166 Darwin, Charles, 86 Dayton Hudson, 243 de Montyon, Baron, 107–8 Deal or No Deal (TV game show), 33–5, 253 decentralisation, 73, 74–8, 222, 224–5, 226–31; Iraq war and, 76–8, 79; trial and error and, 31, 174–5, 232, 234 decision making: big picture thinking, 41, 42, 46, 55; consistent standards and, 28–9; diversity of opinions, 31, 44–5, 46, 48–50, 59–63; doctrine of unanimous advice, 30–1, 47–50, 62–3, 64, 78; grandiosity and, 27–8; idealized hierarchy, 40–1, 42, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 78; learning from mistakes, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; local/on the ground, 73, 74, 75, 76–8, 79, 224–5, 226–31; reporting lines/chain of command, 41, 42, 46, 49–50, 55–6, 58, 59–60, 64, 77–8; supportive team with shared vision, 41, 42, 46, 56, 62–3; unsuccessful, 19, 32, 34–5, 41–2; see also centralised decision making Deepwater Horizon disaster (April 2010), 36, 216–19, 220 Democratic Republic of Congo, 139–40 Deng Xiaoping, 1 Denmark, 148 Department for International Development (DFID), 133, 137–8 development aid: charter cities movement, 150–3; community-driven reconstruction (CDR), 137–40; corruption and, 133–5, 142–3; economic ‘big push’ and, 143–5, 148–9; feedback loops, 141–3; fundamentally unidentified questions (FUQs), 132, 133; governments and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; identification strategies, 132–5; microfinance, 116, 117–18, 120; Millennium Development Villages, 129–30, 131; product space concept, 145–8; randomised trials and, 127–9, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 137–40, 141; randomistas, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; selection principle and, 117, 140–3, 149; SouthWest project in China, 131; success and failure, 116, 118–20, 130–1; Muhammad Yunus and, 116, 117–18 digital photography, 240–1, 242 Dirks, Ray, 211–12, 213 disk-drive industry, 239–40, 242 Djankov, Simeon, 135 domino-toppling displays, 185, 200–1 Don Basin (Russia), 21–2, 24, 27 dot-com bubble, 10, 92 Dubai, 147, 150 Duflo, Esther, 127, 131, 135, 136 Dyck, Alexander, 210, 213 eBay, 95, 230 econometrics, 132–5 economics and finance: banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bankruptcy contingency plans, 204; Basel III regulations, 195; bond insurance business, 189–90; bridge bank/rump bank approach, 205–6; capital requirements, 203, 204; centrally planned economiepos=0000032004 >11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70; CoCos (contingent convertible bonds), 203–4; complexity and, 3–4; decoupling of financial system, 202, 203–8, 215–16, 220; Dodd-Frank reform act (2010), 195; employees as error/fraud spotters, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215; energy crisis (1970s), 179; evolutionary theory and, 14–17, 18–19, 174–5; improvements since 1960s, 215; inter-bank payments systems, 207; latent errors and, 209–10, 215; ‘LMX spiral’, 183–4, 189; narrow banking approach, 206–7, 215; need for systemic heat maps, 195–6; reinsurance markets, 183; zombie banks, 201–2; see also business world; corporations and companies; financial crisis (from 2007) Edison, Thomas, 236, 238 Eliot, T.S., 260 Elizabeth House (Waterloo), 170–1, 172 Endler, John, 221–2, 223, 234, 239 Engineers Without Borders, 119 Enron, 197–8, 200, 208, 210 environmental issues: biofuels, 84, 173, 176; clean energy, 91, 94, 96, 245–6; corporations/companies and, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; renewable energy technology, 84, 91, 96, 130, 168, 169–73, 179, 245; see also climate change Equity Funding Corporation, 212 Ernst and Young, 199 errors and mistakes, types of, 208–10; latent errors, 209–10, 215, 218, 220 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 188 European Union, 169, 173 Evans, Martin, 100 evolutionary theory, 6, 12–13, 15–17, 174, 258; business world and, 14–17, 174–5, 233–4; Darwin and, 86; digital world and, 13–14, 259–60; economics and, 14–17, 174–5; Endler’s guppy experiments, 221–2, 223, 239; fitness landscapes, 14–15, 259; Leslie Orgel’s law, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180; problem solving and, 14–15, 16; selective breeding and, 175–6 expertise, limits of, 6–8, 16, 17, 19, 66 extinction events, biological, 18–19 Exxon (formerly Jersey Standard), 9, 12, 188, 245 F-22 stealth fighter, 93 Facebook, 90, 91 failure: in business, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; chasing of losses, 32–5, 253–4, 256; in complex and tightly coupled systems, 185–90, 191–2, 200, 201, 207–8, 219, 220; corporate extinctions, 18–19; denial and, 32, 34–5, 250–3, 255–6; disruptive technologies, 239–44, 245–6; of established industries, 8–10; government funding and, 148–9; hedonic editing and, 254; honest advice from others and, 256–7, 258, 259; learning from, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; modern computer industry and, 11–12, 239–42; as natural in market system, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; niche markets and, 240–2; normal accident theory, 219; recognition of, 36, 224; reinterpreted as success, 254–5, 256; shifts in competitive landscape, 239–46; ‘Swiss cheese model’ of safety systems, 186–7, 190, 209, 218; types of error and mistake, 208–10; willingness to fail, 249–50, 261–2; of young industries, 10 Fearon, James, 137, Federal Aviation Administration, 210 Federal Reserve Bank, 193–4 feedback, 25, 26, 42, 178, 240; in bureaucratic hierarchies, 30–1; development and, 141–3; dictatorships’ immunity to, 27; Iraq war and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; market system and, 141; praise sandwich, 254; public services and, 141; self-employment and, 258; yes-men and, 30 Feith, Douglas, 44, 45 Ferguson, Chris ‘Jesus’, 32 Fermi nuclear reactor (near Detroit), 187 Festinger, Leon, 251 financial crisis (from 2007), 5, 11, 25; AIG and, 189, 193–5, 215–16, 228; bankers’ bonuses, 198; banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bond insurance business and, 189–90; collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 190, 209; credit default swaps (CDSs), 187–9, 190, 194; derivatives deals and, 198, 220; faulty information systems and, 193–5; fees paid to administrators, 197; government bail-outs/guarantees, 202, 214, 223; Lehman Brothers and, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16; ‘LMX spiral’ comparisons, 183–4, 189; Repo 105 accounting trick, 199 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 214 Firefox, 221, 230 Fleming, Alexander, 83 Food Preservation prize, 107, 108 Ford Motor Company, 46–7 fossil record, 18 Fourier, Joseph, 155 fraud, corporate, 208, 210, 212–13, 214 Friedel, Robert, 80 Frost, Robert, 260 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical), 248 Gage, Phineas, 21, 27 Galapagos Islands, 86, 87 Gale (US developer), 152 Galenson, David, 260 Galileo, 187 Galland, Adolf, 81 Gallipoli campaign (1915), 41–2 Galvin, Major General Jack, 62, 256 game theory, 138, 205 Gates, Bill, 110, 115 Gates, Robert, 59, 64, 78 Gates Foundation, 110 Geithner, Tim, 193–5, 196 GenArts, 13 General Electric, 9, 12, 95 Gilbert, Daniel, 255, 256 GlaxoSmithKline, 95 Glewwe, Paul, 127–8 Global Positioning System (GPS), 113 globalisation, 75 Google, 12, 15, 90, 91, 239, 245, 261; corporate strategy, 36, 231–4; Gmail, 233, 234, 241, 242; peer monitoring at, 229–30 Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 158 Göring, Hermann, 81 government and politics: climate change and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; development aid and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 193–5, 198–9, 202, 214, 215–16, 223; grandiosity and, 27–8; ideal hierarchies and, 46pos=00002pos=0000022558 >7, 49–50, 62–3, 78; innovation funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; lack of adaptability rewarded, 20; pilot schemes and, 29, 30; rigorous evaluation methods and, 29* Graham, Loren, 26 Grameen Bank, 116, 117 Greece, 147 Green, Donald, 29* greenhouse effect, 154–6 Gulf War, first, 44, 53, 65, 66, 67, 71; Battle of 73 Easting, 72–3, 74, 79 Gutenberg, Johannes, 10 Haldane, Andrew, 195, 258 Halifax (HBOS subsidiary), 211 Halley, Edmund, 105 Halliburton, 217 Hamel, Gary, 221, 226, 233, 234 Hanna, Rema, 135 Hannah, Leslie, 8–10, 18 Hanseatic League, 150 Harrison, John, 106–7, 108, 110, 111 Harvard University, 98–9, 185 Hastings, Reed, 108 Hausmann, Ricardo, 145 Hayek, Friedrich von, 1, 72, 74–5, 227 HBOS, 211, 213, 214 healthcare sector, US, 213–14 Heckler, Margaret, 90–1 Henry the Lion, 149, 150, 151–2, 153 Hewitt, Adrian, 169 Hidalgo, César, 144–7, 148 Higginson, Peter, 230 Hinkley Point B power station, 192–3, 230–1 Hitachi, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 82, 83, 150 HIV-AIDS, 90–1, 96, 111, 113 Holland, John, 16, 103 Hong Kong, 150 Houston, Dame Fanny, 88–9, 114 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), 101–3, 112 Hughes (computer company), 11 Humphreys, Macartan, 136, 137, 138–40 Hurricane aircraft, 82* IBM, 11, 90, 95–6 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), 8, 10 India, 135, 136, 143, 147, 169 individuals: adaptation and, 223–4, 248–62; climate change and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; experimentation and, 260–2; trial and error and, 31–5 Indonesia, 133–4, 142, 143 Innocentive, 109 innovation: corporations and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; costs/funding of, 90–4, 99–105; failure as price worth paying, 101–3, 104, 184, 215, 236; government funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; grants and, 108; in health field, 90–1, 96; large teams and specialisation, 91–4; market system and, 17, 95–7, 104; new technologies and, 89–90, 91, 94–5; parallel possibilities and, 86–9, 104; prize methodology, 106–11, 112, 113–14, 179, 222–3; randomistas and, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; return on investment and, 83–4; skunk works model, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; slowing down of, 90–5, 97; small steps and, 16, 24, 29, 36, 99, 103, 143, 149, 153, 224, 259–60; space tourism, 112–13, 114; specialisation and, 91–2; speculative leaps and, 16, 36, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 259–60; unpredictability and, 84–5 Intel, 11, 90, 95 International Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), 127–9, 131 International Harvester, 9 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 137–8, 139 internet, 12, 15, 63, 90, 113, 144, 223, 233, 238, 241; randomised experiments and, 235–6, 237; see also Google Iraq war: al Anbar province, 56–7, 58, 64, 76–7; civil war (2006), 39–40; Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), 77; counterinsurgency strategy, 43, 45, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 65; decentralisation and, 76–8, 79; feedback and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; FM 3–24 (counter-insurgency manual), 63; Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), 51–3, 57, 65; Haditha killings (19 November 2005), 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 52; new technologies and, 71, 72, 74, 78–9, 196; Samarra bombing (22 February 2006), 39; Tal Afar, 51, 52, 53–5, 61, 64, 74, 77, 79; trial and error and, 64–5, 66–7; US turnaround in, 35, 40, 46, 50–1, 53–6, 57–8, 59–61, 63–5, 78; US/allied incompetence and, 38, 39–40, 42–5, 46, 50, 64, 67, 79, 223; Vietnam parallels, 46 J&P Coats, 9 Jacobs, Jane, 87 James, Jonathan, 30 Jamet, Philippe, 192 Janis, Irving, 62 Japan, 11, 143, 176, 204, 208 Jay-Z, 119 Jo-Ann Fabrics, 235 Jobs, Steve, 19 Joel, Billy, 247–8, 249 Johnson, President Lyndon, 46, 47, 49–50, 60, 62, 64, 78 Jones, Benjamin F., 91–2 Joyce, James, 260 JP Morgan, 188 Kahn, Herman, 93 Kahneman, Daniel, 32, 253 Kantorovich, Leonid, 68–9, 76 Kaplan, Fred, 77 Karlan, Dean, 135 Kauffmann, Stuart, 16, 103 Kay, John, 206–7, 208, 215, 259 Keller, Sharon, 252 Kelly, Terri, 230 Kennedy, President John F., 41, 47, 62–3, 84, 113 Kenya, 127–9, 131 Kerry, John, 20 Keynes, John Maynard, 181 Kilcullen, David, 57, 60–1 Klemperer, Paul, 96, 205 Klinger, Bailey, 145 Kotkin, Stephen, 25 Kremer, Michael, 127–8, 129 Krepinevich, Andy, 45 Lanchester, John, 188 leaders: decision making and, 40–2; failure of feedback and, 30–1, 62; grandiosity and, 27–8; ignoring of failure, 36; mistakes by, 41–2, 56, 67; need to believe in, 5–6; new leader as solution, 59 Leamer, Ed, 132* Leeson, Nick, 184–5, 208 Lehman Brothers, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16 Lenin Dam (Dnieper River), 24 Levine, John, 48–9 Levitt, Steven, 132–3 Liberia, 136–9 light bulbs, 162, 177 Lind, James, 122–3 Lindzen, Richard, 156 Livingstone, Ken, 169 Lloyd’s insurance, 183 Lloyds TSB, 214 Local Motors, 90 Lockheed, Skunk Works division, 89, 93, 224, 242 Lomas, Tony, 196, 197–200, 204, 205, 208, 219 Lomborg, Bjorn, 94 longitude problem, 105–7, 108 Lu Hong, 49 Lübeck, 149–50, 151–2, 153 Luftwaffe, 81–2 MacFarland, Colonel Sean, 56–7, 64, 74, 76–7, 78 Mackay, General Andrew, 67–8, 74 Mackey, John, 227, 234 Madoff, Bernard, 208212–13 Magnitogorsk steel mills, 24–5, 26, 153 Malawi, 119 Mallaby, Sebastian, 150, 151 management gurus, 8, 233 Manhattan Project, 82, 84 Manso, Gustavo, 102 Mao Zedong, 11, 41 market system: competition, 10–11, 17, 19, 75, 95, 170, 239–46; ‘disciplined pluralism’, 259; evolutionary theory and, 17; failure in as natural, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; feedback loops, 141; innovation and, 17, 95–7, 104; patents and, 95–7; trial and error, 20; validation and, 257–8 Markopolos, Harry, 212–13 Marmite, 124 Maskelyne, Nevil, 106 mathematics, 18–19, 83, 146, 247; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 209, 213; prizes, 110, 114 Mayer, Marissa, 232, 234 McDonald’s, 15, 28 McDougal, Michael, 252 McGrath, Michael, 252 McMaster, H.R.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

By every objective measure, free-enterprise capitalism has won this battle. The United States was far more economically dynamic and socially evolved than the Soviet Union, its chief communist rival. The same held true for West Germany versus East Germany; South Korea versus North Korea; and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore versus China. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, country after country began to turn toward greater political and economic freedom in the 1990s and 2000s, as the dismal economic and societal results of the various socialistic experiments conducted in the twentieth century became better known. As this transition to greater freedom took root, many countries experienced rapid economic growth, and hundreds of millions of poor people were able to escape grinding poverty.

Another almost equally historic year occurred more recently in 1989, which marked several epochal changes in society and technology. Consider three momentous events that took place that year. The Fall of the Wall Preceded by the dramatic but failed Chinese uprising in Tiananmen Square in June, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, triggered the collapse of communist regimes all over Europe, something that was unthinkable just a few years before. Without a shot being fired, the defining ideological debate of the twentieth century between competing systems for organizing human society was suddenly over.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The best examples of this were Japan, the ‘tiger’ (or ‘dragon’, depending on your animal preference) economies of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) and, increasingly, China. The wall comes crashing down: the collapse of socialism Then, in 1989, a momentous change happened. That year, the Soviet Union started to unravel, and the Berlin Wall was torn down. Germany was reunited (1990), and most Eastern European countries abandoned communism. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself was dismembered. With China gradually but surely opening up and liberalizing since 1978 and with Vietnam (unified under the Communist rule in 1975) also adopting its ‘open door’ policy (Doi Moi) in 1986, the socialist bloc was reduced to a few die-hard states, notably North Korea and Cuba.

There were, of course, areas like space and arms technologies where they were leading the world (after all, in 1957 the Soviet Union put the first ever man in space), thanks to the disproportionate amount of resources poured into them. However, when it became evident that it could only offer its citizens second-rate consumer products – as symbolized by Trabant, the East German car with plastic body, which quickly became a museum piece after the fall of the Berlin Wall – the citizens revolted. In the next decade or so, the socialist countries in Eastern Europe made a headlong dash to transform themselves (back) into capitalist ones. Many thought that the ‘transition’ could be made quickly. Surely, it was just a matter of privatizing SOEs and reintroducing the market system, which is after all one of the most ‘natural’ human institutions?


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Decisions were often guided by the belief that markets, on their own, would lead to economic efficiency so long as governments kept spending, deficits, debts, and inflation low. It is worth recalling how these decisions were attached to—indeed, contingent upon—a particular moment in history. It was a moment of capitalist triumphalism. Those economic beliefs enjoyed a moment of popularity in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, to say the market economy accounted for the collapse of authoritarian regimes from Warsaw, to Bucharest, to Moscow is to misread history. Instead, it was the failure of a deeply flawed Communist system, pushed to the brink by the American devotion to a high-tech arms race, combined with a human yearning for freedom.

Europe has maintained a mixed economy—a balance between private enterprise, government (at many different levels), and a mix of other institutional arrangements, including foundations, cooperatives, and not-for-profit organizations. However, the aggressive free-market approach of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in a major change in this balance, based on an excessive confidence in markets. In the clash between two competing systems, Communism and capitalism, the latter seemed to have triumphed absolutely. Some, like Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to proclaim “the end of history,” prophesying that the entire world would eventually appreciate the wisdom of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Apprised of the move after landing, Druckenmiller found a nearby pay phone and called in his resignation.2 A bit later, back in the office, nerves calmed and apologies issued, Soros said he was departing for a six-month trip to Europe, a separation period to see if Druckenmiller’s early losing streak was due to “us having too many cooks in the kitchen, or whether you’re just inept.” Months later, the Berlin Wall dividing West Germany and East Germany was opened and eventually toppled. The world cheered, but investors worried the West German economy and its currency, the deutsche mark, would be crippled by a merger with much-poorer East Germany. That view didn’t make much sense to Druckenmiller; an influx of cheap labor seemed likely to bolster the German economy, not hurt it, and the German central bank could be expected to bolster its currency to keep inflation at bay.

See Statistical arbitrage Archimedes (yacht), 267, 320 Armstrong, Neil, 170 Artin, Emil, 69 Asness, Clifford, 256–57 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 37 astrology, 121–22 autism, xviii, 268, 287, 323–24 Automated Proprietary Trading (APT), 131–32, 133 AWK, 233–34 Ax, Frances, 98 Ax, James, xi, 37, 68–69, 324 at Axcom Limited, 78–83 backgammon, 69, 76–77 background of, 68–69 at Berkeley, 68–69 Berlekamp and, 95–102 conspiracy theories of, 77–78, 99 at Cornell, 69, 70–71 death of, 103 focus on mathematics, 69–70 at Monemetrics, 51–52, 72–73 personality of, 68, 70, 71–72, 98–99 Simons and, 34, 68–69, 99–103, 107 at Stony Brook, 34, 71–72 trading models, 73, 74–75, 77–78, 81–86, 95–101, 107 Axcom Limited, 78–83 disbanding of, 118 trading models, 95–101, 107–18 Ax-Kochen theorem, 69, 70, 103 Bachelier, Louis, 128 backgammon, 69, 76–77 backtesting, 3 Bacon, Louis, 140 Baker House, 15–16 Baltimore City Fire and Police Employees’ Retirement System, 299–300 Bamberger, Gerry, 129–30 BankAmerica Corporation, 212 Bannon, Steve, 279, 280, 280n break with Mercers, 304 at Breitbart, 278–79, 299–300, 301–2 midterm elections of 2018, 304 presidential election of 2016, xviii, 281–82, 284–85, 288–90, 293, 294–95 Barclays Bank, 225, 259 bars, 143–44 Barton, Elizabeth, 272 basket options, 225–27 Baum, Julia Lieberman, 46, 48, 50, 62–63, 65 Baum, Leonard “Lenny,” xi, 45–46, 63–66 background of, 46 currency trading, 28–29, 49–53, 54–60, 62–64, 73 death of, 66 at Harvard, 46 at IDA, 25, 28–29, 46–49, 81 at Monemetrics, 45, 49–60, 63–65 move to Bermuda, 64–65 rift with Simons, 63–65 trading debacle of 1984, 65, 66 Baum, Morris, 46 Baum, Stefi, 48, 62, 63 Baum–Welch algorithm, 47–48, 174, 179 Bayes, Thomas, 174 Bayesian probability, 148, 174 Beane, Billy, 308 Beat the Dealer (Thorp), 127, 163 Beautiful Mind, A (Nasar), 90 behavioral economics, 152, 153 Bell Laboratories, 91–92 Belopolsky, Alexander, 233, 238, 241, 242, 252–54 Bent, Bruce, 173 Berkeley Quantitative, 118 Berkshire Hathaway, 265, 309, 333 Berlekamp, Elwyn, xi at Axcom, 94–97, 102–3, 105–18 background of, 87–90 at Bell Labs, 91–92 at Berkeley, 92–93, 95, 115, 118, 272 at Berkeley Quantitative, 118 death of, 118 at IDA, 93–94 Kelly formula and, 91–92, 96, 127 at MIT, 89–91 Simons and, 2–3, 4, 93–95, 109–10, 113–14, 116–18, 124 trading models and strategies, 2–3, 4, 95–98, 106–18, 317 Berlekamp, Jennifer Wilson, 92 Berlekamp, Waldo, 87–88 Berlin Wall, 164 Bermuda, 64–65, 254 Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, 198 betting algorithm, 144, 167 Bezos, Jeffrey, 134 Bezos, MacKenzie, 134 Big Bang, 324–25 Big Bang Theory, The (TV show), 254 Big Bounce, 325 black box investing, 137 Black Monday (1987), 97, 126, 256 Boesky, Ivan, 106 Bolton, John, 305 Bombieri, Enrico, 28 bond trading, 53, 55 bonuses, 200–201 Bookstaber, Richard, 314–15 Bossie, David, 284, 285, 289 Botlo, Michael, 154–55 Box, George, 245 Bozell, Brent, 304 Breakfast Club, The (movie), 183 breakout signals, 83–84 Breck’s (Newton, MA), 9–10 Breitbart, Andrew, 278 Breitbart News, 278, 280–81, 289–90, 295, 299–300, 301–2 Brexit, xviii, 280–81 Bridgewater Associates, 310 British pound, 40, 52, 79, 165 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 154 Brown, Aaron, 171 Brown, Henry, 172–73 Brown, Margaret, 176, 179–80, 229 Brown, Peter, xi background of, 172–73 education of, 187 at IBM, 5, 173–81, 187–88 Brown, Peter, at Renaissance client presentations, 249–50, 251 equity stake, 201 financial crisis and, 257–61 Magerman and, 181–82, 191–95, 241, 294, 296, 297, 299, 318 management, 208–9, 230–31, 232–33, 237, 241–43, 254–55, 275, 289–90, 319, 320 Mercer and political blowback, 296, 297, 299, 319 recruitment of, 169, 179–80 statistical-arbitrage trading system, 187–91, 193–95, 197–99, 204, 205–8, 213–14, 223, 224–27, 229–32, 255 tech bubble, 215–17 Brown University, 103 Buffett, Warren, xvi, 96, 161, 265, 309 Bush, John Ellis “Jeb,” 279 C++, 155, 191–92 Caddell, Patrick, 279–80 Café (movie), 270 Calhoun, Anthony, 299–300 California Institute of Technology, 53–54 Cambridge Analytica, 279, 280–81, 303 Cambridge Junior College, 22 Candide (Voltaire), 230 candlestick pattern, 122 Carlson, Tucker, 285 Carmona, René, 40, 81–86, 96, 98–99 Carnegie Mellon University, 173, 178 Celanese Corporation, 19 “Characteristic Forms and Geometric Invariants” (Chern and Simons), 38 Charlap, Leonard, 33, 36, 71–72, 141 Cheeger, Jeff, 39 Chern, Shiing-Shen, 17–18, 38 Chern–Simons theory, 17–18, 38 chess, 50, 147, 178 Chevron, 79 Chhabra, Ashvin, 308 Chicago Board of Trade, 113–14, 125 Christie, Chris, 285 Chrysler, 251 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 208 Citadel Investment Group, 256, 310–11 Citigroup, 123 Citizens United v.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Since the liberal view of history cannot explain the outbreak of the war, it likewise treats the existence of fascism and communism (both, indeed, outcomes of the war) cavalierly, as “mistakes.” Saying that something is a mistake is not a satisfactory historical explanation. Liberal theory thus tends to ignore the entire short twentieth century and to go directly from 1914 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, almost as if nothing had happened in between—1989 brings the world back to the path it was on in 1914, before it slipped in error. This is why liberal explanations for the outbreak of the war are nonexistent, and the explanations proffered are based on politics (Fritz Fischer, Niall Ferguson), the remaining influence of aristocratic societies (Joseph Schumpeter), or, least convincing of all, the idiosyncrasies of individual actors, mistakes, and accidents (A.

“Wages, Capital and Top Incomes: The Factor Income Composition of Top Incomes in the USA, 1960–2005.” Chap. 2 of “The Determinants of Incomes and Inequality: Evidence from Poor and Rich Countries.” PhD diss., Oxford University. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2016. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Economic Review 30(2): 203–232. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton. Leijonhufvud, Axel. 1985. “Capitalism and the Factory System.” In Economics as a Process: Essays in the New Institutional Economics, ed.


pages: 394 words: 107,778

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

I wasn’t about to waste any possible opportunity to get the most out of this experience by being unprepared. I was always studying, memorizing, or practicing. There was no time to follow the national or international news, but one event stands out in my memory. During a late night in the classroom, a janitor came in and said, “Turn on the news! They’re knocking down the Berlin Wall!” Learning to Be a Test Pilot Whenever I start a new position, I habitually define the mission of the organization I work for and then determine my role to support the overall mission. At TPS, I had two missions. First was to become the best test pilot I could be. Second, I needed to perform my duties as class leader, to help those in my class achieve mission number one for themselves.

., 111 Andersen AFB, 76 Anderson, Mike, 244, 254 Apollo 13, 252 Arbach, Bob, 106 Armstrong, Neil, 103, 153, 218 Arnold, Bruce, 108–109 Arnot Ogden Hospital, 15 Ashby, Jeff, 208, 212, 220, 233 asteroids, 231 astronaut astronaut interview, 118–119, 124 qualifications for selection, 72, 87–88, 117, 152, 158, 179 selection process, 118–130 astronaut beach house, 158–159, 219 astronaut candidate (ASCAN), 131, 146 Astronaut Crew Quarters, 124, 144, 146, 159, 217–219, 221, 222, 268 Astronaut Office chief information officer (CIO), 238 Astronaut Office Vehicle Systems Branch, 238 Astronaut Support Person (ASP), 139–145 duties, 140 Astronaut’s Prayer, 2 astronomy, 70, 205, 207, 231 Atlantis “cleanest vehicle” reputation, 181 cracks in flow liners, 241 fuel leaks, 132 Launch on Need rescue vehicle, 263 rudder/speed break actuators (RSBs), 261 STS-27R tile damage, 253 See also STS-84, STS-114 Austin, Bryan, 215 Austin, Texas, 135 Automated Transfer Vehicle, 197 autopilot, 4, 231–232, 263 basic training, 24–28 Beale AFB, 106 Beirut, Lebanon marine barracks bombing, 78–79 Ben Guerir, Morocco, 4 Bergstrom AFB, 135 Berlin Wall, 103–104 bicycle ergometer, 163–164 Bitburg, Germany, 193 Blagov, Viktor, 155 blind spots, gaps in knowledge, 284 Boeing, 214–215 Bolden, Charlie, 125 books, 13, 22, 180, 187, 285 Bowersox, Ken, 240 Brake, Jeff, 79 Brandenstein, Dan, 133 Brandt, Marlene, 38 bravery, 80, 121, 188, 286 Brown, Dave, 254 Budarin, Nikolai, 240 Building 9 (JSC), 132 Buran, 154 C-5 Galaxy, 31 C-9, 74 C-17 Globemaster III, 92 C-27A, 111 C-123, 27 C-130 Hercules, 31, 107 C-141 Starlifter, 74–75, 79–80, 82, 92, 138 crew, 75 as training to command space shuttle, 83–84 Cabana, Bob, 177, 205–206, 245 Cain, LeRoy, 259 call signs, 64–65, 139, 190, 228 Caltech, 119 Camarda, Charlie, 259, 263, 270, 276–277 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 215, 235 Camp El-Ne-Ho (summer camp), 13–14, 53 CAPCOM (capsule communicator), 145, 173, 177–178, 198, 225, 229, 243 Cape Canaveral, 267 Cape Crusader.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

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

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

The pace of change was starting to quicken a bit. My technology platforms were improving faster. After my tour in Jerusalem, I moved to the Washington bureau, where I served as the New York Times diplomatic correspondent, starting in 1989. I had a front-row seat traveling with Secretary of State James A. Baker III for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. On those trips we used Tandy laptops to write and file over long-distance phone lines. We reporters became experts at taking apart telephones in hotel rooms around the world to directly fix the wires to our Tandys. You always had to travel with a small screwdriver, along with your reporter’s notepad.

“For more than three decades after World War II, all four went up steadily and in almost perfect lockstep,” Brynjolfsson noted in a June 2015 interview with the Harvard Business Review. “Job growth and wage growth, in other words, kept pace with gains in output and productivity. American workers not only created more wealth but also captured a proportional share of the gains.” In hindsight, the period from World War II up to the fall of the Berlin Wall was “an incredible period of economic moderation,” argued James Manyika, one of the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute. And economic moderation drove political moderation and stability. It made inclusion and immigration easier to tolerate. Most countries were also still benefiting from improved health care and decreased child mortality, producing a demographic dividend of bulging youth populations and relatively few older people to take care of.

., III balance of power Bandar Mahshahr, Iran bandwidth Bangladesh bankruptcy laws bank tellers Barbut, Monique baseball, class-mixing and BASIC Bass, Carl Batman, Turkey BBCNews.com Bee, Samantha Beinhocker, Eric Beirut: civil war in; 1982 Israeli-Palestinian war in Bell, Alexander Graham Bell Labs Bennis, Warren Benyus, Janine Berenberg, Morrie Berenberg, Tess Berkus, Nate Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall, fall of Bessen, James Betsiboka River “Better Outcomes Through Radical Inclusion” (Wells) Between Debt and the Devil (Turner) Beykpour, Kayvon Bible Bigbelly garbage cans big data; consumers and; financial services and; software innovation and; supernova and Big Shift Big World, Small Planet (Rockström) “Big Yellow Taxi” (song) Bingham, Marjorie bin Laden, Osama bin Yehia, Abdullah biodiversity: environmental niches and; resilience and biodiversity loss; climate change and biofuels biogeochemical flows biomass fuels biotechnology bioweapons birth control, opposition to Bitcoin black elephants Blase, Bill blockchain technology Bloomberg.com Blumenfeld, Isadore “Kid Cann” Bobby Z (Bobby Rivkin) Bodin, Wes Bohr, Mark Bojia, Ayele Z.


pages: 742 words: 202,902

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Gunnar Myrdal, Kitchen Debate, land reform, Neil Armstrong, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, Torches of Freedom, William of Occam

—Washingtonian magazine “Rasenberger provides an outstanding chronological day-by-day, nearly minute-by-minute, account of the operation that was first planned during the Eisenhower administration and inherited by JFK.… In the end, Rasenberger makes the case for the large impact that the Bay of Pigs had on historic events that followed, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the involvement in Vietnam, and the election of President Nixon and Watergate, among others.” —Idaho Statesman “A brilliant book … Students of history too young to remember the events of that April in 1961 will appreciate the thoroughness. For those who lived through that chilling time, it is a page-turner.

A young Seattle woman wrote to Time: “I hope the President knows that even mothers of small children are losing sleep over the dread situation. But I can say that this mother would rather lose all than raise her children under less than freedom. Courage, JFK!” Then in August came news from Germany that the Communists were constructing a great wall along the border between West Berlin and East Germany. The Berlin Wall was potentially a provocation, but Kennedy understood that it was also a solution—a barbed-wire olive branch from Khrushchev. The wall would stop the flow of East Germans into West Berlin, ending the population drain that so distressed Khrushchev, letting him achieve what he desired without closing off West Berlin to the United States.

., “Program of Covert Action” supported by, 76 Baker, Leo, 294 Bank of America, 373 Barbara J, 206, 229, 238, 244, 247, 251, 263, 273 Barnes, Tracy, 105, 117, 118, 135–36, 139, 158, 182, 306, 329, 394, 403 Bissell’s relationship with, 66–67 in Guatemala coup, 61, 62 Stevenson’s briefing by, 172, 173, 198, 205, 329 Barreto, Berta, 357, 359, 377 Bartlett, Charles, 170 Base Trax: mutiny at, 119 training at, 84, 85, 96, 97 see also Guatemala, invasion training camps in Batista, Fulgencio, 13, 356 ouster of, 11, 14, 30, 68 U.S. backing of, 29 Bay of Pigs, as landing site, 138–39, 175, 227 Bay of Pigs invasion: accounts of, xv–xvii, 385–90 casualties in, xv CIA’s reputation following, 382, 390; see also Central Intelligence Agency, condemnation of cost of, xv Cuban memory of, xix–xx, 401 international perception of, xiii investigation of, 321, 331, 338–41 journalism affected by, 383–85 Kennedy administration’s reaction to, 314–15, 334–38, 383 Kennedy’s public stance on, 308, 316 Kennedy’s reaction to, 308, 314, 315–17, 332, 333–34, 364, 381, 382 Kennedy’s resentment about, 319–21 Khrushchev’s criticism of, 347 motives for, xvii–xviii public reaction to, 313–14 U.S. involvement recognized in, 313–14 U.S. national memories of, xiv, xix worldwide protests against, 266 see also Cuban Expeditionary Force; Happy Valley; invasion air force; invasion fleet; Operation Zapata; “Program of Covert Action” Beerli, Stanley, 217, 218, 235, 293 Bender, Frank, see Droller, Gerry Berle, Adolph, 159, 200, 285, 286, 295, 296, 305, 330 Berlin Wall, 348 Bernstein, Carl, 399 Bernstein, Theodore, 169 Beschloss, Michael, 221 Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam), 125 Bethesda Naval Hospital, 374 Billings, Lem, 201, 332, 333 Bissell, Ann, 58, 65, 174, 355 Bissell, Annie, 60, 61n Bissell, Richard, 41, 351, 393, 403, 413 adventure-seeking of, 58–59 air strikes curtailed by, 185, 400 in Bay of Pigs investigation, 331 Cabell’s effect on, 218 and Castro assassination plot, 80, 81, 82, 83, 142 CIA internal invasion report delivered to, 353 condemnation of, 57, 127, 330, 331, 399–401 covert-action task force assembled by, 49 final Operation Zapata briefing by, 181–83, 221 at first Operation Zapata progress report, 200, 201, 203 follow-up air strikes advocated by, 223, 224, 225 intellect of, 57, 58, 62 invasion accounts of, 386–87, 391, 392, 399–400 Kennedy administration’s admiration of, 122–23, 147–48, 148n in Kennedy’s Castro ouster plot, 352 Kennedy’s postelection briefing by, 100, 101, 103 motives of, 141 naval air cover blunder blamed on, 292 Operation Zapata approval received by, 215–16 in Operation Zapata crisis, 265, 269–70, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 306–7 Operation Zapata overseen by, 147, 148, 153, 157, 162, 173–76, 181–83, 185, 229, 242, 258 persuasiveness of, 59, 71, 127, 129, 132, 135, 137, 393–94, 401 post-invasion career of, 329–30, 386–87 as “Program of Covert Action” leader, 55, 56, 64, 66–69, 72, 76, 80, 103, 105, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125–26, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134–35, 137, 144 “Program of Covert Action” reformulated by, 138, 139, 140, 141 “Program of Covert Action” widened by, 96, 97, 100–101, 102 resignation of, 354–55 Robert Kennedy’s briefing by, 176, 222 social life of, 60–61, 62–63, 65 U-2 program overseen by, 63–64, 66, 70, 71, 148, 174 Bissell, Richard, III, 65 Bissell, Thomas, 65 Bissell, William, 65 Blagar, 206, 211, 219, 230, 231, 232, 237, 243, 244, 247, 251, 252, 263–64, 267, 268, 273, 290 Blight, James, 401 Blue Beach, see Playa Girón Board of National Estimates, 77, 157 Bohlen, Charles, 2, 125, 277 Bohning, Don, 83, 400 Boland, Frederick H., 89, 198, 199 Bonsal, Philip, 28, 30, 200 diplomatic efforts of, 31–32, 35 recall of, 51–52 Bonsal, Stephen, 31 Bowles, Chester, 147–48, 148–50, 151, 161, 163, 314, 315, 394 Bradlee, Ben, 124, 170, 384 Bradley, Omar, 217 Brigade 2506, see Cuban Expeditionary Force Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Talbot), xvii Browne, Malcolm, 384 Buckley, William F., Jr., 30 Bundy, McGeorge, 59, 71, 123, 124–25, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139, 147, 148n, 156, 159, 168, 182, 198, 200, 221, 265, 269, 280, 282, 285, 286, 305, 319, 330, 333, 348, 363, 383, 393 air-strike cancellation relayed by, 222, 223 Kennedy’s national security policy overhauled by, 334–35 Stevenson’s briefing by, 244–45 Bundy, William, 59, 114, 125, 135, 147, 158, 159, 208, 394 Burke, Arleigh, 89, 116, 208, 245, 270, 271, 274, 279, 282, 283, 285, 289, 331, 339–40 in covert-action planning, 55, 76 Bush, George W., xiv Cabell, Charles P., 41, 47, 49, 76, 215, 250, 264, 265, 331 CIA role of, 65, 150 follow-up air strikes and, 217–18, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225 operational remedies sought by, 233–34, 235, 240–42 Capone, Al, 81 Cardona, José Miró, 144–45, 285, 295, 296 Caribe, 205, 230, 251, 252, 259, 263, 264, 274 Caroline, 379 Carreras, Enrique, 239, 244, 248 Carroll, Wallace, 115 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 62, 84 Castro, Fidel, xvi, 56, 228 air-strike reaction of, 193, 214–15 anti-Americanism of, 14, 25, 28, 29, 34–35, 52, 53, 89, 214–15 assassination plots against, 48, 55, 80–83, 88–89, 141–44 CIA’s 1959 assessments of, 14, 23, 47 CIA’s policy change toward, 48; see also “Program of Covert Action” communism denied by, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28 Communist conversion of, 29–30, 34, 84, 192, 215 Cuban air force deployment by, 208, 208n, 391 Cuban military demobilized by, 116 Cuban military mobilized by, 96, 185, 214 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 366 Cuban opposition to, 33, 34, 35, 77, 96, 239; see also Cuban exiles death threats against, 24, 25 diplomatic outreach by, 349, 350 dissident groups culled by, 96, 162, 171, 214, 229, 393 domestic popularity of, 66, 77, 137, 229, 323, 352 Eisenhower and, 15, 30, 39–40, 52 impending invasion known to, 170–71 international reputation of, 323 invasion preparations by, 185 Kennedy assassination and, 381, 382 Kennedy’s position toward, 90, 92–93, 94, 95, 116 Kennedy’s post-invasion policy toward, 317, 349, 350–52, 364, 382 Khrushchev’s relationship with, 88, 89 military leadership of, 236–37, 239, 250, 253–54, 273, 301 1959 U.S. visit of, 12–16, 19, 20–25, 30 1960 U.S. visit of, 86–88, 89, 90, 91 Nixon’s theories about, 381–82 post-invasion ouster plot against, 317, 349, 350–52, 360, 364, 398 prisoner deal offered by, 343–45 prisoner negotiations with, 359–61, 366, 367, 374, 375, 376, 377 prisoners interrogated by, 323, 341 prisoners tried by, 356–57 reign of, xviii, 395, 401 as revolutionary, 11, 12–13 revolutionary victory of, 64, 68 Robert Kennedy’s warning about, 305 Soviet alliance with, 30, 33, 52–53, 64, 76, 77, 78, 89 United Nations address of, 89, 90, 91 U.S. concerns about, xvii, 14–16, 17, 21–22, 23, 25, 29, 51, 77, 79, 80, 86–87, 90, 390; see also “Program of Covert Action” U.S. diplomatic outreach to, 31–32 U.S. diplomats ordered to leave by, 105 U.S. insecurity noted by, xviii, 19 U.S. popularity of, 11, 12–14, 16, 20, 22, 25, 86, 87 see also Cuba Castro, Raúl, 13, 17, 28, 33, 34, 88, 185 Catholics, 75 Catledge, Turner, 168, 384 Cavero, Father, 257 Central Australia, Cuba, Castro’s military headquarters at, 254 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), xiii, 40 assassination plots of, 82, 83 Bissell as heir apparent at, 123, 141, 147 Bissell’s early career at, 61–64 Bissell’s post-invasion career at, 330 Bissell’s view of, 60, 62 Castro ouster plan formulated at, 349, 351, 352, 398 Castro policy change at, 48; see also “Program of Covert Action” Castro watched by, 14, 23, 47 Cold War operations of, 44, 45, 49, 50, 61–62, 63–64; see also “Program of Covert Action” condemnation of, xvi–xvii, 128, 135, 270, 331, 332, 341, 352, 353, 382, 390, 392, 393, 399 Cuban exiles recruited by, 73–75, 84, 96, 120, 121, 143 Cuban military intelligence at, 117 in Cuban prisoner negotiations, 359, 369 Cuban provisional government assembled by, 137, 285 Cuba Task Force of, see WH/4 culture of secrecy at, 41, 42, 43, 118 Directorate of Plans at, 43–44, 65 Dulles’s defense of, 388–89, 392 Eisenhower’s support of, 44, 45, 49, 50, 53, 62 “Family Jewels” documents of, 80 as foreign policy maker, xvii functions of, 43–44 internal invasion investigation at, 353 internal politics in, 67, 353 invasion headquarters of, 7; see also Quarters Eye invasion plan supported by, 124, 135 Kennedy administration’s admiration for, 122–23 Kennedy assassination theories involving, 382 Kennedy’s blaming of, 320, 321, 354 new headquarters of, 41, 42, 43, 45–46, 353 Nicaraguan base of, 4 Office of Security of, 81 Operation Zapata tasks of, 152 preinvasion reconnaissance mistakes by, 230–31 presidential candidate briefings by, 78–79 press coverage of, 41, 42, 107, 169 Project ZR/RIFLE at, 352 Senate investigation of, xvi, 83, 399 Stevenson’s misinformation from, 203, 216 Stevenson’s protest to, 218–19 Taylor Committee’s findings on, 340, 341, 353 Technical Services Division of, 54 U-2 program of, 63–64, 66, 70–72, 78, 148, 171, 174, 177, 190, 196, 207, 363, 366 U.S. combat pilots authorized by, 276, 288, 402 in U.S.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

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

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

Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs circulated plans, over the opposition of the State Department, to insert U.S. combat troops primarily to protect South Vietnam’s borders against Communist incursions. President Kennedy was not sure what to do, and he could not devote his full attention to Vietnam. East German and Soviet forces had begun erecting the Berlin Wall in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, to stop the hemorrhaging of refugees to the West. The Communists were threatening to force American troops out of the city altogether—a threat that Kennedy vowed to resist with force if necessary. While World War III was looming in Berlin, Kennedy decided on October 11 to send a team of trusted advisers to Saigon to recommend a way forward in Vietnam.

In reality, Prouty was a crank with a febrile imagination—“a complete nut,” in Rufus Phillips’s words.5 He was a “good pilot of prop-driven aircraft,” Lansdale later said, “but had such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff that I kicked him back to the Air Force.”6 Prouty would be associated after his retirement from the Air Force in 1964 with the white supremacist Liberty Lobby, the Church of Scientology, and the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche; he grandiosely compared LaRouche’s federal prosecution for conspiracy and mail fraud to the trial of Socrates. He also claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall was stage-managed by David Rockefeller to profit from “the rubles and the gold,” that he had personally seen a UFO, and that “the Churchill gang” murdered Franklin D. Roosevelt.7 Prouty’s old boss was a favorite target of his bizarre and inventive accusations. He claimed that Lansdale had concocted the entire Huk threat—that so-called Huk attacks were actually carried out by Philippine army special forces in order to elect Ramon Magsaysay president, although he never explained why Washington would want to elect Magsaysay if there was no Huk threat.8 In a similar vein, he claimed that the members of Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission were “a band of superterrorists” who deliberately created the Vietcong by moving a million Vietnamese from the North to the South in 1954–55.

., 102 Barrio Aglao, 126 Bataan, 146, 147 Bataan Death March, 78 Batak tribe, 41 Batcheller, Nellie, 26 Batcheller, Russell, 26 Batcheller, Willard Oscar, 26 Batista, Fulgencio, 280 Battalion Combat Teams, 130, 133 “Battleground in 1967, The,” 500 Bay Bridge, 29 Bay of Pigs invasion, 360, 369, 376–78, 385, 388, 398, 465, 575 EGL’s opposition to, xliv, 376–77, 380 planning of, 354 Bay Vien (Le Van Vien), 260, 270 retirement of, 273 Beatles, 546 Bedouins, 258 Beer Hall Putsch, 17 Belafonte, Harry, 502 Belgium, 436 Belin, David W., 578, 579 Bell, Daniel, 108 Bell, David E., 484 Bell, J. Franklin, 49 Bellow, Saul, 452, 547 Ben-Gurion, David, 297 Berg, Morris “Moe,” 35 Berle, Milton, 88 Berlin tunnel, 389–90 Berlin Wall: erection of, 369, 372 fall of, 421 Bernstein, Richard, 68 Best and The Brightest, The (Halberstam), xli, 228 Bigart, Homer, 201 Bill of Rights, xlv, 497 Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam, 169, 251, 252, 512 Binh Hung, Vietnam, 345, 352, 357 Binh Xuyen, 203–4, 254 in Battle of Saigon, 265–71, 272–73, 275, 277 EGL threatened by, 270 rifles taken from, 344 troop strength of, 261 in uprising against Diem, 260, 261, 262, 263 biological warfare, 384–85 Birch, John, 42 Bird, Kai, 313 Bismarck, Otto von, 540 Bissell, Dick, 390 Black, Ed, 413 Black Patches, 481 blowback, 153 Boer War, xxxviii, 49–50 Bogart, Humphrey, 292 Bohannan, Charles T.


pages: 161 words: 38,039

The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How to Say Something Funny About Anything by Sally Holloway

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, congestion charging, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking

you trawl through your mind and look for other things to which you can apply those criteria: For example when chaos theory was first popularised in the early nineties, comedienne Jenny Vickers came out with the joke... I know chaos theory’s true, because one day my Dad farted and the next day the Berlin wall came down. This has kept to ‘tiny’ and ‘enormous’ criteria. Here’s a couple I wrote... Chaos theory, where something small can turn into something large? Yeah one day I ate this tiny little cake and the next day my bum was enormous. Chaos theory: like a tiny remark to your mum that you saw your dad giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to his secretary and the next day they have a massive row.


pages: 113 words: 36,785

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis

airport security, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, psychological pricing, the new new thing

Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight. Men just look away in shame. And so the American father now finds himself in roughly the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain. The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH…YOU…POOR…BASTARD. But I digress. I came home one night, relieved the babysitter, and found that Quinn had three bright red spots on her forehead and, for the first time in her life, a fever.


pages: 123 words: 37,853

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

Creativity is about making choices and, when you can go anywhere, it is much harder to choose. For example, in workshops, when people get stuck it is not because they can’t think of anything to say or do. It is because there are too many things they could say or do and they clam up trying to decide which one to choose. Too many options make us anxious. When the Berlin Wall came down, East German housewives broke down in tears in West German supermarkets, not out of envy at the opulence of the West, but out of confusion - they had no way of making sense of the vast array of choices on offer and this provoked anxiety. This is even harder when we obsess about making the ‘right’ choice - by which we normally mean the one that will make us look good (or clever, or funny).


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Going to Africa for the first time only to meet with threats of voodoo and poisoning made me question an outsider’s role in development. Seeing a group of women with whom I had worked for years both suffer as victims and act as perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide made me reconsider the very nature of what it is to be human. Watching the Berlin Wall fall, which resulted in a widespread belief in the “victory of capitalism,” while also experiencing the cruelty an unbridled capitalist system can inflict on the very poor made me seek alternative solutions that could include all people in the opportunities presented by a global economy. Meeting and working with some of the world’s wealthiest individuals made me explore the role of philanthropy and private initiative in bringing about large-scale change, especially when it comes to poverty.

When I was considering what to do after business school, my choices were to accept a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation to explore enterprise-development strategies for low-income communities in the United States or to move to Czechoslovakia to work on a fund that would build small enterprises in that newly freed country just one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With my tendency toward wanderlust, I leaned toward working in a new land during a historic moment. John felt I should instead accept the fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation. “It will give you an important vantage point on what philanthropy is, both domestically and internationally,” he said.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

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

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

And that’s how the modern computer was born: a machine divided into hardware and software; a machine that could be programmed easily, and was capable of performing not only mathematical but logical operations as well; a machine that could simulate any other machine. By the time the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, the Western Allies had already developed advanced computer technology. They would use it to computerise their arsenal and tactics, and ultimately to win the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the West had such an advantage over the Soviet Union in computing power that it was capable of shooting down most Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles in mid-flight. President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ initiative9 used complex operational research algorithms run on fast supercomputers to guide counter-attack weapons so effectively that the Soviet Union was rendered a military lame duck.

The tension between totalitarian utopias and free-market idealism resulted in the destruction of the ancient imperial order, caused the violent death of tens of millions during two world wars and accelerated the development of new technologies – of which computers were perhaps the most important one. We now live at a time when the aftermath of the Cold War seems like a fading echo of the past. The apparent victory of liberal capitalism over communism, symbolised by the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, is nowadays doubted and challenged. The Great Recession that was set off in 2007 has demonstrated that unregulated financial markets create financial bubbles that can bring down the entire world economy. Millions of livelihoods have been destroyed in southern Europe, where double-digit unemployment has wiped out hope for the next two generations at least.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, between 600,000 and 700,000 Palestinians fled Israel, and 4.6 million people are now registered as Palestinian refugees.110 Hundreds of thousands of Jews were also displaced from Arab states in the late 1940s, and Israel took in about 600,000 of these refugees. Israel also hosted hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who fled persecution in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989. Refugees also flowed out of countries that tried to close their borders. The Berlin Wall, separating East and West Germany, was the most famous of the barriers erected to prevent emigration from communist states to the west. Nevertheless, about 840,000 people fled the USSR between 1961 and 1989. They were accommodated by western countries, which used refugee policy as a tool of Cold War foreign policy.111 Charles Keeley notes that refugee policy was used “to embarrass communist states, and in some cases was used with the intent of frustrating the consolidation of communist revolutions and hopefully destabilizing nascent communist governments.”112 Following the Vietnam War, the United States gave refuge to half a million Vietnamese, 182,000 Laotians, and 126,000 Cambodians.113 In Africa, states placed few restrictions on emigration (with the notable exception of apartheid South Africa), but during the 1960s and 1970s, there were several waves of expulsions on the continent.

PART II PRESENT 4 Leaving Home: Migration Decisions and Processes Having reviewed 60,000 years of human migration in the part I, part II covers the period from the early 1970s to today. This has been a period of unprecedented globalization. Accelerating cross-border movements of goods, services, ideas, and capital are drawing the regions of the world into an interdependent and interconnected community. Political changes associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of China, and democratization in much of Africa and Latin America have been both a cause and an effect of this accelerating integration. Rapid technological progress and the development of containerization, fiber optics, and mass computing have facilitated more rapid integration, as the increasing transfer of skills and ideas has prompted further innovation.1 The rise of cross-border flows resembles the “first wave” of early globalization between 1840 and 1914 that was accompanied by mass migrations.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

From the streets outside one cannot see the democratic process being enacted in our name. In recent decades, however, a number of architects have proposed that there is a relationship between the visibility of democracy and trust; this ‘architecture of transparency’ blows away the cobwebs of secretive government and forces a new openness. In 1992, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Foster + Partners were invited to renovate the historic Reichstag in Berlin; the brief was to create a symbol for the reunification of the whole nation as well as a home for the democratic future of Germany, the Bundestag. The glass dome, which rises above the original 1870s building, stands above the central debating chamber, allowing visitors to look down into the room and observe democracy in action.

Liverpool One has attempted to revive the fortunes of its abandoned Albert Docks area with a collection of attractions, museums and enticing modern apartment blocks, with mixed critical response, hoping to bring people back into the city centre to live and visit. In Berlin, the development of the Pariser Platz, which once ran along the line of the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany, had the complicated task of both attracting crowds of visitors but also becoming a place of national significance, the symbol of the united nation. Many of these new schemes are in pursuit of the ‘Bilbao effect’. At the end of the 1980s the Basque city of Bilbao was a long way down the list of European cultural centres.


pages: 356 words: 112,271

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

He reached for the totems of Easter 1916, the ‘struggle for independence’, the quest for economic prosperity. But every patriotic reference point was couched in terms of Ireland’s European destiny. ‘The 1916 Proclamation,’ he said, ‘recognized that Ireland’s place in the world will always be defined by our relationship with Europe, as well as with the United States and with Britain.’ The fall of the Berlin Wall meant that the most divisive border left in Europe was that ‘between Dundalk and Derry’. Theresa May’s name was not invoked once. ‘Brexit,’ he declared, ‘is a British policy, not an Irish policy or an EU policy. I continue to believe it is bad for Britain, for Ireland and for Europe.’ Avoiding a hard border was ‘a political matter, not a legal or technical matter’.

The issue then disappeared. But the German parallel was kept within the ether. A senior Irish official confirmed to the author the following December that it was still being looked at, but that the government didn’t necessarily want to draw attention to it. ‘The model is Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall,’ he said. ‘The principle is that nothing is disturbed [in the event of Irish unity]. No one is contesting this. But there’s no need to put it up in lights.’ But it was being discussed at the highest level. A confidential memo, dated 26 October 2016, was circulated among senior officials in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs, spelling out the German parallel and the key role Ireland had played in 1990.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

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

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

Washington imposed economic sanctions that virtually destroyed the economy, the main burden falling on the poor nonwhite majority. They too came to hate Noriega, not least because he was responsible for the economic warfare (which was illegal, if anyone cares) that was causing their children to starve. Next, a military coup was tried, but failed. Then, in December 1989, the US celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War by invading Panama outright, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of civilians (no one knows, and few north of the Rio Grande care enough to inquire). This restored power to the rich white elite that had been displaced by the Torrijos coup—just in time to ensure a compliant government for the administrative changeover of the Canal on January 1, 1990 (as noted by the right-wing European press).

But while this particular phase has ended, North-South conflicts continue. One side may have called off the game, but the US is proceeding as before—more freely, in fact, with Soviet deterrence a thing of the past. It should have surprised no one that [the first] President Bush celebrated the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by immediately invading Panama and announcing loud and clear that the US would subvert Nicaragua’s election by maintaining its economic stranglehold and military attack unless “our side” won. Nor did it take great insight for Elliott Abrams to observe that the US invasion of Panama was unusual because it could be conducted without fear of a Soviet reaction anywhere, or for numerous commentators during the Gulf crisis to add that the US and Britain were now free to use unlimited force against its Third World enemy, since they were no longer inhibited by the Soviet deterrent.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Then, when she was pregnant with their fourth child, Erhan decided it was time for them to progress to the second stage of arrival, to make their break from the dormitory compounds and move to the Turkish enclave of Kreuzberg, in what was then still known as West Berlin. Beginning in the 1960s, Turks had flooded into this run-down neighborhood adjoining the Berlin Wall, drawn by its large apartments, its low rent, and the fact that its landlords would rent to Turks—something that was far from guaranteed in most German neighborhoods. After the Wall came down, shortly after their move, Berlin’s center of activity shifted to the East, neatly leapfrogging Kreuzberg and leaving parts of it poor and neglected, home to anarchists, pacifists, ecologists, and other members of the urban subaltern—and to the largest urban population of Turks in the Western world.

From the beginning, German policy seemed almost hard-wired to produce a failed arrival city, one whose residents can neither establish themselves in a meaningful way nor realistically expect to move permanently back to their villages. This exclusion began in 1961, when the German economy was booming, creating large-scale labor shortages; the erection of the Berlin Wall had severely curtailed the supply of workers from within Germany and eastern Europe. That year, the Federal Republic of Germany set up a recruitment office in Istanbul to hire labor for the Telefunken transistor factory, in Berlin, and the automotive plants of the Rhineland. The workers, under the 1961 Recruitment Agreement for Labor, would initially be known as Fremdarbeiter (alien workers) and then, in a better reflection of the policy’s goals, as Gastarbeiter (guest workers).


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

JG: It’s so inconvenient! NDT: When you’re at war, money flows like rivers. In 1945 physicists basically won the war in the Pacific with the Manhattan Project. Long before the bomb, and continuing through the entire Cold War, America sustained a fully funded particle physics program. Then the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, and within four years the entire budget for the Super Collider gets canceled. What happens now? Europe says, “We’ll take the mantle.” They start building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and now we’re standing on our shores and looking across the pond, crying out, “Can we join?

., 248–49 Andromeda galaxy, 57, 239 Milky Way galaxy and, 118–19 Nebula in, 100 Antarctica, 76 Anti-Deficiency Act, 288 antimatter, 164, 170–71 Antitrust Civil Process Act, 311 Anyone, Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, 146 Apollo program, 6, 8, 11, 15, 25, 109, 111, 133, 151, 154, 162, 168, 179, 195, 214, 219, 245 Apollo 1, 17, 66, 96 Apollo 8, 69–70, 145, 172 Apollo 11, 4–5, 7, 14, 21, 23, 69, 86, 88, 102, 112, 127, 144–45, 149–50, 196, 220 Apollo 12, 5, 198 Apollo 13, 112 Apollo 14, 3 Apollo 16, 198 Apollo 17, 17, 69, 132, 187, 188 Apophis (asteroid), 53 Apple Computer, 136 Arecibo Observatory, 28, 41 “argument from ignorance,” 182–83 Aristarchus, 34, 97 Aristotle, 34 Armstrong, Neil, 5, 14, 66, 69, 86–87, 111–12, 149, 187, 219–20 asteroid belt, 245 asteroids, 45–54, 103, 188, 201, 227, 228, 252, 255, 259 collision rates of, 49–50, 50 composition of, 46 cratering record of, 47–48 detecting and diverting, 52–54, 236 ecosystems and impact of, 51–52 impact records of, 45–46 impact risk of, 46–47, 49–51, 50 keyhole altitude range of, 53 near-Earth, 46–47 planet formation and, 45–46 predicting, 54 shock waves of, 47 Trojan, 117, 176 see also comets Astronaut Pen, 194 astronauts, 141, 145 Astronomy Explained (Ferguson), 254 Atlantis space shuttle, 147, 162 atomic bomb, 50, 87, 97, 224 Atomic Energy Act of 1954, 274–75 Atomic Energy Commission, 274 Augustine, Norm, 146, 221 Australia, 239 aviation, see flight bacteria, 246–47 ballistics, see orbits Bean, Alan, 5 Belgium, 7 Bell, Jocelyn, 29 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 92 Bell X-1 (rocket plane), 109 Benz Patent Motorwagen, 213 Berlin Wall, 80 Big Bang theory, 92, 95, 129, 141, 176 biomarkers, 30 black holes, 71, 94, 139, 141, 142 Blériot, Louis, 110 Blob, The (film), 35, 203 Blue Marble, The, 187–88 Boeing, 236 Bolden, Charles F., Jr., 146 Book of Predictions, The (Truax), 218 Brazil, xiv, 7, 23, 73 Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, 170 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 215 Bruno, Giordano, 217 Bush, George H.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Reagan’s capacity to sail through such stormy waters with apparently unfailing calm was a gift that few politicians are given. That was how he survived Iran–Contra and left office in 1988 with a higher approval rating than any other departing president since the Second World War – 63 per cent, according to Gallup. When the Berlin Wall was breached a year later, Reagan basked in the glory. I watched Gorbachev in Washington on his second visit (the first was in 1987), when he repeated several of his walkabouts, his car stopping on the short drive from the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street to the White House to meet George H. W. Bush, letting him plunge into crowds like any Western politician.

INDEX Aaron, Hank, 105 ABC, 102 Abedin, Huma, 188 Abernathy, Ralph, 155 abortion, 119, 175, 176, 203–4, 204, 265, 274, 276–7 Abourezk, James, 80 Abramsky, Jenny, 110 Accidental American, The, 143 Afghanistan, 112, 132, 159, 258 Agnew, Spiro, 44, 49, 51 al-Qaeda, 132 Alda, Alan, 45 Alexander, Bobby and Gloria, 175, 176 All the President’s Men, 57 Allen, Gavin, 155 Allen, Woody, 16 Amash, Justin, 199 America, vi, 280 American Conservative Union (ACU), 146, 197 American Enterprise Institute, 98 American Spectator, 120 America’s Crisis of Leadership, 111, 113, 114 Ames, Aldrich, 93 Andy (student), 24 Annan, Kofi, 131 anthrax scare, 139 anti-communism, 38, 98, 145 anti-Semitism, 14, 16, 216 Apprentice, The, 177 Arafat, Yasser, 115 Assange, Julian, 290 assassination, 49, 71, 72, 78, 82, 198, 202, 219 assimilation, 9–10, 15 Associated Press (AP), 34 Atlanta Constitution, 56 The Atlantic, 81–2, 202 Audacity of Hope (Obama), 154 automaticity, 141 Baker, Howard, 42 Baker, James, 126 Baltimore Sun, 56 Balz, Dan, 82 Barenboim, Daniel, 95 Barnum & Bailey, 62 BBC, 38, 50, 63, 106–12 passim, 115, 122, 154, 155, 169, 183, 241, 271, 280 M Street offices of, 116, 191–2, 299 Naughtie joins, 5 Radio 4, 5, 75, 95, 110, 111–12, 125, 153 Radio 5 Live, 111, 154 World Service, 50, 241 Beach Boys, 78, 79 Beame, Abe, 32 Bear Stearns, 158–9 Beck, Glenn, 176 Becker, Daniel, 104–5 Begin, Menachem, 69 Benenson, Joel, 190 Benn, Tony, 84 Berkowitz, Mr and Mrs, 16 Berle, Milton, 15 Berlin Wall, 95–6 Bernstein, Carl, 38, 57, 80 Bernstein, Leonard, 31 Bess (dog), 207 Biden, Hunter, 291 Biden, Joe, 168, 269, 291 Bingham, Joan, 83 Birch, John, 98 Black Lives Matter, 216 Blair House, 84, 122 Blair, Tony, 120, 121, 122, 129–33, 141–3, 147–51 Blitzer, Wolf, 121 Bluestone, Irving, 89 Blumenthal, Sidney, 120, 124 Bobbitt, Phil, 215–16 Bolton, John, 143, 144, 146 Borscht Belt, 9, 14, 15, 20 Boston Globe, 56 Bradlee, Ben, 79, 80–1 Breasted, Mary, 134, 299 Brexit, 197, 242 Broder, David, 42, 87–8, 120 Brooks, Mel, 15 Brown, Gordon, 120 Brown, Jerry, 88, 205–7, 208–9 Brunson, Doyle, 173–4 Buckley, William F., 98 BUNAC, 6, 10–11 Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, 203 Burke, James Lee, 6 busboys, 12, 13 Bush, Barbara, 108, 181 Bush, Billy, 275 Bush, George H.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

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

There was a time not so long ago when democracy was obvious; a time when it was the clear solution to the world’s ills, to be spread as broadly and as completely as possible. That was the objective of reform across much of the twentieth century. That was its singular achievement. In 1942, there were 9 democratic states across the world. By 1975, there were 34. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that number had risen to 63.5 Democracy had become the default. At the “end of history,”6 only rogues would deny rule by the people. Yet if you asked “the people” today anywhere, but especially in America, whether the people rule, most would find the idea somewhat quaint. Everywhere there is the view that society is divided between an elite and “the people.”

The politicians aren’t required to be so embarrassed—even if some seem quite eager to embarrass themselves. Neither should we be required to be so embarrassed. Instead we all, whether Republican or not, should openly and loudly proclaim—hey, that “we” does not represent us. CONSEQUENCES The year I graduated from law school, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, I started teaching. From the start of my career as an academic, I was obsessed with how those newly independent nations would govern themselves. My first job was at the University of Chicago. That institution had the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe.


The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, IFF: identification friend or foe, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

The wiretaps worked from May 1955 until uncovered in April 1956.31 Gerber had been taught the traditional methods of handling human espionage agents—finding and filling dead drops, handling letters with secret writing, sending and receiving signals, and making surveillance detection runs. In Berlin during the 1950s, the common method for espionage was to coax sources from the East to come to a safe house in West Berlin for debriefing, as Kisevalter had done with Popov. It depended on the source’s having freedom to move from East to West, which was possible until the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. A whole new set of obstacles then confronted the intelligence officers: how to run agents at a distance. The CIA still had little experience in the closed societies of the Soviet bloc. The agency’s thinking at headquarters was dominated by veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II intelligence agency, who had carried out daring paramilitary exploits during the war but believed that impersonal methods, such as dead drops, were safest.

He believed deeply in the battle against communism and the struggle to protect freedom, an outlook born not so much from ideology as from his own experience. He knew the Soviet Union in earlier decades maintained a vast system of penal colonies populated by tens of thousands of people who were incarcerated for their thoughts and nothing else. He knew well the ugly reality of the Berlin Wall, the dirty, plowed strip laden with watchtowers, mines, barbed wire, automatic weapons, electric-shock fences, feral dogs, and probing floodlights. The Cold War had to be fought, and Rolph wanted to be part of it. During his initial training at the CIA, Rolph was asked if he had a preference for where to serve.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

She feared the loss of British sovereignty and the prospect of German domination either directly or by European proxy. For this reason, Thatcher signalled that she not merely did not wish to participate in further integration herself but that she opposed it for the rest of the Community as well. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the collapse of communism across Europe and the prospect of German unification brought matters to a head. First, there was the German Question, now back on the agenda in the most dramatic possible way. With reunification on the cards, Margaret Thatcher feared that Germany ‘would, once again, dominate the whole of Europe’.77 She summoned a special conference of experts to the prime minister’s country residence of Chequers to brief her on whether a united Germany could be ‘trusted’.

In the Middle Ages, the main enemy was France; in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries, it was Spain; from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, it was France again; in the mid- to late nineteenth century, it was Tsarist Russia; in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of the Second World War down to the present day. Very often, the danger was also ideological, from continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through Counter-Reformation Catholicism (which also became a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jacobinism in the late eighteenth century, continental autocracy in the nineteenth century, right- and left-wing totalitarianism in the twentieth century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Complexity scientists refer to moments of radical change within a system as a ‘phase transition’.5 When liquid water turns into steam, it is the same chemical, yet its behaviour is radically different. Societies too can undergo phase changes. Some moments feel abrupt, discontinuous, world-changing. Think of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rapid reorganisation of our society today is just such a moment. A phase transition has been reached, and we are witnessing our systems transforming before our very eyes. Water is becoming steam. The transformation of society in the early twenty-first century is the focus of this book. It is a book about how new technology is getting faster.

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

He wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, at a moment of extreme global upheaval, with the Great Depression giving way to a second world war. One might not have thought that ideas were what mattered most at such a moment. But he was right. The perspectives of economists and the contest of political ideologies served to shape the two world wars, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the financial sector, and a globalizing economy—virtually all of the greatest challenges of the twentieth century. Economists also entered the innermost halls of political decision-making, advising leaders and directly crafting public policy. Prior to World War II, it was lawyers who dominated federal agencies, and courts ignored most economic evidence about the predicted effects of their decisions.

In tactics made famous by the Oscar-winning movie The Lives of Others, the secret police (the Stasi) bugged bedrooms and bathrooms, read mail, and searched people’s homes at a moment’s notice, destroying any distinction between private and public life. Given this history, it’s no surprise that in 1983, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court declared “self-determination over personal data” to be a fundamental right—one that was extended to East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But the recent push to update data privacy regulations has more contemporary roots. When Edward Snowden revealed classified details on the work of the NSA, Europe was outraged. There were countless embarrassing allegations for the United States, including evidence of spying on 122 high-ranking world leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel via her mobile phone and some 70 million French citizens via their phone calls and emails.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

If Apple believes that its customers prefer cutting the company that charged them $1,000 for a phone 30 percent of every app they run on that phone, it could just give them the choice: “Buy Fortnite through the App Store or through Epic’s app; it’s up to you! Think different!” The idea that Apple customers prefer to buy from Apple is belied by Apple’s extreme measures to prevent them from buying elsewhere. We didn’t believe East German bureaucrats who insisted that the Berlin Wall’s purpose wasn’t to keep the people locked in, but rather to stop outsiders from breaking into the workers’ paradise of the German Democratic Republic. We shouldn’t believe Apple when it insists that preventing interoperability is just a way of enforcing its customers’ preferences. Apple can easily prove that its customers don’t want to escape its walled garden: just let Epic install a gate and see if anyone goes through.

What’s been happening in the creative industries presages what’s coming for everyone else if chokepoint capitalism is allowed to reign unchecked. IDEAS LYING AROUND Transformative change isn’t easy. We tend to talk about watershed moments—the US Civil War, the burning of the Reichstag, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the election of a politician or the passage of a law—as if they were the moments when everything changed. But in retrospect, of course, we see that they were just milestones marking longer-term transformations. The New Deal commemorated a change that had been brewing for more than a century of labor organizing, striking, street fighting, orating, singing, and weeping over the dead.


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

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

The influx of immigrants from the Global South is likely to have profound consequences not just for contemporary European societies but also for the future, because the aging white populations have much lower fertility rates than the immigrant families from developing societies.23 By contrast, immigration was slower in Mediterranean Europe, while Eastern Europe saw a steady loss of migrants for two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the numbers stabilized at a lower level. Migration can be driven by many factors, including (1) opportunities to work, study, and live in other countries, and (2) to flee civil wars, economic crises, and the breakdown of political order in countries like Somalia, Libya, Sudan, 42 The Cultural Backlash Theory Eritrea, or Nigeria.

These cohorts reflect major historical watersheds common across many Western societies, making them suitable for pooled analysis. There are also other major events that could be turning points in specific societies, such as the fall of dictators and subsequent periods of democratization during the 1970s in Spain and Portugal, the era of the military junta in Greece, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification in Germany, the Thatcherite years in the UK, and the impact of 9/11 in the United States. The transition from Communist party rule during the 1990s had a decisive impact on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe, with divergent pathways of regime change in countries such as Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, and Bulgaria.

This movement of people from the global South to Europe will have profound consequences not only for contemporary European societies but also for the future, because the aging white populations have much lower fertility rates than the younger immigrant families from developing societies.14 Eastern Europe saw a steady loss of migrants for two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the numbers stabilized at a lower level. Migration is driven by many factors, including opportunities to work and study in other countries, and to flee civil wars, economic crises, and the breakdown of political order. Refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless persons are at greatest risk, and 6.2 million of them live in Europe.15 Israel United Kingdom Ukraine Turkey Switzerland Sweden Slovenia Luxembourg Finland Note: Net migration is defined as the total number of people moving into a country (immigrants) minus the total number of people leaving a country (emigrants), including citizens and non-­citizens, for the five-­year period.


City Parks by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, crony capitalism, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, the High Line, time dilation, urban sprawl

I have since described it as “the mother of all airports.” But entering, I recall a sinking feeling. Its echoing halls seemed saturated with historical associations, inevitably evoking its fascist roots. Years later, visiting the Reichstag for the first time conjured a similar range of emotions. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and German reunification, marked the final phase in the history of the Reichstag and the Tiergarten. An international competition was launched in April 1992 to transform the Reichstag building into a parliament for a unified Germany, moving the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin. Eight months later three practices were short-listed, one of which was Foster + Partners.


Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

“Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience.” Econometrica, 1960, 28, 287309. Kydland, Finn E. and Prescott, Edward C., “Rules Rather Than Discretion: the Inconsistency of Optimal Plans”. Journal of Political Economy, June 1977, 85, 3, 473-492. Lakner, Christoph and Milanovic Branko. “Global income distribution: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” Vox CEPR’s Policy Portal, 27 May 2014. Lane, Robert E. 1998. “The Joyless Market Economy.” In Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman (eds.), Economics, Values, and Organization, 461-490. New York: Cambridge University Press. 123 Lang, Gerald, “Consequentialism, Cluelessness, and Indifference,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2008, 42, 477-485.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

The eight-story massive Bauhaus building was constructed in 1928 as a department store. After the Nazis took power, they seized it from its Jewish owners to use as a headquarters for Hitler Youth. The Allies bombed Berlin, but the building survived. Later, it housed an office for senior Stasi officials. After the Berlin Wall fell, the building was returned the original owners’ heirs, then sold to Soho House. I sat on a bench in the lobby. A tan-colored Great Dane lay just outside, tethered to a rail. Each time the front door opened, the dog’s eyes met mine. I said “hello.” The dog cocked his head, seeming to sense my anxiety.


pages: 140 words: 42,194

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Econometrica 28: 287–309. Kydland, Finn E., and Edward C. Prescott. 1977. “Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans.” Journal of Political Economy 85, no. 3 (June): 473–492. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2014. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal. Accessed 27 May. Lane, Robert E. 1998. “The Joyless Market Economy.” In Economics, Values, and Organization, edited by Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman, 461–490. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lang, Gerald. 2008. “Consequentialism, Cluelessness, and Indifference.”


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

However, despite such judicious mediation, the United States maintained a distant relationship with Mexico, skillfully depicted in a book by journalist Alan Riding entitled, precisely, Distant Neighbors.15 Despite being united by geography, migratory flows, and significant trade, the two neighbors lived at a distance from one another, separated by an immense development gap and an even greater divide of a mutual lack of understanding. Although, in the 1980s, Mexico suddenly and timidly began to change its economic policies, reducing its tariffs and partially opening up to international trade, signs of real change did not arrive until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was this historical opportunity that both countries were able to read: Mexico and the United States could, for mutual benefit, become closer trading partners. The Mexican administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988– 1994) demonstrated courage and audacity by proposing to Mexican society a pact with the United States.

Of course, there were very high peaks in the period dominated by the military effort required by World War II (from 1941 to 1945, defense spending absorbed 76.2 percent of GDP), but as of the 1971–1975 period, still in the midst of the Cold War, social welfare spending clearly overtook defense spending. And that is not all: in the years subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall and up until 2004, in the United States more was spent on health care than on defense. One should highlight these aspects in a republic whose military expansion, with no rival in the world, is clear. Nonetheless, outlays on defense are not the largest category. Just as the Argentina of “social justice” was more inclined to set its pace in spending on the economy and defense, the militarist republic of the United States is more geared to social welfare and health.48 Furthermore, if we analyze the separation of fiscal powers according to how it ties into the supply of public goods, one must bear in mind that Why Institutions Matter 251 table 9.6 United States: Federal and Subnational Public Spending: Outlays by Purpose 1936– 1940 1941– 1945 1946– 1950 1951– 1955 1956– 1960 Consolidated Public Sector Federal government Subnational governments 100% 100% 0 100% 100% 0 100% 81.4% 18.6% 100% 72.9% 27.1% 100% 100% 69.0% 67.3% 31.0% 32.7% General Administration Federal government Subnational governments 8.2% 8.2% 0 4.8% 4.8% 0 14.4% 14.4% 0 5.9% 5.9% 0 6.5% 6.5% 0 Defense and Security Federal government Subnational governments 17.5% 17.5% 0 76.2% 76.2% 0 36.2% 36.2% 0 47.0% 47.0% 0 38.9% 31.9% 38.9% 31.9% 0 0 Health Federal government Subnational governments 0.6% 0.6% 0 0.2% 0.2% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.5% 0.5% 0 0.9% 0.9% 0 Education and Culture Federal government Subnational governments 20.8% 20.8% 0 3.1% 3.1% 0 0.3% 0.3% 0 0.4% 0.4% 0 0.6% 0.6% 0 0.9% 0.9% 0 Economic Development Federal government Subnational governments 24.4% 24.4% 0 8.0% 8.0% 0 4.3% 4.3% 0 4.0% 4.0% 0 4.7% 4.7% 0 5.5% 5.5% 0 Social Welfare Federal government Subnational governments 22.3% 22.3% 0 6.3% 6.3% 0 20.0% 20.0% 0 13.3% 13.3% 0 16.7% 18.6% 16.7% 18.6% 0 0 Public Debt Federal government Subnational governments 9.5% 9.5% 0 3.5% 3.5% 0 9.1% 9.1% 0 5.5% 5.5% 0 4.8% 4.8% 0 4.6% 4.6% 0 -2.2% -3.4% -3.6% -3.6% -3.3% -2.2% 0 -3.4% 0 -3.6% 0 -3.6% 0 -3.3% 0 Undistributed Compensatory -3.3% Resources Federal government -3.3% Subnational governments 0 1961– 1965 8.3% 8.3% 0 Notes: Data are given in percentage of GDP in averages per five-year period. nd: no data.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

He was impressed by the young man's earnestness and idealism. ‘He used to tell me: “You should be more ambitious, you can change this world.” We used to joke that one day John Githongo would be president of Kenya.’ For Ali, John was remarkable for his attempt to get to grips intellectually with his stagnating country's predicament. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had ushered in a period of tumultuous change in Africa, in which a generation of post-independence autocrats faced increasingly strident calls for multi-party democracy. It was a drive Moi was doing his best to ignore, banning demonstrations and jailing opponents. ‘Here was someone thinking his way out of a society that was tyrannically stable, a police state.

Moi's far leaner economy struggled, in contrast, to sustain the impact of State House's system of authorised looting, which a minister later estimated to have cost the taxpayer a total of 635 billion Kenya shillings (roughly $US10 billion) in the space of twenty-four years.29 Identical practices were viewed in the West with freshly critical eyes. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant support for disreputable African regimes could no longer be justified on traditional ‘He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard’ lines. Many of those bastards were seen to produce failed states, judged – with the menace of the Soviet empire gone – to threaten Western interests. The new head of the World Bank, the Australian James Wolfensohn, gave voice to the new approach when he declared corruption an ‘intolerable cancer’.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

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

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

Also among the skeptics was Malcolm Gladwell, who had previously picked a fight with Shirky over the latter’s rhapsodies about social media. Gladwell pointed out that in the 1980s, East Germans barely had access to phones, much less the Internet, and they still organized, protested, and brought down the Berlin Wall. Of the Arab Spring revolutions, Gladwell wrote, “Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”49 As the critics gained momentum, social media proponents fought back.

See also Caste system Bahrain: Arab Spring, 34, 37 Bain Capital, 85–86 Bales, Kevin, 166–167 Banerjee, Abhijit, 68, 236–237(n14) Banking sector. See Microcredit Barnes & Noble, 75–77 Bauerlein, Mark, 10 Baumeister, Roy, 132, 251–252(n15) Behar, Anurag, 8 Behavior change, manipulative nature of, 161, 197 Behavioral economics, 144–145, 258(n2) Beneficiaries of packaged interventions, 26, 61, 66–69, 111–112 Bentham, Jeremy, 88 Berlin Wall, 36 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 191, 270(n48) Bhutan, 87–88 Blagsvedt, Sean, 122 Blake, William, 174 Blaming victims, 170, 172–174, 202, 256(n42) Book industry, 74–77, 240(n1), 246(n67) Bookshops, 74–75 Bornstein, David, 190 Bottom of the pyramid. See Social enterprise Bourdieu, Pierre, 250(n11) Brain drain and brain circulation, 183–184 Brazil, 182, 190 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 47 Business and entrepreneurship book publishing, 74–77 bottom of the pyramid, 82–84 cost containment through technology, 42–44 for-profit approach to social causes, 82–84 India’s high-tech economy, 182–185 knowledge management, 44–46 marketing personal music, 39 social enterprise, 84–87 telecenters and Internet cafés, 19, 105, 246–247(n8) Walkman, 38–40 See also Economics; Microcredit; Nonprofit organizations Cairncross, Frances, 46 Cambodia: One Laptop Per Child, 15 Cameron, David, 89 Capacity building, 124 Digital Green, 108–109, 206 health care, 136–137 packaged interventions, 66–68 See also Education and training; Mentorship Capitalism, 176, 243(n35).


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

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

Elitism signified a privileged claim to power on the part of those who not only manifested proven intelligence, experience, and sterling character but also, unlike the fantasy-prone masses, were “realists.”70 A whole ideology emerged to legitimate elitism: the “realists” and “neoliberals” such as Niebuhr, George Kennan, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. That war was “cold” only in the sense that the two antagonists did not engage each other in a shooting war. During that era, which lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1987, the United States fought two very hot wars, first in Korea, then in Vietnam. It suffered a stalemate in one and defeat in the other, both by Soviet proxies. If we add the defeat in Iraq, we might be tempted to redefine superpower as an imaginary of power that emerges from defeat unchastened, more imperious than ever.

Reagan believed in all of the dynamics we have previously associated with inverted totalitarianism: unqualified admiration for the marvels of technology, free market corporate capitalism, and even a deep eschatological belief in the coming of Armageddon.20 What was the image of Reagan standing triumphantly beside the ruins of the Berlin Wall but that of a latter-day Joshua tearing down the walls of Jericho before entering the promised land? The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a “performance president” who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).21 With little or no interest in policy and the details of governance he took on the task of evoking nostalgia, overlaying the present with an idealized past, warmer, believing, guileless, “a shining city on the hill” that provided an illusion of national continuity while obscuring the radical changes at work.22 The other element characterizing his administration was a presidential entourage that included hard-nosed, ideological zealots and operatives from the corporate world and the public opinion industry.


pages: 460 words: 122,556

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

Home foreclosures broke every record; two of America’s three automobile manufacturers filed for bankruptcy, and banks themselves failed by the score. Confidence in America’s market system, thought to have attained the pinnacle of laissez-faire perfection, was shattered. The crisis prompted government interventions that only recently would have been considered unthinkable. Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when prevailing orthodoxy held that the free market could govern itself, and when financial regulation seemed destined for near irrelevancy, the United States was compelled to socialize lending and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks, on a scale that would have made Lenin smile. The massive fiscal remedies evidenced both the failure of an ideology and the eclipse of Wall Street’s golden age.

Its banks had failed. Its investors had failed abysmally. Also, the model of international markets—the idea that investors would regulate world economies, appropriately apportioning capital and limiting risk—had failed. The United States had been lustily pushing this model on the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had been deregulating at home since the 1980s. The disaster raised an unavoidable question: If America had taken a wrong turn, how far back should the clock be set? International opinion was already shifting, sharply, toward the view that free markets had been too free. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, a onetime advocate of American-style capitalism, was espousing government protection of essential industry.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

If you want to understand, say, how Microsoft Word was written, you can’t find out by peering into its binary file; you would need to see the source code—the thousands of lines of human-written program code that was grist for the compiler. But Microsoft, like most commercial software enterprises, won’t let you. The source code to its programs is its most coveted asset, and a Berlin wall of intellectual property law protects the treasure. That has enabled Bill Gates’s company to create the most profitable software franchise in history. It also means that when something goes wrong with Microsoft software, you can’t fix it yourself, even if you are an adept programmer. You have to wait for Microsoft to fix it, because only its programmers have access to the code.

This is the scenario presented by a business thinker named Nicholas Carr in a notorious May 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr infuriated legions of Silicon Valley visionaries and technology executives by suggesting that their products—the entire corpus of information technology, or IT—had become irrelevant. Like Francis Fukuyama, the Hegelian philosopher who famously declared “the end of history” when the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, Carr argued, essentially, that software history is over, done. We know what software is, what it does, and how to deploy it in the business world, so there is nothing left but to dot the i’s and bring on the heavyweight methodologies to perfect it. Drawing comparisons from previous generations of “disruptive technologies” like railroads and electricity, Carr argued that computers and software had at first offered farsighted early adopters an opportunity to seize comparative advantage.


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

By 1970 in his landmark work Ni Marx, Ni Jesus (Without Marx or Jesus), Jean-François Revel could say with confidence that ‘no one today, even within the communist parties of the western world, seriously contends that the Soviet Union is a revolutionary model for other countries’.10 If the true believers were falling away gradually, they disappeared almost to a man when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the world had confirmed for them what their own warning sirens had been trying to alert them to for years. The confirmation of what their own true believers had done in their effort to dream up the perfect system was scarcely to be believed. But the millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives – living and dead – that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause.

The difference from their Western European partners could not have been more stark. What was it that made the East and West of the same continent think so differently on such central issues? Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans ‘increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our questions … the divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life’.14 That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East.


pages: 434 words: 124,153

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

Realizing his glasnost programme might lose its authority if the workers could not be supplied with something as simple and essential as cigarettes, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to issue emergency orders to American manufacturers for billions of cigarettes, which were paid for with diamonds, oil and gold. When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR dissolved into a dozen separate states, the tobacco multinationals moved into these new and promising markets. In many cases they established joint ventures with the old state manufacturers, but when local tastes and investment policies permitted, they manufactured their Western brands and encouraged their importation, so that these tokens of unrestrained capitalism were soon common in the heartlands of communist ideology.

Kleiner Department of Health, Report of the Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health, HMSO, 1998 El Galeon de Manila, Exhibition Catalogue, Hospital de los Venerables, Seville, 2000 Master Settlement Agreement dated November 23, 1998 Royal College of Physicians, Smoking or Health, Pitman Medical, 1977 Société General, ‘Tobacco Sector Analysis’, June 2000 Index Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) 311, 324 addiction See under tobacco Africa 59–64 pipes 61–3, 200 afterlife 14 Alaska 293 Albert, Prince 186–7 Alchemist, The (Jonson) 52 alchemy 40, 161 Aldren, Buzz 309 Alexander VI, Pope 25 Allen and Ginter 206, 207, 212 Allied Dunbar 335 Amazon 5 American Cancer Society 346 American Tobacco Company 213–15, 220–2, 245 anti-monopoly proceedings 222 British American Tobacco, formation of 215 law suits 289 retailers, leans on 221 see also British American Tobacco American War of Independence 140–3 Treaty of Paris 142–3 Andalusia 146, 147 Andes 3, 5, 7 Andorra 358 animal experiments 162 Arbuckle, Fatty 248 Arcadia 77 Armstrong, Neil 309 Articles of Piracy 103–4 Asia 91 see also individual countries asset stripping 335, 336 Astaire, Fred 248 Atlantic Magazine 242 Atlantic Monthly 296–7 Auerbach, Oscar 300 Auf der Wacht 254 Austerlitz, battle of 145 Australia 91, 128, 130–1 Botany Bay 133–5 Port Jackson 134–5 as New Holland 133–4 tobacco, Aboriginals’ uses of 130–1 Austria 95–5, 182 Serbia, declares war on 231 Azores 20 Bacall, Lauren 267 Bacon, Francis 60 Baden-Powell, Sir Robert 217 Bahamas 22 Bali 91 Baltimore, Lord 78 Banks, Joseph 128, 129 Barbados 77 slaves 111 Barclay, William, of Towie 100 Barrie, J. M. 190–1, 1920–3 Bartolomé, St See Las Casas, Fra Bartolomé de (St Bartolomé) Batavia 90 Baudelaire, Charles 179–80 Beardesley, Aubrey 220 Beatles 299 Benn, Tony 339 Bennelong 135 Benzoni, Girolamo 33–4 Berlin 160, 181–2, 254–5 Berlin Wall, fall of 338 Bermuda 78 Berry, Chuck 270 Beykoz 94 Bird, William, II 110 Bismarck, Prince Otto Edward Leopold von 342–3 Blake, William 194 Bogart, Humphrey 267, 286 Bohemia 40 Bonaparte, Joseph 146 Bonaparte, Napoleon 144–5, 156–7, 189 Elba exile 152 Russia, defeat in 152 Russia, invasion of 145–6 St Helena exile 157 Bond, James 281–3, 284 Bonsack, James Albert 207 Borneo 91 Boston: Massacre (1770) 138–9 Tea Party (1773) 139 see also United States of America Botham, Ian 339 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de 131–2 Bowery 106 Bowie, David 312 Boy, The 216 Brazil 33, 59 slavery 113 Brezhnev, Leonid 338 ‘Brief and True Report of the New Founde Land of Virginia, A’ 53–4 Brief Receipt (Cartier) 30–1 Brill, A.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

CMP=share_btn_tw Conclusion: The Dissolution of the Public Schools 1 Plato, The Republic. 2 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-on-the-big-society 3 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may 4 http://www.nme.com/festivals/jeremy-corbyn-glastonbury-2017-speech-full-2093107#YpxzkTZV5LV6UhQ0.99 5 Matthew Parris, The Times, 9 June 2012. 6 James Kirkup, Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2015. 7 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-divided-society-social-mobility-commission-alan-milburn-a7811386.html 8 https://www.oecd.org/education/school/50293148.pdf 9 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2572643/SEBASTIAN-SHAKESPEARE-Dis-brother-joins-war-Notting-Hill-yummy-mummys.html#ixzz4q9BgN9l1 10 http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/west-london-news/council-denies-asset-stripping-community-11216646 11 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/21/temporary-school-built-pupils-academy-grenfell-tower 12 http://www.kensingtonaldridgeacademy.co.uk/grenfell-tower-justgiving-page/ 13 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/10/shami-chakrabarti-education-system-grammars-private-schools-local-comprehensive?CMP=share_btn_tw 14 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/12/14/schools-face-bigger-funding-crisis-nhs-select-committee-chair/ 15 https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/education-private-schools-berlin-wall 16 The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, p. 191. 17 The Road to Somewhere, p. 183. 18 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/an-analysis-of-2-decades-of-efforts-to-improve-social-mobility 19 http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Publication-The-Meritocrats-Manifesto-Dominic-Raab.pdf 20 http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Publication-The-Meritocrats-Manifesto-Dominic-Raab.pdf 21 https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/02/gove-michael-our-segregated-education-system 22 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may 23 Interview with the author. 24 https://www.isc.co.uk/media-enquiries/news-press-releases-statements/joint-funding-could-see-10-000-free-new-independent-school-places-every-year/; https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/private-schools-should-receive-state-cash-educate-poor-pupils-if 25 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/warren-buffett-is-right-ban-private-schools_b_1857287.html 26 The Westminster Hour, BBC Radio 4, 3 December 2017. 27 http://www.warrenbuffett.com/buffetts-thoughts-on-public-education/ 28 https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/15765/ 29 http://www.hmc.org.uk/about-hmc/partnerships/ 30 https://inews.co.uk/opinion/sir-anthony-seldon-plan-solve-educations-inequality-problems-just-100-new-schools/ 31 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests that 2,698 people aged 25–44 died in the north in 2015 who would have survived had they lived in the south. 32 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8698227/A-palpable-change-inthenational-mood.html 33 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/psc1/newsom1968-1.html 34 Diane Reay, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017), p. 44. 35 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change. 36 Ibid. 37 The Observer, 3 December 2017. 38 Joseph Rowntree Foundation annual report 2017.

CMP=share_btn_tw 14 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/12/14/schools-face-bigger-funding-crisis-nhs-select-committee-chair/ 15 https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/education-private-schools-berlin-wall 16 The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, p. 191. 17 The Road to Somewhere, p. 183. 18 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/an-analysis-of-2-decades-of-efforts-to-improve-social-mobility 19 http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Publication-The-Meritocrats-Manifesto-Dominic-Raab.pdf 20 http://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Publication-The-Meritocrats-Manifesto-Dominic-Raab.pdf 21 https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/02/gove-michael-our-segregated-education-system 22 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may 23 Interview with the author. 24 https://www.isc.co.uk/media-enquiries/news-press-releases-statements/joint-funding-could-see-10-000-free-new-independent-school-places-every-year/; https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/private-schools-should-receive-state-cash-educate-poor-pupils-if 25 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/warren-buffett-is-right-ban-private-schools_b_1857287.html 26 The Westminster Hour, BBC Radio 4, 3 December 2017. 27 http://www.warrenbuffett.com/buffetts-thoughts-on-public-education/ 28 https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/15765/ 29 http://www.hmc.org.uk/about-hmc/partnerships/ 30 https://inews.co.uk/opinion/sir-anthony-seldon-plan-solve-educations-inequality-problems-just-100-new-schools/ 31 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests that 2,698 people aged 25–44 died in the north in 2015 who would have survived had they lived in the south. 32 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8698227/A-palpable-change-inthenational-mood.html 33 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/psc1/newsom1968-1.html 34 Diane Reay, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017), p. 44. 35 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change. 36 Ibid. 37 The Observer, 3 December 2017. 38 Joseph Rowntree Foundation annual report 2017. Caroline Wheeler, Sunday Times, 3 December 2017. 39 https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/education-private-schools-berlin-wall 40 https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/oct/02/ofsted-michael-wilshaw-independent-schools 41 https://www.isc.co.uk/research/independent-schools-economic-impact-report/; https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/private-spending-on-education/indicator/english_6e70bede-en; https://www.ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/fiscal_facts/public_spending_survey/education 42 Reay, p. 44; Danny Dorling, Social Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011), p. 68. 43 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1978/mar/22/direct-grant-schools 44 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/12/unpaid-interns-elitist-uk-social-mobility-alan-milburn 45 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/14/poor-pupil-oxbridge-less-likely-pope-bono 46 @DavidLammy, Twitter, 26 January 2018.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

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

Edifices dating back to Prussia, the German Empire, Weimar, and Nazi eras gave way to sterile Communist-era concrete blocks as we closed in on our destination: the former German Democratic Republic’s Hohenschönhausen prison. The once top-secret military compound had been part of the headquarters of the Stasi, short for State Security Service. The Stasi served as East Germany’s “shield and sword,” ruling over the country with repressive surveillance and psychological manipulation. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi employed almost ninety thousand operatives backed by a secret network of more than six hundred thousand “citizen watchdogs” who spied on their East German coworkers, neighbors, and sometimes their own family.1 The Stasi accumulated a staggering number of records, documents, images, and video and audio recordings that if lined up would stretch sixty-nine miles.2 Citizens who were considered flight risks, threats to the regime, or asocial were detained, intimidated, and interrogated at Hohenschönhausen from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War.

Now It’s Congress’ Turn,” Microsoft on the Issues (blog), Microsoft, October 23, 2016, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/10/23/doj-acts-curb-overuse-secrecy-orders-now-congress-turn/. Back to note reference 23. CHAPTER 3: PRIVACY Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 697. Back to note reference 1. Anna Funder, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (London: Granta, 2003), 57. Back to note reference 2. Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, “Lessons on Protecting Privacy,” Today in Technology (video blog), Microsoft, accessed April 7, 2019, https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/videos/. Back to note reference 3. Jake Brutlag, “Speed Matters,” Google AI Blog, June 23 2009, https://ai.googleblog.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

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

Cities that had been in a spiral of decline and de‐population as a result of de‐industrialisation and disinvestment suddenly appeared more flexible than their national governments at taking advantage of the new order; some rapidly became switchboards for key corporate decision‐making and negotiations between national and international representatives in government and business alike. Analysts and commentators searched for new conceptual tools to grasp this change. The emergence of a new way of thinking about cities coincided with a wave of optimism and prophecy about the future of global society, as the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed and regional economic integration accelerated. Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) ‘The End of History’ thesis famously declared the triumph of Western liberal democracy and the inevitable supremacy of global capitalism; this had an echo in the ‘end of the nation state’ foreseen by management and economics analyst Kenichi Ohmae (1995).

Index Abe, Shinzo, 88 Abu Dhabi, 11, 30 Afghanistan, 19 Africa, 10, 21 Aleppo, 21 Amsterdam, 21, 46, 50 Asia, 4, 20, 21, 82, 85, 107, 146, 152, 154, 162, 179, 180, 187 Central, 234 Eastern, 69 North–East, 72, 75 South Eastern, 72 Southern, 87, 98 Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, 31, 158 Asian Development Bank, 104 Asian Financial Crisis, 77, 155 Asia‐Pacific, 79, 152, 153, 238 Baghdad, 20 Barber, Benjamin, 27 Barcelona, 7 Beijing, 7, 14, 17, 18, 92, 153–155, 157, 159–162, 180–182, 184, 210, 211, 217, 230, 231, 233 Berlin, 7, 11 Berlin Wall, 23 Bloomberg, Michael, 27, 92, 114, 116, 117, 119 Boston, 21, 117, 231 Brasilia, 6, 17, 231 Brazil, 6, 10, 17, 30, 31, 123–129, 133, 134, 217, 229, 231, 232, 235–237 Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), 235 Ministry of Cities, 134 National Conference of Cities (ConCidades), 134 national urban policy, 128 1988 Federal Constitution, 125, 127 2001 City Statute, 125 Brisbane, 8 Britain, see United Kingdom Brussels, 10, 13, 239 Buenos Aires, 13 Bukhara, 20 Canada, 8, 10, 17, 137–147, 215, 218, 219, 221, 222, 231, 234, 236, 237 Building Canada Fund, 140 Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund, 140 Infrastructure Canada Program, 140 Networks of Centers of Excellence (NCE), 140–141 Cape Town, 8 Chicago, 7, 231 China, 7, 17, 19, 25, 31, 91, 103, 105, 152–161, 166, 178–180, 182–188, 212, 221, 222, 230, 231, 233 Chinese Revolution, 180 Made in China 2025 campaign, 179 national urban policy, 183–184 One Belt, One Road, 234 system of cities, 156–157 12th Five Year Plan, 158, 182 Chirac, Jacques, 57, 210 City collaboration, 236–237 City size, 11–12 City‐states, 11, 20, 26–27, 48, 190–191 Cobbett, William, 38 Consider Canada City Alliance, 237 Copenhagen, 21 Core and periphery, 23 Core cities (UK), 44, 45, 236 Damascus, 20 De Blasio, Bill, 117, 119 De‐concentration, 6, 235 Defoe, Daniel, 38 Delhi, 14, 20, 99, 101, 104, 107, 109, 231 Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), 106 Density, 13, 31, 101, 124, 133, 157, 172, 184, 198, 200, 205, 206, 214, 225 Dubai, 11, 30, 50 Dutch Republic, see Holland World Cities and Nation States, First Edition.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

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

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

But his principal passion appeared to be volleyball, which he played every day at the Kathmandu palace or at his far-flung hunting lodges. He also enjoyed swimming and had been trained as a helicopter pilot, potentially useful skills for a despot uncertain when or how he might need to make a quick getaway. By February 1990, the remnants of the Berlin Wall were being scavenged by souvenir hunters and hundreds of students at Tribhuvan University had banded together to launch a movement for democracy modeled on the efforts of their Chinese and East European brethren. Their democracy movement was a direct violation of Nepal’s laws against organized politics, but the students said they intended to go ahead anyway with street demonstrations, and they set a date to begin.

If these factories and other state enterprises are now to be shut down, essentially on the grounds that they shouldn’t have been built in the first place, then the government had better be prepared to retrain and relocate the victims. Otherwise, the social and political rebound may be nasty indeed. Just ask the Germans what it has been like since the fall of the Berlin Wall, my informants would typically conclude. And the Germans have the money, the developed economy, to give it a try. India does not. For us, the numbers of people who may languish on the wrong side of transition are just too great. And what will happen if we fail, if we divide our society between those who can make it with the Ambanis and those who cannot?


Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, clean water, operation paperclip, post-war consensus, V2 rocket, wikimedia commons, éminence grise

Those living in the east of the city could cross into the western sectors and see the conspicuous wealth on display in lavishly stocked shop windows. Many chose to leave, a trickle that soon turned into a flood. Ulbricht’s dramatic response came in 1961, when he ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall. The city was now physically split into two separate halves and it became virtually impossible for any inhabitant in the eastern sector to cross over to the west. Twelve years earlier at the height of the siege of Berlin, Ulbricht had made a speech in which he said, ‘As a German people, we will do everything in our power to support the Soviet Union.’10 He proved true to his word, serving as a loyal Communist ally until his death in 1973.

Hurst, 1985 Stafford, David, Camp X, Lester and Orpen Dennys Publishers, 1986 Steege, Paul, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949, Cambridge University Press, 2007 Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Bodley Head, 1980 Stivers, William and Donald A. Carter, The City Becomes a Symbol: The US Army in the Occupation of Berlin, 1945–1949, Center of Military History, United States Army, 2017 Taschereau, Robert and R. L. Kellock, The Report of the Royal Commission … June 27, 1946, Stationery Office, 1946 Taylor, Frederick, The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961–9 November 1989, Bloomsbury, 2007 ——, Exorcising Hitler, Bloomsbury, 2011 Toland, John, The Last 100 Days, Bantam, 1967 Turner, Barry, The Berlin Airlift, Icon Books, 2017 Tusa, Ann and John, The Berlin Blockade, Hodder & Stoughton, 1988 Walker, Jonathan, Operation Unthinkable, The History Press, 2013 Wilson, Squadron-Leader G.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

They’ve all gotten their pieces of the dirty money pie. And they all exist, quite literally, offshore. But that definition of “offshore” has been a misnomer since the late twentieth century. It fails to account for a turning point toward the end of the Cold War, during a transition that just so happened to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All of a sudden, the postcommunist states opened to the West—and the communist apparatchiks were replaced by rapacious oligarchs, all of whom watched their net worth explode, mirroring the elite wealth gathering in other postcolonial regions. And it didn’t take long for officials and industrial leaders in the U.S. to suddenly realize how they could profit from that transition.

See shell companies, anonymous antiauthoritarian protests Anti-Corruption Action Center (Ukraine) Anti-Corruption Data Collective Apple Aslund, Anders al-Assad, Bashar Atlantic Council auction houses and dealers Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier) Baddin, Neil Baez, Lazaro Baker, Raymond Bandar bin Sultan Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) Barr, Bill Batrick, David Bean, Elise Beautiful Vision, Inc. Bellows, Abigail Berger, Michael Berlin Wall, fall of Bernstein, Jake Biden, Joe bin Laden, Osama Birkenfeld, Bradley Birrell, Jeffrey Blavatnik, Len Blavatnik Family Foundation Blinken, Antony Blum, Jack Bogatin, David Bogolyubov, Gennadiy Bolívar, Simón Bolsonaro, Jair Bongo family (Gabon) Bout, Viktor Breaking Bad (television series) Breuer, Lanny Bridges, Chris (Ludacris) Broidy, Elliott Brookings Institution Browning, David Buckner, Michael Bullough, Oliver Burgis, Tom Burke, Frank Bush, George H.


Lonely Planet Cyprus by Lonely Planet, Jessica Lee, Joe Bindloss, Josephine Quintero

Airbnb, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, urban decay

IthakiBAR ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.facebook.com/Ithaki33; Leoforos Nikiforou Foka 33; h7pm-3am Mon-Sat summer, from 9pm winter) This decidedly unflashy bar-club is one of the granddaddies of the Old City scene, having been in the business of providing a fun night out since 1998. Monday is R & B night and Friday is a 'Thinking Outside the Box' gay-friendly party. Some nights there's a small admission fee (usually around €3). Happy hour (two-for-one drinks) is between 10pm and 11pm. Berlin Wall 2BAR ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Faneromenis; hnoon-1am) Yep. It's a shack, complete with corrugated-iron roof and plastic windows (during chillier months). And yep. It's rubbing up against the UN Buffer Zone and smack-bang next door to an army guard station. The name starts making sense now, doesn't it.

The two peoples treated each other with civility and kindness and, more than a decade after the checkpoints’ opening, no major incidents have been reported. Many Turkish Cypriots now cross the line every day on their way to work in the southern part of the island. Serdar Denktaş, the son of Rauf and the man behind the realisation of the Green Line opening, dubbed the events 'a quiet revolution'. Many compared it to the the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, minus the dramatic knocking down of the buffer zone, an event still to take place. Repairing the Damage Many Greek Cypriots quickly regrouped after 1974, putting their energies into rebuilding their shattered nation. Within a few years the economy was on the mend and the Republic of Cyprus was recognised internationally as the only legitimate representative of the island.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

As a student, Owens had participated in the civil society demonstrations against Noriega. He proudly kept the X-rays that show where his wrist was injured by police. For years President Ronald Reagan had countenanced Noriega’s alliances with money launderers and drug traffickers because the dictator was an ally in the fight against the Sandinistas. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Noriega’s usefulness diminished.12 The December 1989 invasion ended years of economic and social turmoil in Panama but left the country’s banking secrecy and tax haven status intact. A brilliant legal tactician, Owens had a quick wit matched by a puppy’s eagerness to please. An Isle of Man newspaper report of an Owens speech promoting Panamanian shell companies noted that alongside his PowerPoint presentations,13 the lawyer “likes to break into a little salsa to liven up the proceedings.”

., 76–78 Front Trading Consultants, 54 Gabon, 139 Gallego, Héctor, 12–14, 212 Gang of Five, 22–23 Ganz Collection, auction of, 110–12 Garant Holdings, 263 Garrido, David, 53 Gauguin, Paul, Mata Mua, 114–15 Gazprombank, 100 Gelin, Philippe, 61 General Corporation Law, 15 Generalov, Sergey, 82–83 Geneva, 14, 15, 27, 47–59, 84, 93, 106, 130, 136, 142–43, 203, 240, 269 Geneva Freeport, 103–6 Geoghegan, Michael, 54 Germany, 7, 89–91, 153, 155, 160, 178, 195, 220–21, 231, 232 banking, 205–10 BND, 178 Commerzbank raid, 205–10 fall of Berlin Wall, 40 Nazi, 7–9, 108, 235 postwar, 9 tax evasion, 178, 205–10 World War II, 7–8, 9 Gertler, Dan, 53, 259, 281 Gibraltar, 56, 79, 268 Giuliani, Rudolph, 154 Glencore, 281 Glendoon Limited, 266 global elite, 4, 27, 48–60 banking and, 47–60 British Virgin Islands, 27 China, 162–75 Iceland, 118–29 increase in private wealth, 4 princelings, 164–75 rise of, 47–60 Russia, 88–102 Global I-Hub, 218, 223, 228 Global Investigative Journalism Conference, 150–51, 224–27 Globalised Limited, 139 gold, 139, 143 Gold Star, 32 Goodwin, Steve, 43–44 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 262 Gordin, Oleg, 95, 97 Gordon, John, 35–40, 76–78, 83, 93 Microsoft case and, 36–38 Mossfon partnership, 35–39, 76–78 Gorka, Sebastian, 252 Goulandris, Basil, 112–14 Goulandris, Elise, 112–14 Great Britain, 4, 20–21, 57, 61, 147, 161, 202–3 arms trafficking, 86–87 colonialism, 23–24 double tax treaty, 21–22 feudal, 28 Freemasonry, 24–25 Industrial Revolution, 24 Panama Papers and, 240 postwar, 21 public registries law and, 283–84 tax havens, 20, 23–24, 43, 133, 240 Green, Stephen, 51 Gref, Herman, 256 Guadalajara, 44, 45, 46 Guardian, 54, 58, 148–49, 151–57, 174, 183, 202, 221, 225, 282 Panama Papers and, 235, 237 Swiss Leaks project, 202–3 Guardian Bank and Trust, 66, 70 Guernsey, 252, 259, 263 Guerrero, Antoni, 48, 106, 269 Gu Kailai, 172–73 Gulliver, Stuart, 54 Gunnlaugsson, Sigmundur, 128–29, 216, 217, 223, 228–30, 234–35, 238–40 Gunvor, 94 Haarde, Geir, 118, 128–29 Halet, Raphael, 186 Hall, Kevin, 217, 245 Halliburton, 55–57 Harney Westwood & Riegels, 21, 22 Hauksson, Ólafur, 117–18, 121, 123, 215, 239, 258 hedge funds, 155, 191, 193, 269, 283 Helvetic Services Group, 192 Henley and Partners, 276–77 Heredia Holdings, 113 Hermitage Capital Management Limited, 155 Hernández, Rubén, 211, 213 Hersh, Seymour, 13 Heymann, Sébastien, 197 Heywood, Neil, 172–73 Hitler, Adolf, 87 Hitler Youth, 7, 8 Hong Kong, 31, 50, 68, 83, 162, 164–67 Mossfon and, 166–67 Panama Papers and, 244 tax havens and offshore system, 162–75 Hrafnsson, Kristinn, 214–15 Hranitzky, Dennis, 194, 195 HSBC, 47–60, 79, 86, 134, 137–44, 171, 177, 252, 259, 271 Falciani files and, 177–81, 186–90, 196, 203 Mossfon and, 47–60, 79, 137–44, 199 Project Gold, 51 risk management, 57–58 Safra Republic Holdings acquired by, 48–54 Senate investigation of, 139–44 Swiss leaks investigation, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 Hudson, Michael, 158–59, 160, 217 Huns, 20 Hunte, Lewis, 22 Hussein, Saddam, 87 Ibori, James, 32 Ibragimov, Alijan, 258 Iceland, 85, 116–29, 213–17 banking, 118–24, 214–16, 223, 229 Panama Papers and, 228–30, 234, 237–40 tax havens and offshore system, 116–29, 216, 228–30, 234, 238–40, 257–58 2008 financial crisis, 116–17, 123–24, 128–29, 214, 215, 229, 239, 258 ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), 145–61 China and, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 collaborative style of, 176–77, 186–87, 195–96, 222–23, 232, 272–73 Falciani files and, 177–81, 186–90, 196 growth plan, 225–27, 272–74 independence from CPI, 273–74 Lillehammer conference, 224–27 Lux Leaks, 186, 188–90, 199–202, 209, 211 Malta and, 275, 280, 282, 284 Offshore Leaks investigation, 145–77, 196, 215–16 Panama Papers, 230–49, 268–74 Prometheus project, 218–33 releases Mossfon database, 247–49, 267 Süddeutsche Zeitung Mossfon story and, 206–10, 217 Swiss Leaks, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 Igora ski resort, 97, 100 IKEA, 185 India, 258 International Art Center, 107–10 International Media Overseas, 96–99 International Monetary Fund, 19 Interpol, 43, 54, 179, 272 Iran, 87, 261, 262, 264, 283 Iraq, 87, 202, 217 Ireland, 281 IRS, 39, 61–74, 126, 161, 193, 246, 254 credit card project, 70–74 John Doe summonses, 71–74, 131–32 offshore tax evasion investigations, 61–74, 161 Operation Tradewinds, 63 UBS scandal and, 130–32 Wheaton case, 63–66 Israel, 53, 252, 285 Istanbul, 265 Italy, 106 Japan, 51–52, 62, 195 Jersey, 24, 54, 124, 268 tax havens, 24, 29, 124–25, 266, 281 Jerusalem, 55 Jinkis, Hugo, 32 Jinkis, Mariano, 32 John Doe summons, 71–74, 131–32 Joly, Eva, 116–17, 123, 124, 201, 272 Jornot, Olivier, 203 journalism, 3, 13, 145–61 China and, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 collaborative, 176–77, 187, 195–96, 218, 220–23, 232, 272–73 data, 157, 188, 196–97, 222–23, 237, 247–49 Lillehammer conference, 224–27 Lux Leaks, 186, 188–90, 199–202, 209, 211 Offshore Leaks, 145–77, 196, 215–16 Panama Papers, 3, 40, 107, 109, 114, 139, 230–49, 268–74 Prometheus project, 218, 219–33 Swiss Leaks, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 Trump’s war on, 267 See also ICIJ; specific groups, publications, and journalists Juncker, Jean-Claude, 189, 199–201 Jura Nominees S.A., 55–56 Justice Department, U.S., 51, 58, 143–44, 252, 283 UBS scandal and, 130–32 Jyske Bank, 79 Kabila, Joseph, 53 Kamaz, 98 Kaplan, David, 149–50 Kastijós, 237 Kaupthing, 118, 121–23, 223, 258 Kaye Tesler & Co., 54 Kazakhstan, 256, 258–60 Kellogg, Brown & Root, 56 Kellogg, M.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

As Bartlett cryptically notes, “Neither was possible.”105 In 1953, too, a rising in East Germany was swiftly put down. In 1956, alarmed at the Hungarian decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, Russia moved its divisions back into that land and suppressed its independence. In 1961, in an admission of defeat, Khrushchev ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of talent to the West. In 1968, the Czechs suffered the same fate as the Hungarians twelve years earlier, though the bloodshed was less. Each of these measures, taken by a Soviet leadership incapable (despite its official propaganda) of matching either the ideological or the economic appeal of the West, simply added to the division between the two blocs.106 The second main feature of the Cold War, its steady lateral escalation from Europe itself into the rest of the world, was hardly surprising.

The enormous surge in American defense expenditures for several years after 1950 clearly reflected the costs of the Korean War, and Washington’s belief that it needed to rearm in a threatening world; the post-1953 decline was Eisenhower’s attempt to control the “military-industrial complex” before it damaged both society and economy; the 1961–1962 increases reflected the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises; and the post-1965 jump in spending showed the increasing American commitment in Southeast Asia.119 Although the Soviet figures are mere estimates and Moscow’s policy was shrouded in mystery, it is probably fair to deduce that its own 1950–1955 buildup was caused by worries that war with the West would lead to devastating aerial attacks upon the Russian homeland unless its numbers of aircraft and missiles were greatly augmented; the 1955–1957 reductions reflect Khrushchev’s détente diplomacy and efforts to release funds for consumer goods; and the very strong buildup after 1959–1960 reveals the worsening relations with the West, the humiliation over the Cuba crisis, and the determination to be strong in all services.120 Communist China’s more modest buildup was as much a reflection of its own economic growth as of anything else, but the 1960s defense increases suggest that Peking was willing to pay the price for its break with Moscow.

The proffered guarantees to Greece and Turkey in 1947 were the first sign of this change of course, and the 1949 NATO treaty was its most spectacular exemplar. With the further additions to NATO’s membership in the 1950s, this meant that the United States was pledged “to the defense of most of Europe and even parts of the Near East—from Spitzbergen to the Berlin Wall and beyond to the Asian borders of Turkey.”133 But that was only the beginning of the American overstretch. The Rio Pact and the special arrangement with Canada meant that it was responsible for the defense of the entire western hemisphere. The ANZUS treaty created obligations in the southwestern Pacific.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In other cases, countries that seemed to be making a transition from authoritarian government got stuck in what the analyst Thomas Carothers has labeled a “gray zone,” where they were neither fully authoritarian nor meaningfully democratic.6 Many successor states to the former Soviet Union, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, found themselves in this situation. There had been a broad assumption in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that virtually all countries were transitioning to democracy and that failures of democratic practice would be overcome with the simple passage of time. Carothers pointed out that this “transition paradigm” was an unwarranted assumption and that many authoritarian elites had no interest in implementing democratic institutions that would dilute their power.

The reasons for our disappointments in the failure of democracy to spread do not lie, I would argue, on the level of ideas at the present moment. Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of one of democracy’s great competitors, communism, and the rapid spread of liberal democracy as the most widely accepted form of government. This is true up to the present, where democracy, in Amartya Sen’s words, remains the “default” political condition: “While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”16 Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Vladimir Putin’s petronationalism, or Hugo Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism,” or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic.

AusAid Australia; Aborigines of Austria Austro-Asiatic languages authoritarian regimes; accountability under; in China; electoral; in Latin America; in Middle East; modernization by; rule of law under; in Russia; in Stuart England autocracy autonomy; in China; of European cities; feudalism and; in France; institutional; in Ottoman Empire; of religious institutions Avignon, popes of Axelrod, Robert Aybak, Qutb-ud-din Ayn Jalut, Battle of Ayyubids Ayyvole merchant guild Azerbaijan Aztecs Ba’athists Bahri; Mamluk sultanate of Baker, Hugh Balkans Baluchistan Ban Biao Bangladesh Bank of England bao-jia system Baphaeon, Battle of Barlow, John Perry Barquq, Sultan Barro, Robert Barzel, Yoram Basij Basil II, Prince of Moscow Bates, Robert Batu Khan Baybars Becker, Gary Bede, Adam Bedouins Béla III, King of Hungary Béla IV, King of Hungary Benedict, Ruth Benedictine order Beowulf Berber tribesmen Berlin Wall, fall of Berman, Harold Bible Big Man Bimbisara, King of Magadha binding constraints Bindusara biology; evolutionary Bismarck, Otto von Black Army, Hungarian Blackstone, William Bloch, Marc Blum, Jerome Boas, Franz Bogotá Bohemia Bolivár, Simón Bolivia Bologna, University of Bolsheviks Bonnets Rouges uprising Boserup, Ester Bosnia Bourbons Brahmanism; corporate elites in; kinship in; limitations on literacy in; in Magadha empire; nonviolent doctrine of; rise of; social hierarchy of Brandenburg Brazil Brihadratha Britain; imperialism of (see also India, British rule in); Department for International Development of; monarchy of; Roman conquest of; see also England Bronze Age Buddhism; in China; in India bureaucracy; of Catholic church; in China ; in Denmark; in France; in Germany; in Hungary; in India; in Japan; of Mamluk sultanate; in Ottoman Empire; in Russia; in Spain; Umayyad Burji Mamluks Burke, Edmund Burma Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de Bushmen, Kalahari Byzantine Empire; Eastern church and caesaropapism in; eunuchs in; European trade with; kinship structures in; provincial administration system of; Turkish conquest of Caesar, Julius caesaropapism California gold rush Calvinism Canada Cannae, Battle of canon law Cao Cao Cao Pei Capetians capitalism; authoritarian; bourgeoisie and; global; property rights and; rise of capitation taxes Carneiro, Robert Carolingian Empire Carothers, Thomas Carpini, Archbishop caste system, Indian; British rule and; impact on individual freedom of; intermarriage and; patrimonialism and; state power limited by Castile Castro, Fidel Catherine II (the Great), Tsarina of Russia Catholic church; Brahmin authority compared to; celibacy of priesthood in; England and, ; in France; Gregorian reform of; in Hungary; kinship groups destroyed by; political allies of; property rights and; Protestant Reformation and popular grievances against; rule of law and; in Spain Catholic League Celtic tribes Central African Republic Chagnon, Napoleon Chandragupta Chang family Charlemagne Charles I, King of England Charles II, King of England Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, King of France Charles XII, King of Sweden Chávez, Hugo Chengzu, Emperor of China Cheyenne Indians chiefdoms; in China; in India; in Oceania Chile chimpanzees China; absolutism in; agrarian society in; appanage in; “bad emperor” problem in; bureaucracy in; campaign against the family in; cities in; Communist, see People’s Republic of China; constraints on imperial power in; dynastic, see specific dynasties; economic development of; eunuchs in; European state-building compared with; feudalism in; founding myth of; Grand Canal in; Great Wall of; Han system in; human evolution in; hydraulic hypothesis of state formation in; imperial; Indian development compared with; kinship structures in; latifundia in; Legalism in; Mandate of Heaven in; Marx on; modernization in; Mongol invasion of; patrimonialism in; peasants in; per capita income in; political decay in; population of; reconsolidation of modern state in; religion in (see also Confucianism); trade networks in; tribalism in; usurpation of Empress Wu in; warfare and state building in; western colonization of Cholas Chosroes I, Emperor of Persia Christianity; conversion to; equality in; kinship structures undermined by; New World colonies; in Roman Empire; rule of law and; saints in; Scriptures of; see also Catholic church; Protestantism Christians; Crusaders; in Ottoman Empire; in Sasanian Empire; see also Christianity Christmas; secular celebrations of Chu, state of Chun Doo-Hwan, General Chun Qiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) Circassian Mamluks Citibank cities; Abbassid; American; Chinese; English; French; Greek; Hanseatic League; Hungarian; Indian; Latin American; Mamluk; Mauryan; Mongol destruction of; Ottoman; Russian; Spanish civil war; in China; in Denmark; in England, see English Civil War; in France; in Mexico; in United States Clark, Gregory classical republicanism Clement III, Pope Clovis Clunaic movement, Coke, Edward Colbert, Jean-Baptiste cold war Collier, Paul Colombia Columbus, Christopher Comanche Indians Common Law; accountability and; Indian law and; institutional adaptability of; Parliament and; property rights under Commons, English communications technology communism; collapse of; primitive; of women and children Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels) Communist Party; Chinese; Soviet Communist regimes; see also People’s Republic of China; Soviet Union comuneros, revolt of Concordance of Discordant Canons (Gratian) concubinage Condé, Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Confucianism; antifemale ideology of; gentleman-scholar ideal of; during Han dynasty; Legalism versus; during Ming dynasty; during Northern Song dynasty; Rectification of Names in; taxation and Confucius Congregationalists Congress, U.S.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

The governor refused, so Maceo pledged to continue the war. The meeting between Maceo and the Spanish governor is well-traveled territory in Cuban history. Known as the Protest of Baraguá, it has come to represent the principle of no surrender. More than a century later, in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, billboards across the island announced that Cuba itself was an “eternal Baraguá.” As Eastern Europe surrendered to capitalism, the signs implied, Cuba would continue the fight. The billboards did not mention that despite his noble and fiery intentions, Maceo had no choice but to lay down his weapons soon after that defiant protest.

Moscow had succumbed to Washington’s “hegemonic delirium.” Castro insisted that he would not accept the withdrawal—not until the United States agreed to withdraw its own troops from Guantánamo.7 Fidel could say what he wanted, but he knew what was coming. Many of his allies in Eastern Europe had already renounced the path of state socialism; the Berlin Wall was no more; the republics were abandoning the Soviet Union. “We are alone—all alone—here, in this ocean of capitalism that surrounds us,” he said in 1991.8 This was a new world, and its emergence challenged everything he had made—and failed to make—in Cuba. At every opportunity, Castro criticized the changes sweeping the East, expressing his disapproval in characteristic style.

Mesa-Lago, Cuba After the Cold War, 6, 219; I saw the placards during a three-month stay in Cuba in early 1992. 10. Mesa-Lago, Cuba After the Cold War, 3–6. Fidel’s first use of “socialism or death” appears to have been on January 1, 1989, but it became standard only after December 1989, the same month the Berlin Wall fell. I heard the bullfighter joke in Havana in early 1992. 11. Fidel Castro speech, January 29, 1990; Granma, December 30, 1990. 12. José Bell Lara, Tania Caram, Dirk Kruijt, and Delia Luisa López, Cuba, período especial (Havana: Editorial UH, 2017), 21–25; Sergio Guerra and Alejo Maldonado, Historia de la Revolución cubana (Tafalla [Spain]: Txalaparta, 2009), 139–40; Ariana Hernández-Reguant, Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4; Louis A.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

It was all exciting and career-enhancing, though it didn’t take much to realize that it wasn’t really going to work. Ironically, the idea of it alone was very frightening to the Soviets, and therefore highly destabilizing and effective. During the year in which America fought the Gulf War and the Berlin Wall fell, I was attending Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where I studied history, strategy, and international economics. My cynicism increased. I began to understand far more clearly the enormous impact of personalities, politics, and money on the deadly serious business of war. After a series of assignments directing larger and larger intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs, ground-based telescopes and radars, and big radar airplanes, I was promoted to brigadier general and sent to command one of the most iconic of Cold War facilities, the underground command center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Design became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and therefore irrelevant. Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967. Photograph by Georg Mladek. Photograph courtesy of Galerie Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman/ Walter Pichler. Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank, becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Almost all the OECD’s member countries were facing stagflation, and for the first time in a generation economists were not confident they had the answers. COMMUNISM Every era is politically divided but it can be hard to recall the character of the division in an earlier time. From this side of November 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the sudden, unexpected, and complete collapse of communism and its system of economic planning, it is easy to assume that those events were inevitable. That is not how it looked beforehand, not even when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won their respective first election victories in 1979 and 1981, and certainly not in the 1970s.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

The inhabitants of poorer countries with more equal incomes are sometimes healthier, on average, than are the citizens of richer countries whose incomes are more unequal. Even people whose incomes rise feel less satisfied than beforehand when they are exposed to others whose incomes are much higher. After the Berlin Wall tumbled, living standards for the former inhabitants of East Germany soared, but their level of contentment declined. The reason: They began comparing themselves to West Germans rather than to others in the Soviet bloc. Few middle-class people aspire to live in a forty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion like the one Bill Gates built for himself near Seattle.


pages: 525 words: 146,126

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Edwards notes that the libertarian movement took off like a shot just as the Objectivist movement was collapsing following the Break, so suddenly there was a whole new bunch of people talking about liberty who had no allegiance to the Rand cult. Perhaps horrified that anarcho-libertarian thought might either taint Objectivism or that libertarianism might make significant inroads independent of Objectivism, Ayn Rand herself erected a Berlin wall of hostility between the two, a wall that since her death has been maintained and fortified by Peikoff-Binswanger-Schwartz.2 In 1997 New Zealand neo-Objectivist and talk-show host Lindsay Perigo recalled reading “correspondence among some members and ex-members of Ayn Rand’s inner circle dating from the late fifties, in which the word ‘libertarian’ was used quite freely and uncontroversially to describe the society that they were all fighting for.3 Now in the orthodox Objectivist sanctum of the Unholy Trinity, the word is more blasphemous than ‘fascist’ or ‘communist’!

I want the feeling—and its reached this stage of practicality in my mind—that if civilization does go under, there’ll be 50,000 copies of each of her works on enduring paper, which I’m going to promptly see are disseminated to the most far-out spots in the world—New Zealand, and India, and Africa, and in caves and in you-name-it, ‘cause I don’t know what will be left if there’s an ultimate holocaust, with the hope that one of these 50,000 will be dug up somewhere.” In 1989 the Berlin wall and East European Communist regimes came crashing down. One suspects that the worst of all worlds for Peikoff would be the persistence for centuries of the continually self-modifying postwar political-economic systems of Western Europe, North America, Japan, and assorted other democracies or quasi-democracies, joined recently by increasingly democratic and capitalist former Soviet Bloc states.


pages: 472 words: 141,591

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

The Apollo moon missions were over. The great space race between the United States and Soviet Union was over, and America had scored a decisive victory. Glynn Lunney saw the Cold War as a forty-four-year contest, divided into quarters and beginning with the end of World War II in 1945 and ending with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets got out to an early lead with the launch of Sputnik and then stretched it out with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. By halftime, however, the game was over. “In our theater of competition, the space theater, we were surprised and engaged at the beginning of the second quarter,” Lunney said.

It was the same overwhelming sense of history as when he visited the Reichstag in Berlin. Fendell, who is Jewish, cried when he visited the former home of the German parliament and site of Nazi propaganda and military events during World War II. He walked outside to compose himself, and once he did, started walking again. Walking near the Berlin Wall, he encountered a graveyard for those who had been killed trying to cross over from East to West Germany during those terrible Cold War years. He cried again. Fendell found that same evocative spirit on Ellis Island, where he could point out the manifest, complete with signatures, from when his father’s family came to the United States.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Anyway, the foolish Soviet pharaohs, having been literally burnt by their attempt, pretty much abandoned their Caspian mother lode. Jack, with Caspian seismics in his head, had a lot to dream about and, as the Cold War slogged on, a lot of time to dream it. Then, in 1989, his dreams came true. The Berlin Wall fell, Soviet Premier Gorbachev lost control of the Warsaw Pact, and to little public notice, the Soviets lost control of the internal empire, the “Stans” (as in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan). But James Baker III noticed. James, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State, was counsel to Exxon and nearly every other member of the Houston oil cartel both before and after his Bush work.

And to air pirates Louie Free (guilty of committing truth), Chuck “This Is Hell” Mertz, Scott “Between the Lines” Harris, Alan Chartock, Bob Lebensold, Alex Jones (who will outlive the IMF), Jim Hightower for the hat, Mike Feder, Leon Wilmer, Christiane Brown, Bob McChesney, Mark Crispin Miller, Jeff Cohen, Peter Werbe, Duke Skorich, Chris Cook, Bev Smith, Meria Heller, Joyce Riley and Mike De Rosa, Harry Osibin, Phil Donahue, GritTV, Link TV, Linda Starr and Santita Jackson and the Reverend Jesse Jackson for graceful Sunday mornings. And my best to Ed Garvey and Fighting Bob. To the electronic publishers who’ve busted through the media’s black-print Berlin Wall, including Mark Karlin and BuzzFlash, Marc Ash and Jason Leopold at Truthout, Arianna Huffington, Michael Moore, Scott Thill at Mor-phizm, Bob Krall at Op-Ed News, and Nicole Power at SuicideGirls. Huge thanks to: Darick Robertson for re-creating the Super Anti-Heroes of Vultures’ Picnic, the comic book; to Mark Swedlund for no bullshit; to Uncle Ollie Kaufman (alev shalom) for showing me that geniuses must be hacks; for Marcia Levy because we love grandma; and for D.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

. ________________ * It also didn’t hurt that financial markets offer the best opportunities to make money if markets are misbehaving, so a lot of intellectual resources have gone into investigating possible profitable investment strategies. † We have benefited by some “natural” experiments, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, that have allowed us to compare market vs. planned economies. ‡ Even the label given to a tax cut may be relevant. Epley et al. (2006) find that people report a greater propensity to spend from a tax cut that is called a “bonus” rather than a “rebate.” § Of course, not everyone should be encouraged to become an entrepreneur.

Sloan Foundation, 177 Alibaba, 248n Alinea, 138–39 Amazon, 72, 127, 245 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 344 American Economic Association (AEA), 170, 173, 323, 347 American Finance Association (AFA), 223–24, 240 American Red Cross, 137 Ames, Ruth, 145 Andreoni, James, 145–46 animal spirits, 209, 233, 242 Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller), 233 “Anomalies” column, 170–75, 176, 195 “anomaly mining,” 178 anti-antipaternalism, 269, 323 anti-gouging laws, 129, 137 AOL, 245 Apple, 135–36 arbitrage, 237–38 limits of, 249, 288, 349 Palm and, 244–48, 246, 249, 250, 348 Arkes, Hal, 67 Arrow, Kenneth, 44, 181 in behavioral economics debate, 159, 160–62 financial economics work of, 208 Ashenfelter, Orley, 68, 70, 257 Asian disease problem, 159–60 “as if” critique of behavioral economics, 44–47 ATMs, 133–34 automatic enrollment, 313–22, 318 vs. negative election, 313 automobile loans, 77, 78, 120–24 discounted, 121–23, 363 rebates in, 121–22 Babcock, Linda, 184, 199–200 Baltussen, Guido, 296, 300 bank tellers, 133–34, 136 Banz, Rolf, 221, 228 Barberis, Nicholas, 206n, 353 Bar-Hillel, Maya, 36, 194n quilt purchased by, 57, 59, 61, 65 Barro, Robert, 96–97, 98 baseball, 282 base rates, 187 Basu, Sanjoy, 221, 224, 225 Baumol, William, 30, 178 Beautiful Mind, A (Nasar), 212 beauty contests (Keynesian), 210–11, 212, 214 Becker, Gary, 277–78, 293–94 Becker conjecture, 277–78, 293–94 beer on the beach, 59–61 “Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics, A” (Jolls, Sunstein, and Thaler), 258–59 behavioral bureaucrats, 269 Behavioral Economics Roundtable, 181, 183, 185 behavioral life-cycle hypothesis, 98 behavioral macroeconomics, 349–52 Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), 11, 334, 336–45 creation of, 10, 334 mantras of, 337–38, 339 Benartzi, Shlomo: equity premium puzzle studied by, 191, 192, 194–95, 198, 203, 217 savings studied by, 313, 314, 317, 318, 321 Berkeley, Calif., 181–82, 185 Berlin Wall, 350n Bernheim, Douglas, 310 Bernoulli, Daniel, 27–28, 30 Bernoulli, Nicolas, 27 beta (in beta–delta model), 110 beta (risk measurement), 226–27, 228, 229, 348 biases, 6, 23, 24, 25, 35, 46 confirmation bias, 172, 355 in financial markets, 203, 251n hindsight bias, 21–22, 190 status quo bias, 154 timid choices and bold forecasts, 186–87 “big peanuts” hypothesis, 303, 341 Binmore, Ken, 50 “Binmore continuum,” 50–51 Black, Fischer, 224, 240, 251, 252 Black-Scholes option pricing model, 208, 224 Blair, Tony, 333 Blinder, Alan, 181 blizzards, 20, 64–65, 128–29, 136, 137 Blumer, Catherine, 67 bonds, stocks vs., 191–92, 195–98, 196 bounded rationality, 23–24, 29, 162, 258, 269 bounded self-control, 269 bounded self-interest, 258 bounded willpower, 258 break-even effect, 80–81, 83, 84 British Airways, 212 British Columbia, University of, 125–26, 140–43, 185 Brown, E.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Elsewhere in Germany, wartime bunkers, which are often so obdurate they literally cannot be demolished, have been creatively recycled as the bases for housing blocks, office complexes, art spaces, paintballing facilities and trendy nightclubs.56 The complexities of developing dark tourism in this most iconic city of twentieth-century history, though, means that some of the Berlin’s almost limitless array of bunkers must remain hidden beneath tons of rubble and dirt. When part of Hitler’s Führerbunker complex was discovered beneath the newly opened ‘death-strip’ of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s, complete with elaborate SS graffiti, it was quickly filled in to prevent it from becoming a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazi and other far-right groups. Such tensions hint at the wider risk that the rapid growth of bunker tourism denies the origins of these sites in periods of deep ideological violence, ruination and trauma.

., 121, 204 Ballvé, Teo, 92 Ballymore, 213 Bandra-Worli Sea Link sky bridge, 206 Bangkok, Thailand, 230–1, 232 Bangladesh, 191n39 Barbican, 224 Bar-Hillel, Mira, 204 Barnes, Djuna, 320 Barnes, Yolanda, 219 Barry, Tom, 85 Battersea, 97, 213 Battery Park City, 310 Baudrillard, Jean, 153 Bauhaus school of design, 179–80 Bauman, Ole, 9 Bavaria, 108 Beaux Arts Ball, 155 Bedell, Geraldine, xi Begley, Josh, 91 Beijing, 254–7, 267–8 Being John Malkovich (film), 136 Bélanger, Pierre, xvi, 12–3 Belgium, 369 Belgrand, Eugène, 326–7, 328 Bell, David, 55–6 Bell Super Cobra, 111–2 Ben Nevis, 288 Berger, Alan, 48–9 Berlin, 281–2, 358 Berlin Underworlds Association, 358 Berlin Wall, 358–9 Berlusconi, Silvio, 54 Berman, Marshall, 156 Bernstein, Fred, 197 Bertuca, Anthony, 203 Berwyn, 203 Bhopal, India, 257 BHP Billiton, 375 ‘Big Dig,’ 288 Bilbray, Brian, 71–2 Bill of Rights Defense Committee, 89, 90 Bin Laden, Osama, 170, 171, 342 Birmingham, England, 223, 224 Bishop, Ryan, 111, 112, 340 Blackmore, Tim, 70, 114 Black Sea, 302 Blackwell Companion to the City, 6 Blair, Tony, 61–2 Block, Niko, 379–80 Bloomberg, Michael R., 197, 202 Boddy, Trevor, 227–9 Boeing, 41, 98, 345 Bogotá, Colombia, 118–9 Bonadies, Ángela, 121 Bonaventure Hotel, 138, 234–5 Bonime, Andrew, 334 Book of Genesis, 174–5 Boston, Massachusetts, 248, 288 Boston Marathon, 109–10 Boyle, Danny, 188 Brampton, 318 Brasilia of the North, 224 Bratton, Ben, 172 Brazil, 114, 116n2, 119, 374–5 Brazilian Association of Helicopter Pilots (ABRAPHE), 103 Brechin, Gray, 370, 372–3, 380, 383 Bridge, Gavin, 6, 379n41, 380 Brillembourg, Alfredo, 121–2 Britain, 57, 65, 66n40, 96, 224–5, 316 British Geological Survey, 288 British Royal Air Force, 35–6 Bronze Age, 295–6 Brooklyn, New York, 198 Bryant, Raymond, 246 Bunker Archeaology (Virilio), 341 Bunker Hill, 230 Bureau for Investigative Journalism, 73 Burj Al Arab Hotel, xi, xii Burj Khalifa, xi, xii, 143, 145, 150, 161n34, 167, 271, 373, 373n21, 374n25, 375, 377, 380, 383 Burma, 46 Buruma, Ian, 170 Bush, George, 346 Bush, George W., 61–2, 176n5 Cabral, Sergio, 103 Cairo, Egypt, 128, 169–70, 254 Calgary, 239 Californian Gold Rush, 370–1 Calvino, Italo, 360 Cambodia, 298 Campbell, Reese, 127–8 Canada, 146, 379 Canetti, Elias, 244n1 Cappadocia, 316 Capulong, Romeo, 309 Caracas, Venezuela, 119–22, 127 Caracciolo, Lucio, 39 Cardiff, Wales, 96 Caribbean, 116, 290–1, 293 Carney, Jay, 71 Cartwright, James E., 347 Cascio, Jamais, 274–5 Cazucá, 123n16 Center for International Policy, 85 Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), 34–5 Central America, 378 Central Park, New York, 198 Centre Pompidou, 225 Centro Financiero Confinanzas, 120 Chadwick, Edwin, 322–3, 323n2, 324–5 Chamayou, Grégoire, 71, 79–80 Channel Tunnel, 288 Charing Cross, 97 Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (film), 138 ‘Cheesegrater,’ 164, 165 Chelsea, 144, 313–5 Chemical Weapons Convention, 276 Chernobyl, 257 Cheshire, 357 Chicago, Illinois, 134, 141, 150–2, 154, 158, 162–3, 184, 203, 221, 249–50, 265, 285, 334, 351–2, 363n70 China, 40, 46, 140–1, 161n34, 162n36, 198, 201, 219, 253–4, 256–8, 263, 274, 276n105, 291, 297, 304–5, 309, 343, 375 Chinese Air Quality Index (AQI), 266–7n68 Chow, Rey, 29n11 Choy, Tim, 233, 247, 260–1 Chrysler Building, 155–6, 197 CHUD (film), 334 CIA, 73–4, 274 Cities Under Siege (Graham), 104 Cities Without Ground, 233–5 Città Nuova (‘New City’), 220 City Journal, 109 City Planning in the Syrian Town of Aleppo (Atta), 16 Clark, Joe, 69 Clark, Kenneth, 65 Clark Howell project, 185 Clausen, Meredith, 98 Clichy-sous-Bois, 146–7 ‘The Cloud, 240–1 Cold War, 35, 59, 66n40, 273, 340–2, 343n11, 355–8 Cole, Chris, 112 Coleman, Alice, 184, 191 ‘Collateral Murder’ video, 113 ‘Collect-It-All,’ 36 Collins, Joan, 315 Colombia, 122, 123n16, 368, 377 Comaroff, Joshua, 298 Combined Air and Space Operations Center (CAOC), xiv Commonwealth Games, 187 Comodromos, Demetrios, 127–8 Condor Legion, 54 Congo, 379 Congrès Internationaix d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) organisation, 222 Congressional Caucus on Unmanned Systems (CCUS), 86 Connecticut, 266 Copacabana beach, 124 Copernicus, 29 Coppola, Francis Ford, 111 Corbett, Harvey Wiley, viii, 221 Corner, James, 312 Cosgrove, Denis, 29 Coulthard, David, xii Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, 161 Cox, Stan, 265 Crali, Tullio, 52–3 Creech Air Force Base, 70, 90 Creep (film), 333, 334 Crossrail project, 288 Crouch, J.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

By April 1989, this fever of liberalism had spread to China and Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to visit China since the 1960s. Students occupied Tiananmen Square for a month only to be crushed by Chinese Army tanks on 4 June 1989. In August that year, F. W. de Klerk became the State President of South Africa, leading to the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990. The Berlin wall opened in November 1989. It was incredible; the world had transformed. These were the most dramatic changes since the second world war. In Britain, 1989 saw the start of Margaret Thatcher’s hubris. She introduced the poll tax in Scotland, which was ultimately to be the main instrument of her downfall.

Index Abbott, Diane here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Abrahams, Debbie here Adams, Gerry here Adonis, Andrew here, here Afghanistan war here, here, here, here Al Qaeda here Alexander the Great here Alexander, Sir Danny here Alexander, Douglas here, here Alexander, Heidi here Ali, Rushanara here Ali, Tariq here Alliance for Workers’ Liberty here, here, here Allied Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) here, here all-women shortlists here, here, here Another Europe is Possible (AEIP) here, here, here, here, here, here antisemitism row here, here, here, here, here, here Arab Spring here Armstrong, Hilary here, here Article 50 here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Brexit; EU referendum Ashdown, Paddy here Ashworth, Jonathan here, here, here, here, here, here, here al-Assad, Bashar here Association of London Government here, here Atkinson, Norman here, here Attlee, Clement here, here, here, here austerity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Austin, Ian here, here, here Baldwin, Tom here Balls, Ed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bank of England here, here Banks, Tony here, here, here, here Barclay, Stephen here Barenboim, Daniel here Barnet council here Basnett, David here, here, here BBC here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Iraq war here Beckett, Margaret here, here, here, here, here, here Benn, Emily here Benn, Hilary here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Benn, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here compared with Corbyn here death here, here deputy leadership election (1981) here, here, here, here, here, here, here economic programme and NEC here, here general election defeat (1983) here, here and Iraq war here, here and Kinnock leadership here, here, here, here and Kosovo intervention here and Northern Ireland here Berger, Luciana here, here, here, here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bermondsey by-election here, here, here Best for Britain here, here, here, here Beveridge, William here bin Laden, Osama here Bishops Stortford meeting here Black September group here Black, Ann here, here, here, here, here Black Wednesday here Blair, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and antisemitism row here and Brown here, here, here, here, here and Brown premiership here, here enters parliament here and EU referendum/Brexit here, here, here general election victory (1997) here, here, here and international events here and Iraq war here, here, here, here, here leadership election (1994) here, here, here leadership style here, here and London mayoral election here and Miliband leadership here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and New Labour here, here, here, here, here, here, here and public services here, here stands down as leader here and trade unions here vetoes Corbyn deselection here Blears, Hazel here Blunkett, David here Board of Deputies of British Jews here, here Bond, Jack here, here, here, here Bond, Pete here Bono here Brabin, Tracy here Bradshaw, Ben here Brady, Sir graham here Bretton Woods here Brexit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Irish border issue here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Article here; EU referendum Brixton riots here Brooks, Rebekah here Brown, Gordon here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and antisemitism row here, here and Blair here, here, here, here, here and Blair leadership here, here economic policies here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and EU referendum here, here and financial crisis here, here general election defeat (2010) here, here Gillian Duffy incident here, here leadership election (1994) here, here leadership election (2007) here, here and Miliband leadership here, here, here, here, here, here, here and New Labour here, here, here, here, here, here, here parallels with Callaghan here, here parallels with Osborne here premiership here refuses to join Euro here, here, here, here and Scottish referendum here and trade unions here Brown, Ron here Burden, Richard here Burgon, Richard here, here, here Burnham, Andy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here leadership election (2015) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bush, George H.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

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

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

—MARK 3:25; ABRAHAM LINCOLN CHAPTER 1 Introduction That things are not going well in the US and in many other advanced countries is a mild understatement. There is widespread discontent in the land. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to the dominant thinking in American economics and political science in the last quarter century. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History, as democracy and capitalism at last had triumphed. A new era of global prosperity, with faster-than-ever growth, was thought to be at hand, and America was supposed to be in the lead.1 By 2018, those soaring ideas seem finally to have crashed to Earth.

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


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

By gradually learning to follow a few rules, such as how to exchange goods for money, maintain respect for private property, and act honestly, man had “stumbled upon” a uniquely effective method of coordinating human activity, Hayek argued; socialism was a futile attempt to overturn the evolutionary process. A year later, the Berlin Wall came down and communism entered its death throes. Hayek didn’t issue any public statements, but he greatly enjoyed watching the television pictures from Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest. “He would beam benignly,” his son Laurence told me, “and the comment was, ‘I told you so.’ ” 4. THE PERFECT MARKETS OF LAUSANNE Hayek’s vision of the free market as an information-processing system was one of the great insights of the twentieth century, but it also raised a tricky question: How can we be sure that the price signals the market sends are the right ones?

Attlee, Clement Australia Axelrod, Robert Aylwin, Patricio Bachelier, Louis Bagehot, Walter Baker, James Bank of America Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee Bankers’ Panic (1907) Bankers Trust Bank for International Settlements Baran, Paul Barclays Bank Barings Bank Barone, Enrico Barro, Robert Barron’s Bartlett, Bruce Bator, Francis Baumol, William Bayh-Dole Act (1984) B&C lending Bear Stearns Beatles Beauty Contest theory Bebchuk, Lucian Becker, Gary behavioral economics Bell Laboratories Beneficial Finance Bennett, Alan Bentham, Jeremy Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Berlin Wall, fall of Bernanke, Ben Friedman lauded by response to market meltdown of subprime crisis underestimated by Beveridge, William Biggs, Barton Bikhchandani, Sushil Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Binmore, Ken Black, Fischer Black Monday crash of 1987 Black Panther Party Black-Scholes option pricing formula Blackstone Group Blair, Tony Blankfein, Lloyd C.


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

INTCMP=SRCH) A Note on the Author Frederick Taylor was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, read History and Modern Languages at Oxford and did postgraduate work at Sussex University. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries 1939–41 and is the author of three acclaimed books of narrative history, Dresden, The Berlin Wall and Exorcising Hitler. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives in Cornwall. By the Same Author Dresden The Berlin Wall Exorcising Hitler Also by Frederick Taylor Exorcising Hitler The Occupation and Denazification of Germany ‘An enthralling narrative about a crucial period of modern Europe’s history’ Observer The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, though it had lasted for only twelve brief but terrifying years, was as cataclysmic as the fall of the Roman Empire.


The Rough Guide to Prague by Humphreys, Rob

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

The neighbouring streets were soon jam-packed with abandoned Trabants, as the beautiful palace gardens became a muddy home to the refugees. The Czechoslovak government gave in and organized special sealed trains to take the East Germans – cheered on their way by thousands of Praguers – over the Iron Curtain, thus prompting the exodus that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall. The palace itself is a particularly refined building, best viewed from the rear – you’ll have to approach it from Petřín (see p.76). The gardens are not open to the public, but you should be able to see David Černý’s sculpture, Quo Vadis?, a gold Trabant on legs, erected in memory of the fleeing East Germans.

You can, however, still see the tank at the Vojenské technické museum (Military Technical Museum) in Lešany, 40km or so southeast of Prague. CONTE XTS | History West German embassy in Prague. Honecker, the East German leader, was forced to resign and, by the end of October, nightly mass demonstrations were taking place on the streets of Leipzig and other German cities. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 left Czechoslovakia, Romania and Albania alone on the Eastern European stage still clinging to the old truths. All eyes were now turned upon Czechoslovakia. Reformists within the KSČ began plotting an internal coup to overthrow Jakeš, in anticipation of a Soviet denunciation of the 1968 invasion.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

He was next posted to Dresden in East Germany, where he worked closely with the Stasi, the secret police, in political intelligence and counter-espionage. It was an isolated life and not a prestigious posting. More favoured agents worked in Western capitals, or at least in East Berlin. But his perseverance brought him the nickname ‘Nachalnik’ (Russian for boss or chief). When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Putin and his KGB colleagues destroyed files in the KGB’s Dresden HQ. He remembers calling Moscow for orders. ‘Moscow kept silent,’ he said later. ‘It was as if the country no longer existed.’ In 1990 Lieutenant Colonel Putin retired from active KGB service and became Assistant Rector in charge of foreign relations at Leningrad State University, a significant reduction in status.

To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader. 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) 17, 288, 337 Aberuchill Castle, Perthshire 148 ABK 43 Abraham, Spencer 230 Abramovich, Anna 43 Abramovich, Arkady 41 Abramovich, Irina 41, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 152, 159, 162, 163, 199, 200, 201, 348 Abramovich, Roman 20, 81, 115-16, 133, 204, 323, 342, 362 appearance 43, 117 appetite for conspicuous consumption 16 art collecting 367 Berezovsky as his bitter enemy 15, 45, 315-16 and children’s education 163-4, 356 and Daria Zhukova 159, 163, 180, 189, 199-203 as a dollar billionaire 363 establishes ABK 43 expensive take-away 26-7 the ‘family’ 51 fortune seriously depleted 364 friendship with Deripaska 55, 319 governor of Chukotka 159, 232, 356 initial friendship with Berezovsky 43 jet-set image 117-18 jets, yachts and cars 151-6 legal writs served on him 127-8 marriages 42-3, 196 meeting with Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili 91-3 orphaned, aged three 41 owner of Chelsea Football Club 15, 125-6, 127, 137, 158, 160, 274, 315 personality 41, 43, 121-2 property purchase 115, 117, 122-3, 124-5, 128-30, 142 and Putin 159, 163, 343 security 130-31, 162, 163 as a shadowy figure 123-4 and Sibneft 41, 44, 96-7, 98, 99, 100, 102, 115, 126, 157, 160 source of his oil fortune 15 Abu Dhabi 98, 99 Aeroflot 39-40, 43, 77-80, 87, 90, 91, 103, 118, 157, 173, 263, 365 Aga Khan 122 Ageyev, Nicholas 170 Aguilera, Christina 202 AIG 362-3 Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) 7, 8, 9 Air Force One 152 Al Fayed, Mohamed 163, 203 al-Qaeda 288 Al-Tajir, Mahdi 94 Alcoa 331 Aleksandrovna, Lyudmila 69, 70 Alexandrovka (Berezovsky’s dacha) 53, 90 Alexandrovna, Anna 264 Alexanyan, Vasily 11 Alfa 138 All Saints Church, Easton, Isle of Portland 11 All-Russian Automobile Alliance 39 Alloro restaurant, London 109 Allen, Paul 153 Alston and Bird 335, 336 Althorp, Northamptonshire 171 Alwaleed, Prince 203 Amsterdam, Robert 234, 242, 274 Andava 40, 78, 79 Annabel’s nightclub, London 109, 172 Apatit chemical company 231 APCO Worldwide 222, 223 Aria, Semyon 264 Aristotle 82 Politics 31 ARK 369 Arsenal Football Club 194, 348, 364 art market crash (1990-91) 190 Art Newspaper 190 Arthur Andersen accountancy firm 47 Ascot 166 Royal 169 Ascot, Berkshire 143 Asher, Abigail 190 Asprey jewellers 26 Assad family 358 Athan, Gina 98 Atkin, Tim 176 Atticus Capital 330, 332 Audit Chamber 160, 233 Aven, Petr 43, 49, 138, 193 Avital, Colette 247 Avtobank 157 AvtoVaz factory, Togliatti 37, 38, 39, 103, 342 Axis Ltd 227 Aylesford (estate agent) 20, 134 Aziz, Prince Sultan bin Abdul 153 Backstein, Joseph 185, 195 Bacon, Francis 187 Triptych 201 Badri see Patarkatsishvili, Arkady Bahamas 219 Baikal 233 Bailey, Liam 140, 141, 367 Bakeham House, Wentworth Park, Surrey 110 Baker, Tatiana 135, 137 Baku, Azerbaijan 26 Bank Menatep collapses in the 1998 financial crash 221 controls Yukos 5 Curtis and 5, 6, 94, 216 first use of word ‘oligarch’ in Russia 31 handles state money 47 a highly controversial Russian company 6 and ISC Global 237-8 money laundering allegations 214-15 set up by Khodorkovsky 46 success of 46-7 whistleblower 219-20 and Yukos 5, 48, 215, 218 Bank of Moscow 118 Barclays bank 40 Barker, Gregory 162-3 Barr, Graham 276 Barvikha Hills, Moscow 170 Basayev, Shamil 115 Basel Art Fair, Switzerland 189 Basic Element 325 Bassey, Dame Shirley 203 Battersea heliport, London 1, 137, 152, 318 Baturina, Yelena 169, 192, 358 BBC 30, 293, 297 Newsnight 258, 266, 298, 305 Question Time (BBC1) 259 Radio 4 296 Beauchamp Estates, Mayfair 131, 134, 354 Becharova, Galina 39 Beckett, Jonathan 352 Beechwood estate, Hampstead 358 Beijing 321 Belgrave Square, London 136, 327 Bell, Tim (now Lord) 50, 111, 114, 250, 256-61, 269, 276, 279, 296, 297, 298 Bell Pottinger 250, 278-9, 281, 297 Belova, Natalya 359 Benda, Alain 331 Berezovska, Anastasia 39 Berezovska, Ekaterina (Katya) 37, 39, 104, 105, 106, 112 Berezovska, Elizaveta 37, 39 Berezovska, Galina 110-11 Berezovsky, Artem 39 Berezovsky, Boris 66, 133, 151, 204, 323, 362 Aeroflot fraud case 77-80, 87 appearance 254 his assassination planned 288-9 at Curtis’s funeral 11, 12 attack on him (1994) 131 and the automobile industry 37-9 benefits from ‘loans for shares’ deal 35 birth (1946) 35 bitter enemy of Abramovich 15, 45, 315-17 brazen lifestyle 31 buys Clocher de la Garoupe 89 a client of Stephen Curtis 4, 6, 95, 235, 236 Confederation of Independent States 54 defends his activities 16, 60-61, 78-9, 80-81 dismissed from Security Council 54 and education 36, 165, 255 extensive business empire 39 extradition case 16, 103, 106, 260-63, 280 the ‘family’ 51 friendship with Lugovoi 306 friendship with Yeltsin 40 a fugitive from Russia 90-91 ‘Grey Cardinal’ 31 at the height of his power 52-3 interest in airlines 39-40 and ISC Global 237 Jewish background 35-6 and Litvinenko 288-93, 296, 298, 299, 306, 309, 310 marriages 37, 39, 196 media empire 196, 275 meets Curtis 94 member of the Russian Academy of Sciences 36-7 new name (Platon Yelenin) 276-7 and Oligarkh 30 and ORT 40-41, 83, 85-6, 87, 92-3, 95-6 personality 15, 36, 254, 255 political asylum request 260-61 property purchases 110-13 and Putin 66, 67, 71-2, 73, 76, 81-2, 85-7, 90, 91-3, 108, 253-4, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 268, 271, 280, 281, 283, 284, 291, 292, 296, 298, 301, 306 relationship with Patarkatsishvili 83, 84, 277 St George’s Hill 144 search for social acceptance 113-14 and security 107-9, 111 severely restricted movements 276 and Sibneft 41, 44, 96-8, 99, 102, 104, 126 social life 109-10 SPVs 103-4 takes risks with his fortune 106-7 works to destabilise Russia 276, 280-81 and Zakayev 269 Berlin 22 Berlin, Isaiah 22 Berlin Wall, collapse of (1989) 70 Bermuda 18 Bernardoni-Belolipskaia, Vladlena 168 Berry Bros & Rudd wine merchant, St James’s, London 24 Beslan school hostage crisis 308 Bili SA 101 Billington, James H. 224 Birt, Lord 257 Black Treasury 50 Blackhurst, Rob 225 Blair, Tony 225, 256, 283, 303, 330, 341, 346 Blanc, Raymond 162 Blavatnik, Leonid 112, 133, 134, 170, 203, 204 Blenheim Palace 279 Blohm & Voss 155 Bloom, Orlando 171 Bloomberg 363, 364, 367 Blunkett, David 262 Boateng, Ozwald 169 Boguslavsky, Leonid 36 Bolshoi Ballet 331 Bonham-Carter, Graham 321 Bonham-Carter, Helena 321 Bonhams fine art auctioneers 192 Boscombe, Dorset 3 Boubnova, Sophia 101 Boujis nightclub, London 204 Bournemouth Airport 2, 7, 9 Bournemouth Town Hall 9 Bow Street Magistrates Court 250, 261, 268 Bowack, John 139 Bowering, Professor Bill 250 Box Hill school, Mickleham, Surrey 166 BP 225, 245 Brackley and Towcester Advertiser 146-7 Bradley, Bill 224 Brando, Marlon 110 Branson, Sir Richard 133 Braynin, Felix 50 Brenton, Sir Anthony 283 Brezhnev, Leonid 37, 52 Britain 21st-century influx of Russians 23 arrival of middle-class, affluent Russians 13 Kremlin complaint about Britain’s Russophobia 281 a long-term haven for Russian exiles and dissidents 21-2 number of Russian residents in 22 refuses extradition attempts by Russian authorities 16 rules for ‘non-domiciles’ 18 Russian oil and gas supplies 303 British Airways 165, 257, 302, 338 British Army 107 British Embassy, Moscow 22 British Gas 58 British Museum, London 21 British Telecom 58 British Virgin Islands 19, 124, 157, 212, 219, 236, 291, 320 Broadlands, Ascot 278 Browder, Bill 47, 217, 218, 243, 246, 340-41 Hermitage Capital Management 209 Brown, Gordon 226, 303, 333, 334, 335, 360 Brown, Nigel 1, 6, 9-10, 238, 247, 248, 265 Brunei, Sultan of 133 BST Link 249 Buchanan, Andrew 141 Buck, Bruce 348 Buckingham Palace, London 358 Buckingham Suite apartment, Belgrave Square, London 112-13 Buckley, Tork 155 bugging 238-9, 264 Bukosky, Vladimir 288 Bullingdon drinking club, Oxford University 332, 334 Bullock, Janna 191 Burberry, New Bond Street, London 24 Burganov, Ranil 210, 211, 212, 248 Burgess 352 Burton, Ian 250 Busch, Gary 293, 309 Bush, George W. 224, 259 Bush, Laura 224 BusinessWeek 245 Buttrke prison 231 Byblos des Neiges, Courchevel 205 Cadogan Square, London 136 Café Pushkin, Moscow 330 Cameron, David 335 Campbell, Naomi 169, 170, 171, 189, 205 Candy, Christian 113 Candy and Candy 25, 107, 112, 113, 141, 348 Candyscape (yacht) 113 Cannes Film Festival 264 Cantinetta Antinori restaurant, Moscow 331 Cap d’Antibes 203, 264 Capital Group 169-70 Carlton Park Tower Hotel, London 99 Carlucci, Frank 224 Carlyle Group 224 Carnegie, Andrew 147 Caroline Terrace, Belgravia 138 Cartier 177, 369 Cartier International Day, Guards Polo Club, Windsor Great Park 168 Cash, William 16-17, 189, 192 Catherine the Great 225 Caves du Roy, Courchevel 205 Cayman Islands 18, 216 Central Bank 47, 166, 217, 363-4 Centre for Contemporary Culture (the Garage), Moscow 202 Centre for Scientific and Technical Youth 46 Chalker, Baroness 276 Champions League 235 Chanel, New Bond Street, London 95 Channel 4 News 297 Channel One 40, 50, 83, 85, 91-2 Channon, Henry ‘Chips’ 320, 321 Chaplin, Charlie 203 Charles, HRH The Prince of Wales 223 Charterhouse, near Godalming, Surrey 164 Château de la Croix, Cap d’Antibes 91, 129 Château de la Garoupe 89-90, 91 ‘Château Rothschild’ 332-3 Chatham House, St James’s Square 258 Chechnya 76, 208, 259, 268, 269, 286, 293, 308 gangs 38 rebels 115, 268 Chechnya conflict 52-3 first Chechen war (1994-6) 53, 268 second Chechen war (1999-2009) 72-3, 81, 269, 292 ‘Chekists’ 71, 74 Chelsea Football Club 15, 93, 125-6, 127, 137, 142, 152, 154, 156-7, 158, 160-63, 274, 315, 319, 348 Chelsea as prime location 139 Cherney, Anna 338 Cherney, Lev 57, 321-2, 323 Cherney, Mikhail (later Michael) 57, 58, 318-19, 321-9, 338-9, 342, 343 Chernobyl disaster 47 Chernysheva, Natalia 212-13, 248 Chester Square, Belgravia 128-9, 130, 136, 163, 201 Chevening, Kent 276 Chevron Texaco 245 Chime Communications 276 China, affluent Russians move to 22 Chinawhite nightclub, London 98, 234 Chinese government 229 Chloé 181 Chopard 178 Chouvaeva, Natasha 18 Christie’s auctioneers 24-5, 169, 187, 188, 190, 192, 366 Chrysler 328 Chubais, Anatoly 74-5 Chukotka, Siberia 159, 160, 232, 356 Churchill, Sir Winston 203, 274, 279 CIA 75, 108, 338 Cipriani restaurant, Mayfair 26, 176 ‘Circuit’ 294 Citigroup 355 City AM newspaper 359 Cityline 104 Clanwilliam, John Meade, 7th Earl of 226 Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair 24, 171 Clark, David 160, 282, 303 Clarke, Mr Justice Christopher 327, 328 Clegg, Nick 22 Clinton, Bill 334 Cliveden House, Buckinghamshire 178, 350 Clydesdale Bank 96, 100, 102 Cobham, Surrey 143 Cohen, Stephen F.: Failed Crusade 63 Coleman, John 147-8, 149 Collins, James 32 Collins, Tim 109 Collongues-Popova, Elena 219-20 Colony Club, Hertford Street, Mayfair 119 Commercial Court, London 317 Committee to Protect Journalists 271-2 communism collapse of (1991) 13, 32, 46, 273 Russian attitude to 49 Communist Party, backs Khodorkovsky 46 Confederation of Independent States 54 Connery, Sean 138 Conservative Party 58, 334 Constellation (ship) 229-30 Cook, Robin 160 Cooperative Insurance Society 341 Corbin, Arnaud 368 Corfe Holdings Ltd 236 Corker Binning 213 Cossacks 56, 171 Côte d’Azur 198, 203, 264 Courchevel ski resort, France 158, 181, 198, 204-7 Cowdray, Lord 236 Crown Prosecution Service 261 Crown Protection Services 351 CSKA Moscow 160 CSS 202 Curtis, Louise 11 Curtis, Sarah 10, 11, 12, 13 Curtis, Stephen Langford 89, 266 covert cooperation with NCIS 6, 7 covert custodian of Russian personal fortunes 3-4 death threats 6-7, 10 decision to co-operate with British police 5 early career 94 fatal helicopter crash follows threats 1-10 finds working for Russians exciting and challenging 93-4 and Fomichev 104, 105 funeral 10-13 guardian of Russian clients’ secrets 4 health 10 and ISC Global 237 and Khodorkovsky 4, 5, 6, 46, 93, 215, 234 meets Berezovsky 94 and Menatep 5, 6, 94, 216, 217, 237, 240 personal fortune 4-5, 236 personality 4, 10, 94, 95, 234 and security 237, 239, 240-41 sets up New World Value Fund Ltd 235 and Sibneft 98, 99 works for Berezovsky 4, 6, 95-6, 107, 110, 261, 262 and the Yukos curse 246 Curtis & Co. 94, 95, 235, 238, 240-41 Cyprus 213, 215, 216, 247, 321, 322 Daily Mail 346 Daiwa Bank 218 Daresbury, Lord 161 Darling, Alistair 301, 356 Dart, Kenneth 240 Dartmouth, Earl of 147 Davidson, Rod 11-12 Davis, Alan 9 Davis, Rick 336 Davos, Switzerland 49, 214 World Economic Forum 49, 275, 330 ‘Davos Pact’ 49-50 de Klerk, F.W. 257, 276 de Kooning, Willem: Woman III 186 de Sancha, Antonia 257 de Saumarez family 350 de Waal, Thomas 288 Del Ponte, Carla 79 Deloitte Touche 137 Deng, Wendi 280 Dent-Brocklehurst, Molly 202 Derby, Earl of 161 Deripaska, Oleg 151, 157, 162, 165, 167, 256, 315, 342, 353 aluminium magnate 15, 55 appearance 55, 319 and Bob Dole 335-6 buys racehorses 356-7 and Cherney 318-19, 322-8, 339, 342, 343 Conservative Party donation issue 334 as a dollar billionaire 363 early life 56 enemies 326 entry problems to United States 16, 328-9, 335, 336, 337 and the ‘family’ 56 friendship with Abramovich 55, 319 global business empire 16 Jewish background and Cossack heritage 56 losses 364 and Magna 328, 339, 364 marriage 56 and Nat Rothschild 329-30 personality 55, 319 a post-Soviet corporate raider 55 property purchaser 145, 320-21 and Putin 15, 66, 343 ruthless young pretender 15, 55 Deripaska, Polina 165, 181, 320 Devonshire, Duke of 114 Diana, Princess of Wales 133, 171 Dickens, Charles 196 Dinamo Tbilisi Football Club 277 Disdale, Terence 153, 154, 351-2 Doig, Peter: White Canoe 185-6, 193 Dolce & Gabbana 315 Dole, Bob 335-6 Dom-2 (reality TV programme) 189 Donde, Daniel Ermes 201 Dorchester Hotel, London 26, 223, 322, 323 Doronin, Vladimir 169-70 Downside Manor, Leatherhead, Surrey 277-8, 279 Draycott House, off Sloane Square 339 Dresner-Wickers 50 Dubai 99, 142, 198 Dubov, Yuli 267-8, 279 Bolshaya Paika (The Lion’s Share) 30, 267 The Lesser Evil 267-8 Ducasse, Alain 203 Dulwich College 166 Dyachenko, Boris 165 Dyachenko, Tatyana (Tanya) 50, 52, 145, 162, 165, 204 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 173 East End, London 21, 190 Eastern Bloc, collapse of (late 1980s) 22 Eastern Oil Company 210 Easton, Isle of Portland 11, 12 Easton Neston, neat Towcester 146 Eaton Square, London 136, 137, 140-41 Ecclestone, Bernie 162 Eclipse (yacht) 155-6 Economic and Trade Ministry 61 Economist, The 221 Ecstasea (yacht) 154 Ekho Moskvy radio station 25, 75, 271, 280 Elizabeth II, Queen 142 Elliott Hotel, Gibraltar 235 Ellison, Larry 153 Enron scandal 337 Esher, Surrey 143 Eurocement 157 Eurocement Holding AG 157 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 126, 127, 128 European Champions League 154 European Union 330, 331, 332 Evans, Chris 111, 112 Evans, Jonathan 270 Evening Standard 132, 346, 365 Evraz 157, 363 Exclusive London 174-5 ExxonMobil 230, 245 Fabergé 192 Falileyev, Judge Igor 357 ‘family, the’ 51-2, 56 Farnborough Airport 152 Farouk, King of Egypt 129 Fatherland All-Russia Party 73 Fayed, Camilla 181 FBI 359 Federal Law N 153-F3 310-11 Feldman, Andrew 334 Felshtinsky, Yuri 292 Fennell, Theo (jewellers) 26 Fezan Ltd 236 Fiat 38 financial crash (1998) 218, 221 Financial Dynamics 256 Financial Times 63, 131, 236, 275, 323, 339 Finans business magazine 55, 363 Finsbury 256 Firebird Fund 80 first Gulf War 130, 131 Fitasc Sporting British clay pigeon shooting Grand Prix 148 Fitzgerald, Edward, QC 213 Fleming, Roddie 161 Florida International University 61 Fomichev, Katya 104-5, 181 Fomichev, Ruslan 104-5, 181 Forbes magazine 24, 77, 363 Forbes Russia 246, 272, 273 Ford, Tom 179 Foreign Office 7, 241, 261, 270, 282, 303, 307 Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) 225 Fortnum & Mason 24 Forus 40, 78, 79, 80 Forward Media Group 320 Fox, James 125 Fox and Gibbons 94 Foxwell, Gavin 8 France, affluent Russians move to 22 Francis I, King of France 149 Fraud Squad 261 Fredriksen, John 128, 132 Freeland, Chrystia 63 French Foreign Legion 108 French Special Forces 108 Freud, Lucian: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping 201 Fridman, Mikhail 49 Friedman, Thomas 61-2 Frieze Fair 188, 192 Frontline (American news programme) 63, 76 Frontline Club, London 36 FSB (Federal Security Service) 53, 62, 71, 74, 86, 103, 106, 115, 230, 231, 262, 267, 275, 281, 285, 286, 287, 289-90, 292, 293, 296, 305-9, 312, 313, 338 Fulham Football Club 163 Fyning Hill, Rogate, West Sussex 124, 130, 152, 161, 163, 200, 201, 353 G8 summits 259-60, 309, 360 Gagosian, Larry 202 Gallitzin, Prince Gregory 167 Garda Worldwide 130 GAZ 157 Gazprom 76, 157, 173, 233, 270-71, 317, 341, 362 Geffen, David 194 Geldof, Bob 172 General Motors 39, 244, 325 George V, King 114 Giacometti, Alberto 201 Gibraltar 19, 100, 104, 215, 216, 235, 236, 241 Gibraltar Criminal Intelligence Agency 241 Gillford, Lord (‘Paddy’) 226-7 Glencore 340 global economic crisis (2008) 17 Global Leadership Foundation (GLF) 275-6 Global Options Group Inc 335, 336 Glushkov, Nikolai 92, 96, 102-3, 279 Goldfarb, Alex 65, 80, 82-3, 275, 281, 291, 297, 298, 337 Goldfarb, Alex with Litivinenko, Marina: Death of a Dissident 307 Goldsmith, Sir James 55 Goldsmith, Lord (Peter) 279 Golubev, Yuri 245 Goodwin, James 334 Gorbachev, Mikhail 32, 35, 40, 171, 173, 199, 312 Gorbunova, Yelena 72, 110, 111, 113, 114 GPW Ltd 351 Grand Bleu, Le (yacht) 153, 154, 155, 203 Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat 203-4 Grayson, Patrick 351 Gref, German 330 Greig, Geordie 171, 172, 345-6, 365 Grey Advertising 222 Grigoriev, Boris Dmitrievich: Faces of Russia 194 Group Menatep Ltd (GML) 215-16, 227, 235, 236 Group of Seven 49 GRU 270, 287 GSS Global 248 Gstaad, Switzerland 19 Guardian 195, 268, 280, 281, 369 Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, Moscow 43 Gucci 179 Guernsey 236 Guinness, Lady Honor 320-21 Gulf States 99 Gusinsky, Vladimir 49, 75-6, 82, 83, 86, 132, 196, 280 Gutseriyev, Mikhail 165, 360-62 Gyunel 169 Hague, Ian 80 Hakkasan restaurant, London 176 Hamnett, Professor Chris 353 Hampton Court Palace 171 Hamstone House, St George’s Hill, Weybridge 145 Hannant, Paul 8 Hanson, Lord 226 Hanson Plc 226 Harding, James 17 Harewood estate, near Windsor 142, 203 Harrods department store, London 26, 123, 125, 137, 163, 174 Harrods Estates 135 Harrogate Ladies’ College 166 Harrow School 165 Harry’s Bar restaurant, South Audley Street, London 101, 109 Hartlands 145-6 Harvard University-Dow Jones US-Russian Investment Symposium 328 Harvey, David 17-18 Harvey Nichols department store, London 174, 180 Fifth Floor Restaurant 26 Hascombe Court, near Godalming, Surrey 111-12 Haslam, Nicholas 105, 136 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 146 Hazlitt, William 191 Health Protection Agency 298, 300 Heath Lodge, Iver, Buckinghamshire 110 Heath, Sir Edward 304 Hello!


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

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

Had the Austrian legacies remained only the ones just discussed—an ecumenical school of economic theory based on subjectivism and marginal utility theory, a heterodox economic approach in the United States, a network of foundations for neoliberalism, a group of policy entrepreneurs deploying their expertise behind the scenes in advanced societies—this would have been impressive indeed. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War managed to transform the Austrians into seers too—as the prognosticators of socialism’s demise. Austrians’ predictions about socialism’s impossibility had seemed to come true. Their scientific and philosophical pronouncements appeared to bear the mantle of truth.56 Vienna itself loomed large in this triumphalist, post-1989 narrative, which would have delighted Austrian School members.

Fukuyama celebrated “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and “the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism.” For a century, the Austrians had railed against socialists and conservatives in the name of liberalism. Mises and Hayek had declared socialism an “impossible” economic system that paved the way to destructionism and serfdom. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the Austrians appeared vindicated. Of course, Hayek’s thesis in Road had been challenged by the fact that postwar European welfare states, which he disparaged in increasingly shrill terms as the years went by, did not move toward totalitarianism with their “planned” economies.


pages: 495 words: 138,188

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, borderless world, business cycle, central bank independence, Corn Laws, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, inflation targeting, joint-stock company, Kula ring, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price mechanism, profit motive, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Fascism and communism were not only alternative economic systems; they represented important departures from liberal political traditions. But as Polanyi notes, “Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” The heyday of the neoliberal doctrines was probably 1990–97, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the global financial crisis. Some might argue that the end of communism marked the triumph of the market economy, and the belief in the self-regulated market. But that interpretation would, I believe, be wrong. After all, within the developed countries themselves, this period was marked almost everywhere by a rejection of these doctrines, the Reagan-Thatcher free market doctrines, in favor of “New Democrat” or “New Labor” policies.

A more convincing interpretation is that during the Cold War, the advanced industrialized countries simply could not risk imposing these policies, which risked hurting the poor so much. These countries had a choice; they were being wooed by the West and the East, and demonstrated failures in the West’s prescription risked turning them to the other side. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these countries had nowhere to go. Risky doctrines could be imposed on them with impunity. But this perspective is not only uncaring; it is also unenlightened: for there are myriad unsavory forms that the rejection of a market economy that does not work at least for the majority, or a large minority, can take.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

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

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

These kids—the young baby boomers—rehearsed hiding under their desks with their arms over their heads to protect themselves from an atomic blast launched by America’s Communist nemesis. The fight against communism would be part of the boomers’ formative experiences: from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even the millions of boomers who opposed the excesses of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War grew up to think, with considerable justification, that capitalist economies created more wealth for their countries than socialist ones. When many socialist countries in the developing world shifted to more market-based systems in the 1990s, many boomers saw it as vindication: boomer historian Francis Fukuyama called this shift “the end of history” and characterized it as a decisive victory for free-market capitalism and liberal democracy.

When many socialist countries in the developing world shifted to more market-based systems in the 1990s, many boomers saw it as vindication: boomer historian Francis Fukuyama called this shift “the end of history” and characterized it as a decisive victory for free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. Even those over fifty who didn’t conflate socialism with communism were leery of what a more socialist America might do to their income. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t have memories of the Berlin Wall falling the year she was born, and she was a child when Eastern European, African, and Asian countries converted from socialism to capitalism to improve their standards of living. She never ducked under her desk to hide from a Soviet missile, because millennials were taught how to hide from mass shooters instead.


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

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

That time in the diner was the first time ever her partner, a Native American, had felt a sense of belonging in society at large. Such redemption amid disruption is common. It reminded me of how many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area had loved the Loma Prieta earthquake that took place three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Or loved not the earthquake but the way communities had responded to it. It was alarming for most of us as well, devastating for some, and fatal for sixty people (a very low death count for a major earthquake in an area inhabited by millions). When the subject of the quake came up with a new acquaintance, she too glowed with recollection about how her San Francisco neighborhood had, during the days the power was off, cooked up all its thawing frozen food and held barbecues on the street; how gregarious everyone had been, how people from all walks of life had mixed in candlelit bars that became community centers.

The Sandinista Revolution that took over Nicaragua in June of 1979 was the last of the old-style leftist revolutions, the last socialist revolution but also one of the last in which a small armed group overthrew a government in the name of justice and the people. And it was perhaps the last revolution in which the old idea of state socialism triumphed; a decade later the Berlin Wall would fall and a revolution in the nature of revolution would follow—but that is another story. Belli devoted much of the 1970s to working toward the revolution. Seven years after the earthquake, the revolution swept the country and the Sandinistas approached Managua in triumph. Belli remembers, “Those first few days were like a dream because—just that feeling I remember of driving down the road toward Managua and people coming out to get the paper: their faces and the happiness.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

The fifty-eight-year-old macroeconomist was an established D.C. insider, easily recognizable in a conference crowd by her sheet of long white blond hair and her habit of wearing chunky silver jewelry. Brainard’s professional life had flowed naturally from an internationalist childhood. Born in Hamburg, Germany, to a Foreign Service officer and a teacher, she had been raised in Cold War Poland and Germany before its reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her upbringing heavily informed her worldview. “I was fascinated by how two countries so close in geography and resources could diverge so sharply simply by being separated by the Iron Curtain,” she had told graduates at a commencement ceremony in 2014.[23] “Germany built a vibrant market democracy oriented to the West while Poland suffocated under a heavy state apparatus oriented to the Soviet Union.

She had chosen the field because she knew she wanted to work on policy, but she also craved an intellectually disciplined route to answering the world’s big problems. From MIT, Brainard spent what she would later call an “eventful year” at the White House Council of Economic Advisers following the fall of the Berlin Wall, working on Poland’s democratic transition plan. She then returned to academia, earning a reputation as a rising star in the economics world while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s. But Washington retained a hold on Brainard, and she started as a White House Fellow in the Clinton administration.


pages: 162 words: 51,445

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

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

Telegenic as he was, Kennedy’s ability to project the youth, glamour, and vitality of the “free world” was overshadowed by the brutal scenes coming out of Birmingham, especially at a time when the Cold War had already put America’s international reputation under close scrutiny. There was barely a moment during his brief presidency when he was not confronted with crisis. Within seven months of his taking office, construction began on the Berlin Wall, and an attempt at fomenting a coup in Cuba, where the revolution had succeeded just two years before, had failed miserably. The Cuban Missile Crisis, less than a year before the March on Washington, had brought the Cold War to his doorstep and the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. On the day of the march, he met with advisers to discuss whether to back a coup in Vietnam.


pages: 178 words: 52,374

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, open borders, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

Another interesting character who elaborated on the border was diplomat John Peck; independent of mind and keen to become historically literate about Ireland following his appointment as British ambassador in April 1970, he insisted Britain needed to recognise the ‘Irish dimension’ to the border problem. Peck was not typical; he had an exceptional affinity with Ireland, was sympathetic to Irish nationalism and lived out the rest of his life in Dublin after retirement in 1973. He noted that ‘people talk and act as if the border were something as impenetrable and controllable as the Berlin Wall’, but, as he pointed out, the border ‘is not actually visible … 1970/1 was the first time that it actually mattered whether the border ran one side of a ditch or the other or whether a culvert was British or Irish sovereign territory’. With the blocking of border-crossing roads by blowing craters in them and closing them with large spikes set in concrete, ‘the village priest, the doctor, the farmer and the vet might have to make considerable detours to go about their normal business’.50 Darach MacDonald, who grew up in Clones, County Monaghan and became a professional journalist in the 1970s, recalled that Clones had been a prosperous market town and rail hub devastated by partition (‘teetering on the brink of ruin’) and told how his childhood landscape was affected: I was a toddler when steel girders were driven deep through the road’s surface at the Aqueduct Bridge at the edge of Clones; the spikes circumscribed my childhood world in a ring of steel … my uncle’s [writer Eugene McCabe] farm was cut off when the road was spiked by the border.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Facts aren’t enough to change the mind of a climate denier, so presenting statistics and sources won’t help. If you reach them, it will be because you sincerely listened to them and strove to understand their concerns. By giving care, love, and attention to every individual, we can counter the forces pulling us apart. * * * — For people who came of age between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, today’s world can indeed appear strange. Those days were marked by a general consensus about how humanity should advance. Some may now wish for that simpler time, making us vulnerable to the promises of leaders who would take us back instead of focusing on what lies ahead.


pages: 2,238 words: 239,238

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Internet Archive, Ronald Reagan

The 85,000-strong Stasi ‘People’s Police’ force and its network of 175,000 informers was led by Brigade veterans for all but four years until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By that time it had become East Germany’s most notorious and hated tool of state repression. Erich Mielke, its head for thirty-two years and a veteran of the Brigades’ internal security services, became known as ‘the Master of Fear’. He was the ruthless architect of what one writer called ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’, which held files on millions of citizens.51 When the Berlin Wall finally fell, much of the popular hatred against the communist regime was channelled directly at him.

H. here, here Auschwitz, wedding in here Azaña, Manuel here, here, here, here, here Azcárate, Pablo de here Aznar, José María here Aznar, Manuel here Azzi, Amedeo here Badajoz massacre here, here Bakallár, István here Balboa, Benjamin here Baldwin, Stanley here Balk, Theodor here, here Bañuls, Rafael here Barbieri, Francesco here Barcelona cosmopolitanism here described by Orwell here ‘events of May’ here, here, here fall of here funeral of Hans Beimler here Italian air raids here People’s Olympiad here, here, here, here political violence here, here, here, here violence breaks out here withdrawal of brigades here Barea, Arturo here, here, here, here Barontini, Ilio here, here, here, here Bassett, John H. here Batov, Pavel here, here Battle of Cable Street here Battle of the Mist here Battle of the Somme here, here Battle of Verdun here, here, here Bay, Charles here Bebb, Captain Cecil here Becker, Hans Klaus here Beethoven, Ludwig van here, here, here Behring, Anders here Beimler, Hans here, here, here, here Belov (Karlo Lukanov) here Ben Mizzian, Comandante Mohammed here Benavente, Jacinto here Bender, Ed here Benicàssim hospital here Benz, Willi here, here, here, here, here Berg, Delmer here Berger, Lya here Bergonzoli, General Annibale here Berlin Olympics here Berlin Wall, fall of here Berneri, Camillo here Bessie, Alvah here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bethune, Norman here, here Better, Max here Bik, Tio Oen here Bingham, Mary here Blair, Eileen here, here Blanche, Lieutenant here blitzkrieg here, here, here blood transfusions here ‘Blue Nose’, see Le Goux, Captain Yves Blum, Léon here, here Boch, Otto here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bonetti, Frank here Bonilla, Amalia here Bonzano, Blas here Bowler, Kitty here, here, here Braccialarghe, Giorgio here, here, here Brandt, Willy here, here, here, here, here Bredel, Willi here, here Brenan, Gerald here British Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Aragon front and Catalonia here, here, here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here battle of Teruel here, here, here battle of the Ebro here, here, here, here, here, here George Green and here withdrawal here Zaragoza offensive here, here British Labour Party here, here British Medical Aid Unit here, here Brooke, Rupert here brothels here, here Browder, Earl here Browne, Felicia here, here, here, here, here Brunner, Otto here, here, here Brustlein, Gilbert here, here Buckley, Henry here, here, here, here, here, here, here Buenaventura Durruti company here Burgess, Guy here Burgot, Jules here Burley, Charles here Busch, Ernst here Butowski, Vladek here Byron, Gene here Byron, Lord here, here caciques here Cagoule here Calles, Plutarco Elías here Calvo Sotelo, José here Camp Lukács here, here Canadian Blood Transfusion Service here, here Canarias, fires on refugees here Capa, Robert here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Carabineros here Cárdenas, Lázaro here Carlos Marx column here, here Carmen, Roman here Carney, William here Carrillo, Santiago here Carrington, Dora here Carritt, Liesel here Carroll, Peter here Carter, Edward here Casa Velázquez here, here Casals, Pau here, here Casares Quiroga, Santiago here, here, here Cassar, Ange here Castelldefels prison here, here, here Castells, Andreu here, here, here Castillo, José del here casualties, overall figures here, here Cazala, René here Cecil-Smith, Edward here Centelles, Agustí here Cercas, Javier here Cerf, Ruth here Chaintron-Barthel, Jean here, here Chakin, Alfred ‘Chuck’ here Chamberlain, Neville here, here Chapaev, Vasily here Chapaev Battalion here, here, here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘Chaparro’ here Charchenko, Mijail here chemical warfare here Chen Agen here Chevallot, Jean here Chiang Kai-shek here Cholitz, General Dietrich von here Chretien, Henri here Churchill, Clementine here Churchill, Viscount Peter here Churchill, Winston here, here, here, here CIA reports here Ciano, Count here, here, here Cisneros, Hidalgo de here City College of New York (CCNY) here Ciudad de Barcelona here, here Civil Guards here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Clarion Cycling Club here Clarke, Tom here Clausewitz, Carl von here Clive, Lewis here, here, here, here CNT union here, here Cockburn, Claud here, here, here, here Cohen, Morris here Cohen, Nat here, here Col, Antonio here Colodny, Robert here, here Colonna Italiana here Columbus, Christopher here Comintern here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and formation of brigades here, here, here, here, here Commune de Paris Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Aragon front and Catalonia here battle of the Ebro here, here Guadalajara front here, here, here Communist Party of Great Britain here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Communist Party of the USA here, here Communist Youth International here communists distinguished from anti-fascists here increase control over brigades here rivalry with anarchists here, here, here, here Companys, Lluís here concentration camps, Nazi here Condor Legion here, here, here, here, here Aragon front here, here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here battle of the Ebro here Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) here Cookson, John here Cooney, Bob here Copado, Bernabé here Copeman, Fred here, here, here, here, here Ćopić, Emil here, here Ćopić, Vladimir here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cordero, Estela here Cornford, John here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here holds international prisoners here Council of Aragon here, here Cova de Santa Llúcia Hospital here Covo, César here, here, here, here Cowles, Virginia here Cox, Geoffrey here, here, here Cremón, Rosa here Crome, Len here, here, here Crook, David here Cunningham, Jock here Dabrowski Battalion, see Dombrowski Battalion Dachau, escape from here, here Daladier, Édouard here, here Danchik, Bernie here, here, here Darton, Patience here, here, here Darwin, Charles here Davidovitch, Maurice here Davids, Rhys here Day, William here de Gaulle, Charles here de Valera, Eamon here ‘Death Hill’ here Delaprée, Louis here, here, here Delasalle, Major Gaston here, here, here, here DeMaio, Tony here, here Detro, Philip here Di Vittorio, Giuseppe here, here, here Diamant, Andre here, here Dickenson, Ted here Dimitrov, Georgi here, here Dimitrov Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here Aragon front and Catalonia here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here Zaragoza offensive here, here, here Dinah, Yvan here discipline here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also punishments ‘Dispossessed, the’ here Djordjević, Svetislav here Djuro Djuković Battalion here, here, here Domanski Dubois, Mieczyslaw here Dombrowski Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here failed attack at Huesca here, here, here, here Guadalajara front here, here Zaragoza offensive here Domingo Germinal Battalion here Donovan, General ‘Wild Bill’ here Doran, Dave here Doriot, Jacques here Dos Passos, John here, here, here Doyle, Bob here, here Dreyer, Poul Erik here Dubois-Domanski, Dr here Duchesne, Captain here Dumont, Colonel Jules here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here failed attack at Valsaín here, here Dupré, Henri here, here, here Durán, Gustavo here Durruti, Buenaventura here, here, here, here, here, here Easter Rising (Dublin, 1916) here Eden, Anthony here Edgar André Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Aragon front and Catalonia here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here, here battle of Teruel here Guadalajara front here, here, here, here, here Edney, Eric here Ehrenburg, Ilya here Eisner, Alexei here, here, here, here, here, here Eitingon, Naum here El Escorial here, here, here, here, here El Pingarrón here, here, here Engel, Rudolf here, here Ericsson, Harry here Escimontowsky, Andre here, here, here, here Español Battalion here, here Estampa magazine here Etchebéhère, Hipólito here, here, here Etchebéhère, Mika here, here, here, here Falangist death squads here Fanjul, Joaquín here February 12 Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here Federation of Iberian Anarchists-National Labour Confederation (CNT-FAI) here Fernández del Real, Virgilio here, here, here, here Fernández Heredia, Enrique here Fernsworth, Lawrence here Ferrer, Ernesto here Ferrer, Margarita here Field, John here Field, Ralph Higbee here Fifth Regiment here, here, here Fischer, Louis here Fisher, Harry here, here, here, here, here, here, here flamethrowers here Fonk, General here Fox, Ralph here, here, here, here Fraga Iribarne, Manuel here Francis, Karl here Francisco Ascaso column here Franco, General Francisco and advance on Bilbao here, here, here and advance on Catalonia here, here, here, here, here, here and advance on Madrid here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and aircraft losses here and Army of Africa here, here and battle of Brunete here, here, here, here, here, here and battle of Teruel here, here, here and capture of Santander here and Czechoslovakia here, here declares victory here and Ebro offensive here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and fascism here flies to Spain here and Italian forces here, here and Jarama river crossing here military reputation here, here, here and post-war Spain here, here supports Hitler in Russia here Fränken, Friedrich here Franklin, Lynn here, here French Communist Party here French Force of the Interior (FFI) here French Highway here, here, here, here, here, here French Resistance here, here, here French Revolutionary Army here French School (Valencia) here, here, here Frente Rojo here Friedemann, Golda here, here Friedemann, Max here, here Friemel, Brigadier Rudolf here Frunze Military Academy here, here, here Fry, Harry here, here, here Fuencarral cemetery here Fulgencio, Father here Fuqua, Colonel Stephen here Gal, General (János Gálicz) here, here, here, here, here, here, here battle of Brunete here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Galán, José María here Galarza, Golonel Valentín here Galleani, Annibale ‘Umberto’ here García, José (‘Pepe El Algabeño’) here García Oliver, Juan here Garibaldi Battalion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here failed attack at Huesca here, here, here Guadalajara front here, here, here, here loudspeaker propaganda here Zaragoza offensive here Garibaldi, Giuseppe here Garland, Walter here, here Gastone Sozzi Centuria here, here, here Gates, John here Gautherot, Henri here Gayman, Vital here, here, here, here Geiser, Carl here, here, here Gellhorn, Martha here, here, here Geneva Convention here Geoffroy, General here George VI, King here George Washington Battalion here, here, here, here, here Georges, Pierre here, here Gerassi, Fernando here German advisors here, here German Communist Party (KPD) here, here, here, here, here German Red Front here, here German Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) here, here Geserd here Gestapo here, here, here, here, here Giacometti, Alberto here Gibbons, Joe here Gide, André here, here Gillain, Nick here, here, here, here Gillet, Maurice here Ginestà, Marina here Giral, José here, here Gitton, Marcel here Giustizia e Libertà movement here, here Goded, General Manuel here Goff, Irving here, here, here Gollancz, Victor here González, General Valentín (‘El Campesino’) here, here, here, here, here Goold-Verschoyle, Brian here Gorkin, Julián here Gough, Joe here Goya, Francisco de here, here, here Graham, Frank here Gramsci, Antonio here Grant, Walter here Great Purge of 1936–38 (Soviet Union) here Green, George here, here, here, here, here, here Green, Martin here Green, Nan here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gregory, Walter here, here, here Gren, Charles Oliver here Grepp, Gerda here Grieg, Nordhal here, here, here, here, here GRU here, here, here Guarner, Colonel Vicente here Guernica bombing here, here guerra celere here Guerrini, Nunzio here Guichard, Alphonse here Guimpel, Boris here Guimpel, Janik here Guimpel, Manon here Guimpel, Maya here, here Guisco, Spartaco here Gurney, Jason here, here, here Guttman, Hans here Guzmán, Eduardo de here Haber, Rudy here Haldane, J.


The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Interviews with William Niskanen, Ira Jackson, and Sam Gibara. As Jonathan Chait recently observed about the Bush administration in The New Republic, "Government and business have melded into one big 'us' " (as cited by Paul Krugman, "Channels of Influence," The New York Times, March 25, 2003). Robert Monks says, "Particularly since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it probably is clear that the heads of large corporations have more impact on your life and the lives of citizens around the world than the head of any country." 51. Interviews with Chris Komisarjevsky and Clay Timon. For an excellent critical discussion of branding and its implications for society, see Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000).


pages: 177 words: 54,421

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, delayed gratification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Paul Graham, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, side project, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Upton Sinclair

Can you really outwork and outrun everyone forever? The answer is no. The ego tells us we’re invincible, that we have unlimited force that will never dissipate. But that can’t be what greatness requires—energy without end? Merkel is the embodiment of Aesop’s fable about the tortoise. She is slow and steady. The historic night the Berlin Wall fell, she was thirty-five. She had one beer, went to bed, and showed up early for work the next day. A few years later, she had worked to become a respected but obscure physicist. Only then did she enter politics. In her fifties, she became chancellor. It was a diligent, plodding path. Yet the rest of us want to get to the top as fast as humanly possible.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

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

And they are surely understood today by the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich, and others who preach the merits of market discipline to seven-year-old children while increasing the Pentagon budget beyond its current Cold War levels, no longer because the Russians are on the march but because of a new threat that emerged when the former enemy became a subordinate ally, even contributing to US weapons production. The Pentagon must remain huge because of the “growing technological sophistication of Third World conflicts,” the Bush administration explained to Congress a few months after the Berlin wall fell, adding that it would also be necessary to strengthen “the defense industrial base” with incentives “to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development.” Shortly after, the administration greatly expanded the flow of US arms to the Third World, thus enhancing the threat that had arisen just in time to replace John F.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Even a one-way medium, such as a book, creates a new intimacy as it lets us see the world through another person’s eyes. Television enables us to bear witness to what is happening to people across the globe, and to do so en masse. On TV we watched together, simultaneously, events from the moon landing to the felling of the Berlin Wall, and experienced our collective humanity as never before. Likewise, the internet connects us more deliberately and, in some ways, more reassuringly than any medium before it. With its development, the tyranny of top-down broadcast media seemed to be broken by the peer-to-peer connections and free expressions of every human node on the network.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Donner party, East Village, financial engineering, illegal immigration, index card, medical residency, pre–internet, rent control, Saturday Night Live, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

I had also forgotten to bring cash and had to borrow twenty dollars from a writer I barely knew. But I stayed the second week at SNL. Antonio Banderas was hosting, and at the read-through, I presented a new sketch. This hilarious sketch was about identical twins who were reunited when their parents died in the rubble when the Berlin Wall fell. After an almost laugh-free reading, Antonio looked over to his assistant, befuddled, and said, “Theese? Theese makes no sense to me.” All the humiliation was worth it for the one shining moment when Amy Poehler proposed we walk a few blocks together, late at night, in New York City in 2006.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

Western governments wanted to prove to their populations that social democratic capitalist societies could also provide public goods such as hospitals and housing for all, which were available beyond the Iron Curtain alongside authoritarian government and censorship. In Britain and across the West these competing pressures kept capitalism in check. But over the last thirty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, unbridled capitalism in the form of a new neoliberal framework has brought the market into every aspect of public policy, in the NHS, in education and in housing, where privatization, deregulation and property speculation are now the dominant approaches. The result is a system in crisis, rife with the contradictions of two opposing ideologies – socialism and neoliberalism – combined with the unintended consequences of a market-led approach to public goods.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

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

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

Foreigners didn’t have to force down our way of life—they ate it up. I don’t just mean our music, movies, food, clothes, sports, manners, and idioms. I mean that our system of political economy, democratic capitalism, which produced our mass culture, was also a universal model, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some yearned for it, some hated it, some tried to adopt it, but no one could be indifferent to it. While Michael Jordan, Titanic, and Microsoft held the world’s attention, Americans never had to think about other countries—thus our notorious ignorance. Why should we know or care that Denmark votes by proportional representation?


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

Those identities were quite stable. The post-Cold War shift to neoliberalism was not just a huge shift in economic organization, it also destroyed the political identities of a great many people, and not just the annoyed folk singer in our parable. Most people still trundled out to vote for “their” party after the Berlin Wall came down – Labour, the Social Democrats, the Democrats – but did it really matter anymore? The post-Cold War era was defined by a loss of political identity and the political disengagement of large parts of the population, especially by those most hurt by the economic changes of the period.11 In the Blair, Schroder, Clinton, Obama, centrist era there simply were no strongly motivating political identities or competing ideologies.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceauşescu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceauşescu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timişoara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceauşescu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him.

Abdallah, Muhammad Ahmad bin (Mahdi) 270, 271 Abe, Shinzō 207 abortion 189, 190, 236 Adee, Sally 288–9, 364 ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) 39 aesthetics: humanist 229–30, 233, 234, 238; Middle Ages 228–9, 228 Afghanistan 19, 40, 100, 171, 351 Africa: AIDS crisis in 2–3; borders in 167–8, 169; climate change and 214–15; conquest of 259, 350; Ebola outbreak in 11, 13, 203; Sapiens evolution in savannah of 338, 388–9 Agricultural Revolution: animal welfare and 77, 78–9, 83, 90–6, 363; Bible and 77, 78–9, 90–6, 98; Dataist interpretation of history and 379; intersubjective networks and 156, 157 AIDS 2–3, 11–12, 13, 19 algorithms: concept defined 83–4; Dataism and 367, 368, 381, 384–97; humanism, threat to 309–97 see also Dataism; individualism, threat to 328–46; organisation of societies in algorithmic fashion 160–3; organisms as 83–90, 106–7, 112–14, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 126–7, 140, 150–1, 304–5, 327, 328–9, 367, 368, 381, 388; render humans economically and militarily useless 307–27 Allen, Woody 29 Alzheimer’s disease 24, 336 Amazon Corporation 343–4 Amenemhat III 161, 162, 175 Andersson, Professor Leif 231 animals: Agricultural Revolution and 77, 78–9, 83, 90–6, 363; as algorithms 83–90; evolutionary psychology and 78–83; animist and biblical views of 75–8, 90–6; cognition/intelligence, underestimation of 127–31; consciousness and 106–7, 120–32; cooperation and 137–43; domesticated, numbers of 71–2; global biomass of 72; humanism and 98–9, 231; inequality, reaction to 140–1, 142; intersubjective web of meaning and 150; mass extinction of 71–5; mother–infant bond 88–90; soul and 101–2; suffering of 78–83, 82, 231, 286 animist cultures 75–8, 91, 92, 96–7, 173 Annie (musical composition program) 325 Anthropocene 71–99 antibiotics 10, 12, 13, 23, 27, 99, 179, 266, 275, 348 antidepressants 40, 49, 122–4 Apple Corporation 15, 155, 343, 372 art: medieval and humanist attitudes towards 228–30, 228, 233; technology and 323–5 artificial intelligence 48; animal welfare and 99; consciousness and 119; humanism, threat to 309–97; individualism, threat to 328–46; putting brakes on development of 50, 51; renders humans economically and militarily useless 307–27; timescale for human-level 50 see also algorithms; Dataism and under individual area of AI artificial pancreas 330 Ashurbanipal of Assyria, King 68, 68 Associated Press 313 Auschwitz 257, 376 autonomous cars 114, 114, 163, 312, 322, 341–2, 384–5 Aztec Empire 8–9 Babylon 172–3, 309, 390 Bach, Johann Sebastian 324–5, 358 Bariyapur, Nepal 92 bats: experience of the world 356–7, 358; lending and vampire 204–5 Beane, Billy 321 Bedpost 331 Beethoven, Ludwig van 253, 324; Fifth Symphony and value of experience 257–61, 358, 387–8 Belavezha Accords, 1991 145, 145 Bentham, Jeremy 30, 32, 35 Berlin Conference, 1884 168 Berlin Wall, fall of, 1989 133 Berry, Chuck: ‘Johnny B. Goode’ 257–61, 358, 387, 388 Bible 46; animal kingdom and 76–7, 93–5; Book of Genesis 76–8, 77, Dataism and 381; 93–4, 97; composition of, research into 193–5; evolution and 102; homosexuality and 192–3, 195, 275; large-scale human cooperation and 174; Old Testament 48, 76; power of shaping story 172–3; scholars scan for knowledge 235–6; self-absorption of monotheism and 173, 174; source of authority 275–6; unique nature of humanity, promotes 76–8 biological poverty line 3–6 biotechnology 14, 43–4, 46, 98, 269, 273, 375 see also individual biotech area Bismarck, Otto von 31, 271 Black Death 6–8, 6, 7, 11, 12 Borges, Jorge Luis: ‘A Problem’ 299–300 Bostrom, Nick 327 Bowden, Mark: Black Hawk Down 255 bowhead whale song, spectrogram of 358, 358 brain: Agricultural Revolution and 156–7, 160; artificial intelligence and 278, 278; biological engineering and 44; brain–computer interfaces 48, 54, 353, 359; consciousness and 105–13, 116, 118–19, 121–4, 125; cyborg engineering and 44–5; Dataism and 368, 393, 395; free will and 282–8; happiness and 37, 38, 41; self and 294–9, 304–5; size of 131, 132; transcranial stimulators and manipulation of 287–90; two hemispheres 291–4 brands 156–7, 159–60, 159, 162 Brezhnev, Leonid 273 Brin, Sergey 28, 336 Buddhism 41, 42, 94, 95, 181, 185, 187, 221, 246, 356 Calico 24, 28 Cambodia 264 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012 122 capitalism 28, 183, 206, 208–11, 216–17, 218–19, 251–2, 259, 273–4, 369–73, 383–6, 396 see also economics/economy Caporreto, Battle of, 1917 301 Catholic Church 147, 183; Donation of Constantine 190–2, 193; economic and technological innovations and 274; marriage and 26; papal infallibility principle 147, 190, 270–1; Protestant revolt against 185–7; religious intolerance and 198; Thirty Years War and 242, 243, 246; turns from creative into reactive force 274–5 see also Bible and Christianity Ceauçescu, Nicolae 133–4, 134, 135–6, 137 Charlie Hebdo 226 Château de Chambord, Loire Valley, France 62, 62 Chekhov Law 17, 18, 55 child mortality 10, 33, 175 childbirth, narration of 297–8, 297 China 1, 269; biotech and 336; Civil War 263; economic growth and 206, 207, 210; famine in 5, 165–6; Great Leap Forward 5, 165–6, 376; Great Wall of 49, 137–8, 178; liberalism, challenge to 267–8; pollution in 213–14; Taiping Rebellion, 1850–64 271; Three Gorges Dam, building of 163, 188, 196 Chinese river dolphin 188, 196, 395 Christianity: abortion and 189; animal welfare and 90–6; change from creative to reactive force 274–6; economic growth and 205; homosexuality and 192–3, 225–6, 275–6; immortality and 22 see also Bible and Catholic Church Chukwu 47 CIA 57, 160, 293–4 Clever Hans (horse) 128–30, 129 climate change 20, 73, 151, 213, 214–17, 376, 377, 397 Clinton, Bill 57 Clovis, King of France 227, 227 Cognitive Revolution 156, 352, 378 Cold War 17, 34, 149, 206, 266, 372 cold water experiment (Kahneman) 294–5, 338 colonoscopy study (Kahneman and Redelmeier) 296–7 Columbus, Christopher 197, 359, 380 Communism 5, 56, 57, 98, 149, 165, 166, 171, 181; cooperation and 133–7, 138; Dataism and 369, 370–3, 394, 396; economic growth and 206, 207, 208, 217, 218; liberalism, challenge to 264–6, 271–4; religion and 181, 182, 183; Second World War and 263 computers: algorithms and see algorithms; brain–computer interfaces 48, 54, 287, 353, 359; consciousness and 106, 114, 117–18, 119, 120; Dataism and 368, 375, 388, 389 Confucius 46, 267, 391–2; Analects 269, 270 Congo 9, 10, 15, 19, 168, 206, 257–61, 387, 388 consciousness: animal 106–7, 120–32; as biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes 116–17; brain and locating 105–20; computer and 117–18, 119, 120, 311–12; current scientific thinking on nature of 107–17; denying relevance of 114–16; electrochemical signatures of 118–19; intelligence decoupling from 307–50, 352, 397; manufacturing new states of 360, 362–3, 393; positive psychology and 360; Problem of Other Minds 119–20; self and 294–5; spectrum of 353–9, 359, 360; subjective experience and 110–20; techno-humanism and 352, 353–9 cooperation, intersubjective meaning and 143–51, 155–77; power of human 131–51, 155–77; revolution and 132–7; size of group and 137–43 Cope, David 324–5 credit 201–5 Crusades 146–8, 149, 150–1, 190, 227–8, 240, 305 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 360 customer-services departments 317–18 cyber warfare 16, 17, 59, 309–10 Cyborg 2 (movie) 334 cyborg engineering 43, 44–5, 66, 275, 276, 310, 334 Cyrus, King of Persia 172, 173 Daoism 181, 221 Darom, Naomi 231 Darwin, Charles: evolutionary theory of 102–3, 252, 271, 372, 391; On the Origin of Species 271, 305, 367 data processing: Agricultural Revolution and 156–60; Catholic Church and 274; centralised and distributed (communism and capitalism) 370–4; consciousness and 106–7, 113, 117; democracy, challenge to 373–7; economy and 368–74; human history viewed as a single data-processing system 377–81, 388; life as 106–7, 113, 117, 368, 377–81, 397; stock exchange and 369–70; value of human experience and 387–9; writing and 157–60 see also algorithms and Dataism Dataism 366, 367–97; biological embracement of 368; birth of 367–8; computer science and 368; criticism of 393–5; economy and 368–74; humanism, attitude towards 387–8; interpretation of history and 377–80; invisible hand of the data flow, belief in the 385–7; politics and 370–4, 375–6; power/control over data 373–7; privacy and 374, 384–5; religion of 380–5; value of experience and 387–9 Dawkins, Richard 305 de Grey, Aubrey 24, 25, 27 Deadline Corporation 331 death, 21–9 see also immortality Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, The 308–9 Deep Blue 320, 320 Deep Knowledge Ventures 322, 323 DeepMind 321 Dehaene, Stanislas 116 democracy: Dataism and 373–5, 376, 377, 380, 391, 392, 396; evolutionary humanism and 253–4, 262–3; humanist values and 226–8; liberal humanism and 248–50, 262–7, 268; technological challenge to 306, 307–9, 338–41 Dennett, Daniel 116 depression 35–6, 39, 40, 49, 54, 67, 122–4, 123, 251–2, 287, 357, 364 Descartes, René 107 diabetes 15, 27 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 223–4 Dinner, Ed 360 Dix, Otto 253; The War (Der Krieg) (1929–32) 244, 245, 246 DNA: in vitro fertilisation and 52–4; sequencing/testing 52–4, 143, 332–4, 336, 337, 347–8, 392; soul and 105 doctors, replacement by artificial intelligence of 315, 316–17 Donation of Constantine 190–2, 193 drones 288, 293, 309, 310, 310, 311 drugs: computer-assisted methods for research into 323; Ebola and 203; pharmacy automation and 317; psychiatric 39–41, 49, 124 Dua-Khety 175 dualism 184–5, 187 Duchamp, Marcel: Fountain 229–30, 233, 233 Ebola 2, 11, 13, 203 economics/economy: benefits of growth in 201–19; cooperation and 139–40; credit and 201–5; Dataism and 368–73, 378, 383–4, 385–6, 389, 394, 396, 397; happiness and 30, 32, 33, 34–5, 39; humanism and 230, 232, 234, 247–8, 252, 262–3, 267–8, 269, 271, 272, 273; immortality and 28; paradox of historical knowledge and 56–8; technology and 307–8, 309, 311, 313, 318–19, 327, 348, 349 education 39–40, 168–71, 231, 233, 234, 238, 247, 314, 349 Eguía, Francisco de 8 Egypt 1, 3, 67, 91, 98, 141, 142, 158–62, 170, 174–5, 176, 178–9, 206; Lake Fayum engineering project 161–2, 175, 178; life of peasant in ancient 174–5, 176; pharaohs 158–60, 159, 174, 175, 176; Revolution, 2011 137, 250; Sudan and 270 Egyptian Journalists Syndicate 226 Einstein, Albert 102, 253 electromagnetic spectrum 354, 354 Eliot, Charles W. 309 EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) 324–5 Engels, Friedrich 271–2 Enki 93, 157, 323 Epicenter, Stockholm 45 Epicurus 29–30, 33, 35, 41 epilepsy 291–2 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 207 eugenics 52–3, 55 European Union 82, 150, 160, 250, 310–11 evolution 37–8, 43, 73–4, 75, 78, 79–83, 86–7, 89, 102–5, 110, 131, 140, 150, 203, 205, 252–3, 260, 282, 283, 297, 305, 338, 359, 360, 388, 391 evolutionary humanism 247–8, 252–7, 260–1, 262–3, 352–3 Facebook 46, 137, 340–1, 386, 387, 392, 393 famine 1–6, 19, 20, 21, 27, 32, 41, 55, 58, 166, 167, 179, 205, 209, 219, 350 famine, plague and war, end of 1–21 First World War, 1914–18 9, 14, 16, 52, 244, 245, 246, 254, 261–2, 300–2, 301, 309, 310 ‘Flash Crash’, 2010 313 fMRI scans 108, 118, 143, 160, 282, 332, 334, 355 Foucault, Michel: The History of Sexuality 275–6 France: famine in, 1692–4 3–4, 5; First World War and 9, 14, 16; founding myth of 227, 227; French Revolution 155, 308, 310–11; health care and welfare systems in 30, 31; Second World War and 164, 262–3 France, Anatole 52–3 Frederick the Great, King 141–2 free will 222–3, 230, 247, 281–90, 304, 305, 306, 338 freedom of expression 208, 382, 383 freedom of information 382, 383–4 Freudian psychology 88, 117, 223–4 Furuvik Zoo, Sweden 125–6 Future of Employment, The (Frey/Osborne) 325–6 Gandhi, Indira 264, 266 Gazzaniga, Professor Michael S. 292–3, 295 GDH (gross domestic happiness) 32 GDP (gross domestic product) 30, 32, 34, 207, 262 genetic engineering viii, 23, 25, 41, 44, 48, 50, 52–4, 212, 231, 274, 276, 286, 332–8, 347–8, 353, 359, 369 Germany 36; First World War and 14, 16, 244, 245, 246; migration crisis and 248–9, 250; Second World War and 255–6, 262–3; state pensions and social security in 31 Gilgamesh epic 93 Gillies, Harold 52 global warming 20, 213, 214–17, 376, 377, 397 God: Agricultural Revolution and 95, 96, 97; Book of Genesis and 77, 78, 93–4, 97, 98; Dataism and 381, 382, 386, 389, 390, 393; death of 67, 98, 220, 234, 261, 268; death/immortality and 21, 22, 48; defining religion and 181, 182, 183, 184; evolutionary theory and 102; hides in small print of factual statements 189–90, 195; homosexuality and 192–3, 195, 226, 276; humanism and 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 234–7, 241, 244, 248, 261, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 305, 389, 390–1; intersubjective reality and 143–4, 145, 147–9, 172–3, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189–90, 192–3, 195; Middle Ages, as source of meaning and authority in 222, 224, 227, 228, 235–7, 305; Newton myth and 97, 98; religious fundamentalism and 220, 226, 268, 351; Scientific Revolution and 96, 97, 98, 115; war narratives and 241, 244 gods: Agricultural Revolution and theist 90–6, 97, 98, 156–7; defining religion and 180, 181, 184–5; disappearance of 144–5; dualism and 184–5; Epicurus and 30; humans as (upgrade to Homo Deus) 21, 25, 43–9, 50, 55, 65, 66, 98; humanism and 98; intersubjective reality and 144–5, 150, 155, 156–7, 158–60, 161–3, 176, 178–80, 323, 352; modern covenant and 199–200; new technologies and 268–9; Scientific Revolution and 96–7, 98; spirituality and 184–5; war/famine/plague and 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 19 Google 24, 28, 114, 114, 150, 157, 163, 275, 312, 321, 322, 330, 334–40, 341, 384, 392, 393; Google Baseline Study 335–6; Google Fit 336; Google Flu Trends 335; Google Now 343; Google Ventures 24 Gorbachev, Mikhail 372 Götze, Mario 36, 63 Greece 29–30, 132, 173, 174, 228–9, 240, 265–6, 268, 305 greenhouse gas emissions 215–16 Gregory the Great, Pope 228, 228 guilds 230 hackers 310, 313, 344, 382–3, 393 Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem 287 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 46, 199 HaNasi, Rabbi Yehuda 94 happiness 29–43 Haraway, Donna: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ 275–6 Harlow, Harry 89, 90 Harris, Sam 196 Hassabis, Dr Demis 321 Hattin, Battle of, 1187 146, 147 Hayek, Friedrich 369 Heine, Steven J. 354–5 helmets: attention 287–90, 362–3, 364; ‘mind-reading’ 44–5 Henrich, Joseph 354–5 Hercules 43, 176 Herodotus 173, 174 Hinduism 90, 94, 95, 181, 184, 187, 197, 206, 261, 268, 269, 270, 348, 381 Hitler, Adolf 181, 182, 255–6, 352–3, 375 Holocaust 165, 257 Holocene 72 Holy Spirit 227, 227, 228, 228 Homo deus: Homo sapiens upgrade to 43–9, 351–66; techno-humanism and 351–66 Homo sapiens: conquer the world 69, 100–51; end famine, plague and war 1–21; give meaning to the world 153–277; happiness and 29–43; Homo deus, upgrade to 21, 43–9; immortality 21–9; loses control, 279–397; problems with predicting history of 55–64 homosexuality 120, 138–9, 192–3, 195, 225–6, 236, 275 Hong Xiuquan 271 Human Effectiveness Directorate, Ohio 288 humanism 65–7, 98, 198, 219; aesthetics and 228–9, 228, 233, 233, 241–6, 242, 245; economics and 219, 230–1, 232, 232; education system and 231, 233, 233, 234; ethics 223–6, 233; evolutionary see evolutionary humanism; formula for knowledge 237–8, 241–2; homosexuality and 225–6; liberal see liberal humanism; marriage and 223–5; modern industrial farming, justification for 98; nationalism and 248–50; politics/voting and 226–7, 232, 232, 248–50; revolution, humanist 220–77; schism within 246–57; Scientific Revolution gives birth to 96–9; socialist see socialist humanism/socialism; value of experience and 257–61; techno-humanism 351–66; war narratives and 241–6, 242, 245, 253–6; wars of religion, 1914–1991 261–7 hunter-gatherers 34, 60, 75–6, 90, 95, 96–7, 98, 140, 141, 156, 163, 169, 175, 268–9, 322, 355, 360, 361, 378 Hussein, Saddam 18, 310 IBM 315–16, 320, 330 Iliescu, Ion 136, 137 ‘imagined orders’ 142–9 see also intersubjective meaning immigration 248–50 immortality 21–9, 30, 43, 47, 50, 51, 55, 56, 64, 65, 67, 138, 179, 268, 276, 350, 394–5 in vitro fertilisation viii, 52–3 Inanna 157, 323 India: drought and famine in 3; economic growth in modern 205–8, 349; Emergency in, 1975 264, 266; Hindu revival, 19th-century 270, 271, 273; hunter-gatherers in 75–6, 96; liberalism and 264, 265; population growth rate 205–6; Spanish Flu and 9 individualism: evolutionary theory and 103–4; liberal idea of undermined by twenty-first-century science 281–306; liberal idea of undermined by twenty-first-century technology 327–46; self and 294–304, 301, 303 Industrial Revolution 57, 61, 270, 274, 318, 319, 325, 374 inequality 56, 139–43, 262, 323, 346–50, 377, 397 intelligence: animal 81, 82, 99, 127–32; artificial see artificial intelligence; cooperation and 130–1, 137; decoupling from consciousness 307–50, 352, 397; definition of 130–1; development of human 99, 130–1, 137; upgrading human 348–9, 352 see also techo-humanism; value of consciousness and 397 intelligent design 73, 102 internet: distribution of power 374, 383; Internet-of-All-Things 380, 381, 382, 388, 390, 393, 395; rapid rise of 50 intersubjective meaning 143–51, 155–77, 179, 323, 352 Iraq 3, 17, 40, 275 Islam 8, 18, 21, 22, 64, 137, 188, 196, 205, 206, 207, 221, 226, 248, 261, 268, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 276, 351, 392; fundamentalist 18, 196, 226, 268, 269, 270, 275, 351 see also Muslims Islamic State (IS) 275, 351 Isonzo battles, First World War 300–2, 301 Israel 48, 96, 225–6, 249 Italy 262, 300–2, 301 Jainism 94–5 Jamestown, Virginia 298 Japan 30, 31, 33, 34, 207, 246, 349 Jefferson, Thomas 31, 192, 249, 282, 305 Jeopardy!


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

By the 1980s, financial freedom of flows was finally at or above the level it had reached almost a century earlier.108 Furthermore, new stock exchanges opened around the world, including New Delhi in 1947, Dhaka and Busan in the 1950s, Lagos and Tunis in the 1960s, Bangkok in 1974, and Kuwait and Istanbul in the 1980s.109 Countries in Eastern Europe that had closed their exchanges in the 1940s began to reopen them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For example, the stock exchange in Budapest reopened in 1990, and Warsaw’s reopened in 1991. Even Shanghai reopened its stock exchange in 1990.110 Capital markets vary from country to country with respect to form and performance, suggesting that there is no single path to securitization and to the emergence of a public capital market.

See also commercial banks; merchant banks Barbarians at the Gate, 276 Bardi bank, 43–44 Barings Bank, 170–72 behavioral finance, 251–54 bell curve, 239 Benartzi, Shlomo, 252 benchmarking, 328–30 Benedict XIV (pope), 37 Bent, Bruce, 143 Bentham, Jeremy, 36 Index 417 Bergen Tunnel construction project, 178 Berlin Wall, fall of, 96 Bernanke, Ben, 9, 197, 208, 226 beta, 243–45; alpha and, 248–49, 254, 308–9 Bible, 34, 239 Bierman, Harold, 204 bills of exchange, 83–84 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 24 Bismarck, Otto von, 108–9 Black, Fischer, 230, 235–36 BlackRock, 299 Black Thursday (October 24, 1929), 164 Blunt, John, 67–68 Bocchoris, 23 Boesky, Ivan, 147, 181, 184–86 Bogle, Jack, 284–85 bond index funds, 285 bonds: convertible, 178; fabrication of Italian, 163; government, 6, 135, 176; high-yield, 276; holding, 93; investment in, 257, 259, 297, 301; management of, 102 Boness, James, 236 bookkeeping, double-entry, 41 borrower, reputation of, 22–23 Borsa Italiana, 95 Boston, 100 Boston Consulting Group, 194 Boston Post, 157 bourses, 84 Breitowitz, Yitzhok, 150 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 188 Britain: beggar-thy-neighbor policies in, 202; colonial rule of India, 49–50, 61; supplies contract, after American Revolution, 175 British Bankers’ Association, 182 British East India Company, 66, 326 Brookings Institution, 91 Brown, Henry, 143 Brown, Robert, 230 Brownian motion, 230, 234 Brumberg, Richard, 121–22 Brush, Charles, 81 Bubble Act of 1720, 68, 87 bubbles: causes of, 5; housing bubble of 2004–2006, 213–14; South Sea Bubble, 68–69; technology (dot-com bubble of 1999-2000), 187, 213, 223–24, 246, 263, 276, 287 bubonic plague, 75 bucket shops, 90 Buddhist temples, 29–30 budget deficit projections, 218 Buffett, Warren: American Express and, 169; earnings of, 305; on efficient market hypothesis, 250–51; financial leverage and, 6; on real ownership, 4; resource allocation and, 7; as value manager, 140 bullet payments, 321 bull market: in 1920s, 91; of 1990s, 269, 285; after World War II, 92, 143 burghers, 42 Bush, George W., 218, 225 BusinessWeek, 143, 188 Buttonwood Agreement, 88, 97 Byzantines, 52 Cabot, Paul, 141 Cady, Roberts decision, 192 Caesar, 28 Calahan, Edward, 90 California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), 129 418 Investment: A History call option: performance fee as, 310–11; sale of, 151 CalPERS.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

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

‘Too often the democratic peaceful nations let slip their guard because they assumed that the danger had gone, assumed that the future would be one of peace and progress,’5 she told the Young Conservatives’ conference on the eve of Mandela’s release. She was not to be lulled into thinking that tearing down the Berlin Wall meant that the Communist danger had passed, as she demonstrated when she told an astonished House of Commons that Neil Kinnock was a ‘crypto Communist’.6 He burst out laughing. By the spring of 1990, it was obvious that the East German people wanted to share western prosperity, and the West German government, led by Helmut Kohl, was determined to see through reunification, despite the immense cost.

INDEX A Abbott, Diane ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 acid-house parties ref1 Adam and the Ants ref1 Adams, Gerry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 AIDS and HI ref1, ref2 alcohol and drug taking ref1, ref2, ref3 Aldington, Lord ref1 Allen, Jim ref1 Allen, Vic ref1 ‘Allo, ‘Allo ref1 Andrew, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3 apartheid ref1, ref2 see also Mandela, Nelson Archer, Jeffrey ref1 Argentina ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 attack HMS Coventry ref1 attack HMS Sheffield ref1, ref2 attack HMS Sir Galahad ref1 football ref1 General Belgrano destroyed ref1 Ashdown, Paddy ref1 Ashley, Jack ref1 Ashworth, Andrea ref1 Aston, Jay ref1 Atkin, Sharon ref1, ref2 Atkins, Humphrey ref1 Atkinson, Rowan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Auf Wiedersehen, Pet ref1 B Baker, Cheryl ref1 Baker, Kenneth ref1 Band Aid ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 banking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘Black Monday’ ref1 barcodes ref1 Barnett, Lady Isobel ref1 Bazoft , Farzad ref1 BBC (British Broadcasting Company) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 see also programmes by name The Beat ref1 Becker, Boris ref1 Bell, Sir Ronald ref1 Benn, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Bercow, John ref1 Berlin Wall ref1, ref2 see also East Germany Berners-Lee, Timothy ref1 Bettaney, Michael ref1 Biffen, John ref1 Black, Conrad ref1, ref2, ref3 Blackadder ref1 Blair, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Bleasdale, Alan ref1, ref2 Blitz (nightclub) ref1, ref2 Blunkett, Daid ref1 Bono ref1, ref2 The Boomtown Rats ref1, ref2 see also Geldof, Bob Botham, Ian ref1 Bow Wow Wow ref1 Bowie, Daid ref1 Boy George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Boys from the Black Stuff ref1 Bradford stadium fire ref1, ref2 Bragg, Billy ref1, ref2 Branson, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3 Brecht, Bertolt ref1 British Army ref1, ref2, ref3 see also Argentina; Falklands war; Royal Nay British Petroleum (BP) ref1 British Steel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 British Telecom (BT) ref1, ref2, ref3 Brixton race riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Broadwater Farm riots ref1 Bronski Beat ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Bucks Fizz ref1 Buerk, Michael ref1 Bullingdon Club ref1, ref2 Bush, George (Senior) ref1 Butt, Ray ref1 C Callaghan, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Cameron, David ref1, ref2, ref3 Campbell, Alistair ref1, ref2 Carrington, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Carter, Jimmy ref1, ref2, ref3 cash machines and ATMs ref1, ref2 censorship ref1 Central Television ref1, ref2 Charles, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Christopherson, Romola ref1, ref2 Church of England ref1, ref2, ref3 see also Runcie, Robert City of London see banking Clark, Alan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Clarke, Kenneth ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Clause ref1 ref2, ref3 Clough, Brian ref1 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Coe, Sebastian ref1 comedy ref1 see also comedians by name; programmes by name Comedy Store ref1, ref2 Comic Relief ref1 Comic Strip ref1 computer technology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Conservative Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Clause ref1 ref2, ref3 football hooliganism ref1, ref2, ref3 immigration and race riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and local authorities ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 miners’ strike ref1, ref2 Moscow Olympics ref1 nuclear arms ref1 poll tax ref1 see also economy; Falklands war; politicians by name; privatization; taxes; Thatcher, Margaret; unions Correspondent ref1 Cortonwood Colliery, Brampton ref1 Costello, Elvis ref1, ref2 Cowling, Maurice ref1 cricket ref1 cruise missiles see nuclear arms Culture Club ref1, ref2, ref3 see also Boy George Currie, Edwina ref1 Curtis, Richard ref1, ref2 D Daily Express ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Daily Mail ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Daily Mirror ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16 Daily Star ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Daily Telegraph ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Dalyell, Tam ref1, ref2, ref3 Dammers, Jerry ref1 Delors, Jacques ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Democratic Unionist Party ref1, ref2 Diana, Princess ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Duran Duran ref1, ref2, ref3 E Ealing Vicarage rape case ref1 East Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 Economist ref1, ref2 economy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 inflation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 monetarism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 property prices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also banking; European Union; taxes Edmondson, Ade ref1, ref2 education ref1 Edwards, Eddie ‘the Eagle’ ref1 Elizabeth II, Queen ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Elms, Robert ref1, ref2 Elton, Ben ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 EMI ref1, ref2 Enfield, Harry ref1 Ethiopia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also Band Aid; Geldof, Bob; Lie Aid ethnic minorities ref1, ref2 see also immigrants and immigration; racism and race riots European Union ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Eurythmics ref1 Evening Standard ref1 expenses scandal ref1 Ezra, Derek ref1 F Fairbairn, Sir Nicolas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Falklands war background to conflict ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 attack on HMS Coventry ref1 attack on HMS Sheffield ref1, ref2 attack on HMS Sir Galahad ref1 General Belgrano destroyed ref1 post war ref1, ref2 war ref1, ref2, ref3 feminism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Greenham Common protests ref1 Yorkshire Ripper protests ref1, ref2 Ferguson, Sarah ref1 Filofaxes ref1 Financial Times ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Findlay, Alexander ref1 Fish, Michael ref1 Fleet Street ref1 see also newspaper industry Fletcher, PC Yvonne ref1, ref2 Fluck, Peter ref1, ref2 Follows, Sir Denis ref1, ref2 Foot, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 football ref1, ref2, ref3 Hillsborough disaster ref1, ref2, ref3 hooliganism ref1, ref2 Fowler, Norman ref1 France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Frankie Goes to Hollywood ref1 French, Dawn ref1, ref2, ref3 Friday Night Live ref1, ref2 Friedman, Milton ref1, ref2, ref3 Fry, Stephen ref1, ref2 G Gallup ref1 Galtieri, General Leopoldo ref1, ref2 see also Argentina; Falklands Gascoigne, Paul ref1 Geldof, Bob ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 General Belgrano ref1, ref2 General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union (GMBATU) ref1, ref2 Germany ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Gibraltar shootings ref1 Gill, Christopher ref1 Gilmour, Sir Ian ref1, ref2 Goddard, Stuart see Adam and the Ants Goodison, Sir Nicholas ref1, ref2 Gorbachev, Mikhail ref1 Gormley, Joe ref1 Gould, Bryan ref1, ref2 Gow, Ian ref1, ref2 Grant, Bernie ref1, ref2, ref3 Grant, Ted ref1 Great Storm (1987) ref1 Greater London Council ref1, ref2 Green Party ref1 Greenham Common protests ref1, ref2, ref3 Guardian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Gyngell, Bruce ref1, ref2 H Haig, Al ref1, ref2, ref3 Hailsham, Lord ref1 Harris, Robert ref1, ref2 Hart, David ref1, ref2 Hart-Dyke, Captain David ref1, ref2 Hastings, Max ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hattersley, Roy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hatton, Derek ref1, ref2, ref3 Healey, Denis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Healy, Gerry ref1, ref2 Heath, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Heathfield, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3 Henderson, Nicholas ref1 Hendra, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3 Heseltine, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Hewitt, James ref1 Hewitt, Patricia ref1, ref2 Hill, Jacqueline ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also Yorkshire Ripper case Hillsborough stadium disaster ref1, ref2, ref3 Hislop, Ian ref1, ref2 see also Private Eye Hitchens, Christopher ref1 Hoban, Chief Superintendent Dennis ref1, ref2 homelessness ref1 homosexuality and homophobia ref1, ref2, ref3 AIDS ref1 Clause ref1 ref2, ref3 politics ref1 Howard, Michael ref1, ref2 Howe, Geoffrey ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16 Howell, Kim ref1 Hurd, Douglas ref1, ref2 I immigrants and immigration ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also ethnic minorities; racism and race riots Independent ref1, ref2 inflation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Institute of Economic Affairs ref1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) ref1, ref2, ref3 IRA (Irish Republican Army) ref1 deaths in Gibraltar ref1 hunger strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 terrorist acts ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Iranian Embassy siege ref1 Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) ref1 Israel ref1 J Jagger, Mick ref1, ref2 The Jam ref1 Jason, David ref1 Jenkins, Roy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Jenner, Peter ref1 John, Elton ref1, ref2 Johnson, Boris ref1, ref2 Johnson, Holly ref1 Johnson, Linton Kwesi ref1 Jones, Griff Rhys ref1 Joseph, Sir Keith ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 K Kemp, Gary and Martin ref1, ref2 Kershaw, Andy ref1 KGB ref1, ref2 Khomeini, Ayatollah ref1, ref2, ref3 Kinnock, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18 Knight, Jill ref1, ref2 Knight, Ted ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Knightley, Phillip ref1, ref2 Kohl, Helmut ref1, ref2, ref3 Kureishi, Hanif ref1, ref2 L Labour Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Billy Bragg and Red Wedge ref1, ref2 ethnic minorities ref1, ref2 European Union ref1 Falklands war ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 homosexuality ref1, ref2 local authorities ref1, ref2, ref3 women’s rights ref1, ref2 see also Foot, Michael; Kinnock, Neil; politicians by name Labour Party Young Socialists ref1, ref2 Laurie, Hugh ref1 Law, Roger ref1, ref2 Lawrence, Lieutenant Robert ref1 Lawson, Nigel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 Le Bon, Simon ref1, ref3 see also Duran Duran Leach, Sir Henry ref1 Lennon, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Lewis, Michael ref1, ref2 Liberal Democrats ref1, ref2 Liberal Party ref1, ref2, ref3 Liberal-SDP Alliance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Libya and Libyan embassy siege ref1, ref2, ref3 Live Aid ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also Geldof, Bob Liverpool ref1, ref2, ref3 Hillsborough disaster ref1 Toxteth riots ref1, ref2 Livingstone, Ken ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Lloyd, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lockerbie disaster ref1 Lyndhurst, Nicholas ref1 M MacColl, Kirsty ref1, ref2 McDonald, Ian ref1 MacGregor, Ian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 MacKenzie, Kelvin ref1, ref2, ref3 McLaren, Malcolm ref1, ref2 Mail on Sunday ref1 Major, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mandela, Nelson ref1, ref2, ref3 Mandelson, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Maradona, Diego ref1 Marshall, Walter ref1, ref2 Massiter, Cathy ref1, ref2 Maw, Annette and Charlene ref1 Maxwell, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mayall, Rik ref1 Meyer, Sir Anthony ref1 MIref1 ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Michael, George ref1 Michael of Kent, Prince and Princess ref1 Militants ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Milligan, Spike ref1 Minder ref1 miners’ strike ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

The costs for the refueling contract alone is expected to run more than $15 billion.39 Also in the works is the privatization of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (the British equivalent of the American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is in charge of the development and assessment of military technology.40 The Blair government has even floated the idea of privatizing future troop donations to UN peacekeeping missions.41 The Former Soviet Union and the Middle East To the east, an explosion of private military activity has accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall. The deterioration of order in post-Soviet Russia provides a dramatic illustration.42 Besides the nearly 150,000 employees of private security firms that operate inside Russia, several new companies have ventured onto the international market to provide military expertise for hire. This has resulted in thousands of ex-Soviet soldiers working in the PMF field.

Instead, it is distinctly representative of the changed global security and business environments at the start of the twenty-first century. The end of the Cold War is at the heart of the emergence of the privatized military industry. The standoff between the two superpowers ordered international politics for half a century. When the Berlin Wall fell, an entire global order collapsed almost overnight. The resultant effect on the supply and demand of military services created a "security gap*1 that the private market rushed to fill. There were two other necessary factors to the emergence of the industry, however. Both are long-term trends that underlay the transfer of military services to private entities and the reopening of the market.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Journalists who moved from one protest to another called me—not to seek comment, but to share stories, as they were experiencing their first glimmer of hopefulness in a war-torn Middle East and wanted to talk about it. Experts sent us papers trying to place the unfolding events in the Arab world in historical context: Was this analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the nations of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy like flowers blooming; or was this like Hungary in 1956, or Tiananmen Square in 1989, popular movements that would be trampled by strongmen? I’d lie awake in bed, my mind racing. A few weeks ago, it seemed that helping to pass the New START treaty was the biggest thing I’d be a part of in government; now, every statement we made, every meeting I was in, every decision Obama had to make, felt like the most important thing I’d ever been a part of—and I wanted us to do something, to shape events instead of observing them.

I saw the reasons why these arguments gained traction. Advocating intervention gets attention. And there’s something innately American about believing that there must be a solution. Many of the people who work in American foreign policy today were shaped by the experience of the 1990s, when the United States was ascendant. The Berlin Wall had come down. Democracy was spreading across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Russia was on its back foot, and China had not yet risen. We really could shape events in much of the world. NATO could expand into the former Soviet Union without fear that Russia would invade one of those countries.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

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

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

But if our efforts to help only cause more harm, it’s inexcusable. Scarred by Vietnam, my parents’ generation came of age with a deep distrust of American power. They suspected that American interventionism never stemmed from pure motives, and never, ever, ended well. My generation came of age at a more hopeful moment: I was a college student when the Berlin Wall came down, and the notion of nonideological U.S. engagement with the world seemed suddenly possible again. The Rwandan genocide taught my generation that nonintervention can be as unconscionable as meddling, and Bosnia and Kosovo taught us that U.S. military power could be a force for good. But after all the waste and bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve lost much of my faith in our government’s ability to restore peace or bring justice.

., 149, 328 artificial intelligence, 135 Asia, colonialism in, 231 Assad, Bashar al-, 248, 314–15 Assize of Arms (1181), 255 Association of the United States Army (AUSA), 149, 151 asymmetric warfare, 41–42 Atlantic, 15, 134 atomic bomb, 133, 190, 191 Atyam, Angelina, 242–43 Augustine, Saint, 184, 185 Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, 190 Austin, John, 71 Australia, 390 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF; 2001), 292–95, 362 Avotip, 174–75 Awlaki, Anwar al-, 108, 296 Baghdad, Iraq, 30–33 Balkans, 81, 243 Ban Ki-moon, 282 Barbary Coast, 47–49 Barno, David, 101, 316, 317, 352 Basque separatists, 339 Basra, 31 battlefield: cyberspace as, 130–31 drone strikes outside traditional, 106–7, 284–89, 293 evolving concept of, 10, 12, 14, 21, 106–7, 156, 252, 284 Ben (Ugandan parent), 235–36, 242–43 Bensahel, Nora, 352 Berlin Wall, fall of, 101 berserkers, 9, 172, 182 Betsey, 48 Bhagavad Gita, 170 Bible, war in, 170, 175 big data, 129, 132, 302, 413 Bill of Rights, English, 101, 256 bin Laden, Osama, 90, 197, 220, 266 killing of, 121, 258 biological warfare, 11 biometric data, 302 bioweapons, 129, 263, 264, 338 DNA-linked, 11, 14, 132, 134, 140–41, 349 Black Death, 261 Blackfoot Indians, 173 Blackstone, William, 211 Blair, Dennis, 120 Bleeding Talent (Kane), 327 Blum, Gabriella, 133 Bockarie, Sam “Mosquito,” 242 Bohannan, Paul, 346 Boko Haram, 277 boot camp, 181–82 Bosnia, 26, 80, 101, 205, 226 ethnic cleansing in, 194 massacre of Muslim civilians in, 206–7, 209–10, 215 Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of, 205 Bosnian Serb army: massacre of Muslim civilians by, 206–7, 209–10, 215 10th Sabotage Detachment of, 206–7 Bosnia War, 234 Botswana, 85 Branjevo collective farm, 206 Brennan, John, 108, 220, 251 Brennan Center for Justice, 125, 126 British Army, 257 British East India Company, 231, 256–57, 258, 340 Bronze Age, 264 Brooks, Rosa: in Afghanistan, 73–75, 76, 77 antiwar activism of, 26 evolving view of military held by, 26–28 family background of, 25–26, 28 fear felt by, 241–42 at Fort Carson, 16–18 Guantánamo visit of, 51–52, 67–69 at Human Rights Watch, 27 in Iraq, 30–32 Pentagon job of, 3–4, 5–7, 34–35, 39–40, 42–43, 62–67, 70–71, 72, 86–87, 88, 116, 127–28, 307–9, 320 shame felt by, 242–43 State Department job of, 27, 28, 53 in Uganda, 176–81, 235–36, 237–38, 241 Bush, George H.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

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

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

The End of Moderation The pressures of integrating vast populations involved on the periphery of the world economy played an important role in the formation of the financial bubble at the turn of the millenia and the subsequent meltdown. World integration, while hardly new, accelerated greatly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Probably within a half century it may be largely over, save for pockets around the globe that may remain backwards due to Islamic fundamentalism, communism, or despotism. Population growth, once a scare akin to global warming today, peaked at 2.4 percent in the 1960s in developing regions. While the first response of poor people to exposure to newfound wealth may be the instinct of procreation to provide for them in their old age, such customs die off.

Moreover, deleveraging and preference of individuals and central banks to convert paper into gold could reveal weakness in the financial system far deeper than the stress tests of early 2009 did. This 362 ENDLESS MONEY would force resolution of the imbalances that have built up, ushering in a system of robust, balanced world trade and healthy domestic savings. Barbarians at the Gate After having cashed in the check from the peace dividend received when the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, begrudgingly America has been brought back into conflict. The United States looked the other way when al Qaeda launched repeated, minor strikes in the 1990s, but we were forced briefly into a new perception of who our enemies were on September 11, 2001, when the nation was attacked in New York and at the Pentagon.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

It had been flummoxed and humbled by its struggle in the Land Between the Rivers, trying nearly everything in its toolbox of conventional methods, and not finding much that promised a successful outcome. Finally, it was ready to try something new. It had to come a long way. In the feel-good days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11, and even for some time after, when the U.S. military was the armed wing of “the sole superpower,” Pentagon officials liked to talk about “rapid decisive operations.” That was a term for, as one 2003 study done at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies put it, the devastating cumulative effect of “dominant maneuver, precision engagement and information operations.”

INDEX Abdullah, king of Jordan Abizaid, John Abu Ghraib Abu Haritha Acevedo Vila, Anibal Adeeb, Ali al- Adhamiyah (Baghdad neighborhood) Afghanistan Afghanistan war Agami, Daniel Alarcon, Victor Albu Issa tribe Albu Soda tribe Alefantis, James Alford, Dale Algeria Al Iraqia Al Jazeera Allen, George Allen, James Allen, John Allyn, Daniel al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) American Enterprise Institute Amiriyah (Baghdad neighborhood) Amiriyah Knights Amman Anbar People’s Council al Anbar Province, Iraq Anderson, “Smokin’ Joe” “anti-Iraqi forces” (AIF) Arab Jabour, Iraq Arlington County Courthouse Armstrong, Joel Army War College Arnold, William Assawi, Rafi al- Atkinson, Rick Austin, Lloyd “Awakening Council” Aylwin-Foster, Nigel Baath party Bacevich, Andrew Badr Corps Baghdad beginning of surge in Bush’s visit to civil war in Baghdad, battle of Baghdad Diary (film) Baghdad Operational Command Baghdad Security Plan One Baker, James Baqubah, Iraq Barbero, Michael Bargewell, Eldon Barnett, Thomas P. M. Barrasso, John Barzani, Masoud Basin Harbor Basra, Iraq Batiste, John Batschelet, Allen Beirut Bell, Gertrude Bell, Mike Benavides, Jose Berlin Wall Biddle, Stephen Biden, Joseph Big Boy Rules (Fainaru) Birmingham News Black Hawk Down Blackwater Boehner, John Borggren, Erica Watson Bosnia Boylan, Steve Brady, Mark Bremer. Paul Bridging Strategy (TBS) Brimley, Shawn Brzezinski, Zbigniew Burganoyne, Michael Burns, John Burr, Stephen Bush, George H.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

He found that meaning in the Open Society Fund, which he established in 1979 and which has since given away more than $4.5 billion. The first program was providing scholarships8 to black students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Since then Soros has spent billions of dollars trying to nudge nations, particularly those under totalitarian control, toward a more democratic and open society. When the Berlin Wall fell9 in 1989, Soros saw it as an opportunity for the West to rescue the East. At a conference in the former East German city of Potsdam, Soros says he was literally laughed at when he suggested launching an aid program for the former Soviet Union similar to the post–World War II Marshall Plan.

In order to survive: Ibid., p. 53. 5. Popper’s ideology of an “open society”: Ibid., pp. 70–73. 6. In his biography Soros: Ibid., p. 166. 7. Yet according to Jane Mayer: Jane Mayer, “The Money Man,” The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 2004. 8. The first program was providing scholarships: Aryeh Neier interview. 9. When the Berlin Wall fell: Kaufman, Soros, pp. 228–29. 10. But by far the biggest beneficiary: Mayer, “The Money Man.” 11. During the 1994 congressional election: [Unsigned,] “The Charge of the Think-Tanks,” The Economist, Feb. 15, 2003. 12. He also donated more than $1 million: Judith Miller, “With Big Money and Brash Ideas, a Billionaire Redefines Charity,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 1996. 13.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

On the forces driving inequality and their consequences, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: OECD, 2011), Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future (New York and London: Norton, 2012), and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, and London, England, 2014). 59. See, in particular, a remarkable paper by Christoph Lakner and Branco Milanovic of the World Bank, ‘Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Research Working Paper 6719, December 2013, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2013/12/11/000158349_20131211100152/Rendered/PDF/WPS6719.pdf. 60. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Divided We Stand. 61.

Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). Laeven, Luc and Fabian Valencia. ‘Systemic Banking Crises: A New Database’, International Monetary Fund WP/08/224, 2008. www.imf.org. Lakner, Christoph and Branco Milanovic. ‘Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Research Working Paper No. 6719, December 2013. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2013/12/11/000158349_20131211100152/Rendered/PDF/WPS6719.pdf. Lanman, Scott and Steve Matthews. ‘Greenspan Concedes to “Flaw” in his Market Ideology’, 23 October 2008. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?


pages: 647 words: 161,908

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess, Paul Haney

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, card file, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, Neil Armstrong, out of africa

These views reflected some of the considerable unease felt by many outside of the Soviet Union. Though there was undoubtedly a degree of admiration for their historic achievement, it came hand in hand with concern about Russia's new assertiveness, best symbolized by the construction the year before of the Berlin Wall within a week of Gherman Titov's flight aboard Vostok 2. The New York Times declared that though the United States was not irretrievably behind in space exploration, it was further back than had been imagined. It acknowledged that putting two spacecraft into close proximity, however briefly, was a scientific achievement "that represents another triumph of human genius in which all men can take pride."

During a detour into the French-controlled sector of West Berlin, the cosmonauts gave a talk about their spaceflight to a theater audience. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside and booed their arrival, holding up placards listing the number of people who had died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. When the cosmonauts later tried to leave in a limousine, demonstrators splattered red paint on all four of the side windows and the windscreen. The paint could not be cleared off sufficiently for the car to be driven, so the shaken ivp guests were bundled into a modest gray sedan, uncomfortably squeezed between security officers, and raced at high speed with a police escort back to the Eastern Bloc.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The underestimation, or even outright ignorance, of the oppositions between Anglo-Saxon liberalism, the French nation-state, and the German and Russian empires ought to have sounded the alarm for the latent conflicts in the international sphere. But the Anglo-Saxon philosophers of the Belle Époque, just like Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were quick to extol the end of history. They believed themselves to be carrying forth universal values, and that it was their mission to introduce them around the world. And what better vehicle for, indeed, this than finance? The pound sterling’s longstanding gold convertibility sanctioned its preponderance as a key currency.

All those who have reached this point of the argument come up against the same conclusion: Germany and France do not trust each other! But perhaps there are structural reasons why this is the case, which we must understand if we are to know if and how it is possible to surpass this obstacle. The euro was not born under favourable auspices. The upheavals prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall forced a hurried compromise. Chancellor Kohl wanted to get the international community to endorse a rapid unification of Germany. President Mitterrand was frightened by the prospect of future German power, and wanted to use currency as a means of binding Germany to Europe. The compromise reached was that Germany would be given free rein for reunification, but would also have to abandon the Deutsche Mark and accept monetary union.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

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

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

In 1950, half of the working population of Spain, Portugal and Greece was employed in agriculture; the same was true of a third of Austrians, almost 30% of French workers, and nearly a quarter of West Germans.11 As they shifted into industry and services, these workers became much more productive. West Germany also received an influx of around 8 million workers in the immediate aftermath of the war, and another 3.8 million people before East Germany built the Berlin wall in 1961. Europe also enjoyed catch-up growth that reflected the lost investment of the war years. By 1949, industrial production in all the countries participating in the Marshall Plan (bar West Germany and Greece) was higher than it had been in 1938. There was an investment boom as industry replaced destroyed and outdated equipment.

Protests occurred in the eastern European nations that had been occupied since the war. Gorbachev, to his eternal credit, refused to follow the example of his predecessors by sending in the tanks. Eastern Europeans started to cross borders and the guards did not stop them; more than four decades of oppression had ended. Most symbolically, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. In a remarkably short period, Germany was reunited, Eastern European nations seized their independence, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Russia was by far the largest of the 15 independent countries that emerged from the Soviet Union. Under Boris Yeltsin, the country adopted a process of shock therapy, which involved the elimination of price controls and subsidies, and the privatisation of many industries.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

They carried flags from Hungary’s pre-Communist era and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet military forces. “Ivan, Aren’t You Homesick?” and “Legal State, Not a Police State” declared their protest signs. The defiant march added to the cracks spreading that spring through the structures of global politics. The Berlin Wall fell a few months later, in November. The Soviet Union fissured and then disappeared. Democratic and free-market revolutions and revivals swept through Central Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Ethnic, religious, and territorial conflicts, long subdued by the cold war, erupted one after another.

In 1959, Exxon ranked as the second-largest American corporation by revenue and profit; four decades later it was third. And more than any of its corporate peers, Exxon’s trajectory now pointed straight up. The corporation’s revenues would grow fourfold during the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its profits would smash all American records. As it expanded, Exxon refined its own foreign, security, and economic policies. In some of the faraway countries where it did business, because of the scale of its investments, Exxon’s sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy.

., 565 Beautiful Vision, Inc., 526 Bechtel Corporation, 96, 97 Beggar of Hope, The (Le Mendiant de l’Espoir) (Haggar), 171 Bellachey, Brenda, 130 Benchmark Capital, 591 Bennett, Jack, 62 Bennett, John, 139, 146 Benson, Sally, 444 benzene, 381, 386 Berezovsky, Boris, 271 Berlin Wall, 17, 19 Bingaman, Jeff, 321 Bingel, Kelly, 551 Bin Laden, Osama, 172, 400 Bin Nayef, Mohammed, 207 Black, Hugo, 401 Black, Ronnie, 43 Blair, Tony, 106, 220, 224, 240, 285, 290, 523, 611 Blankfein, Lloyd, 554 Bodkin, Jim, 130 Bodman, Samuel, 143, 248, 323, 545, 560, 563 Boeing Corporation, 153 Booth, John Wilkes, 542 Borico, Miguel, 292 Bowdoin College, 132 Bowen, Russell, xiii, 375–76, 378 Boxer, Barbara, 320, 486 Boyce, Ralph “Skip,” 113, 117 Boy Scouts of America, 333, 335, 541 Brazil, 18, 446, 448 Breakingviews, 591 Breast Cancer Fund, 483, 485–86, 491 Bremer, Paul, 231, 232, 236 Bridgeland, John, 90 Brill, Ken, 91–92 Bristol-Myers, 80, 91 British Petroleum (BP), 2–3, 10, 16–17, 31, 36–37, 40, 51, 52, 57, 62, 64, 70, 85, 107, 161, 198, 218, 255, 259, 261, 264, 274, 320, 322, 326, 340, 342, 414, 415, 418, 421, 423, 425, 457, 546, 549, 550, 568, 575, 578, 595, 608, 609, 613, 615, 616 Browne’s tenure at, 610–12 climate change issue and, 224–26 ExxonMobil’s rivalry with, 224 liquefied natural gas industry and, 581 logo of, 224 political neutrality of, 226 poor safety culture of, 612, 614 proposed Mobil merger with, 58–59 proposed XTO merger and, 581–82 solar investment of, 224–25 Texas City disaster and, 612 Voluntary Principles and, 404–5 see also Deepwater Horizon disaster Brookings Institution, 344, 537, 553 Brooklyn, 3 Brooks, Karen, 113 Browne, John, 16–17, 57, 59–61, 64, 224–25, 226, 259, 264–65, 340, 610–12 Browner, Carol, 539–40, 542–43 Buchan, Graeme, 451–52, 459 Buchholtz, Walter, 86, 340, 493 Buffett, Warren, 577 Bundy, Darcie A., 215 Burma, 244 Burt, Richard, 292 Bush, Barbara, 235 Bush, George H.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

Like Dulles, General Clay occupied positions in the top ranks of the American establishment. After serving as the U.S. military governor in postwar Germany, Clay had worked with Dulles in Cold War propaganda projects like the Crusade for Freedom, returning to Germany in 1961 as an adviser to President Kennedy during the Berlin Wall crisis. Clay dangerously escalated the crisis without the president’s authorization by threatening to knock down the recently erected wall with U.S. Army tanks. It took all of the Kennedy brothers’ back-channel diplomatic skills to defuse the confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. A disgusted Clay later accused Kennedy of losing his “nerve.”

It was up to those who advocated “social justice and progress and human rights,” said Kennedy, to make the more difficult ideals of democracy a reality for people all over the world. Kennedy’s Italian itinerary, which included an audience with the new pope, Paul VI, at the Vatican and a side trip to Naples, was the finale to a triumphant European tour that was highlighted by a sentimental stopover in Ireland and his resounding challenge to Soviet tyranny at the Berlin Wall (“Ich bin ein Berliner . . .”). The crowds in Rome that greeted Kennedy’s motorcade were comparatively sparse, as the presidential limousine and its police motorcycle squadron made the long and winding trip to the Quirinale along the boulevards and narrow streets of the capital. The Eternal City could be blasé about visiting dignitaries, and the summer heat was sweltering.

“For every nation knows that Ireland was the first of the small countries in the twentieth century to win its struggle for independence.” By standing up to “foreign domination, Ireland is the example and the inspiration to those enduring endless years of oppression.” JFK, fresh from his stirring speech at the Berlin Wall, certainly had the peoples of Soviet-ruled Eastern Europe in mind. But there were also echoes in Kennedy’s liberationist rhetoric of his earlier speeches about the anticolonial struggles of Vietnam and Algeria. As Schlesinger noted, Kennedy’s speeches stirred the forces of freedom around the world.


pages: 195 words: 58,462

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

(We had done plenty of reporting from Red Square; Revolution Square, in Leningrad; and various central squares around the Soviet Union, particularly in the Baltic capitals: Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius.) We arranged to meet some friends in Prague for Thanksgiving; they were coming from Germany, where they had just covered the epochal breach in the Berlin Wall and the onset of revolutions everywhere. The night before we arrived, there had been a demonstration on Wenceslas Square, largely students. Riot police had cleared the square, and the rumor was that someone had been killed in the melee. Wenceslas Square had been the scene of tragedy before. In January 1969 two students, Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, burned themselves to death to protest the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Pioneers are often stuck in one way of doing things—the way they invented—while imitators are often more aware of transformational changes in the market precisely because they imitated. As Wired’s Matt Cowan reported, in 1998 Marc Samwer had an instinct that eBay would thrive in the German market, as the country still suffered from old regulatory retail laws that prevented discounts (a vestige of its reunification in 1990, after the Berlin Wall crumbled). His brothers agreed. The Samwers told Wired that they contacted eBay via email numerous times, recommending that the company replicate the platform in Germany (and hire the Samwers to do so). Claiming that eBay failed to respond, the brothers started their own German-language auction site, Alando, which was then purchased by eBay for 38 million euros (over $50 million) only a hundred days after its debut.


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

The original Chinese language document is also publicly available. 9. Ibid. 10. David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Berkeley and Washington, DC: University of California Press and Woodrow Wilson Press, 2008), particularly chapter 4. 11. See Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 12. This full critique is provided in David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, op. cit., chapter 4. 13. See Richard Baum, “The Fifteenth National Party Congress: Jiang Takes Command?”, The China Quarterly (March 1998), pp. 141–56. 14. Jiang Zemin, “Hold High the Banner of Deng Xiaoping Theory for All-Around Advancement of the Cause of Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Into the 21st Century,” report delivered to the 15th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, September 12, 1997, section VI, available at: http://www.bjreview.com/document/txt/2011-03/25/content_363499_10.htm. 15.


pages: 214 words: 57,614

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

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

Although many of their ideas were finally put into practice in the Reagan administration, it remained the case that the foreign policy establishment—the people who ran the bureaucracies at the State Department, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon, as well as the legions of advisers, think-tank specialists, and academics—was largely dismissive of them. Neoconservatives were also used to having the Europeans look down on them as moralistic nai'fs, reckless cowboys, or worse. They were used to bucking conventional wisdom and going for solutions—like the double zero or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall—that everyone else thought were completely out of the realm of possibility. The sudden collapse of communism vindicated many of these ideas and made them appear mainstream and obvious after 1989. This naturally did a great deal to bolster the self-confidence of those who had held them, a self-confidence that strongly reinforced the us-versus-them solidarity that characterizes all groups of like-minded people.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

Egon Krenz, his man in charge of security, flew to Leipzig to prevent the shooting. Krenz feared that if their security forces opened fire it would mean the end of the regime. Ten days later, after Honecker was forced to resign, the regime did resort to violence. Within a month they were gone and the Berlin Wall was being chipped away by souvenir hunters. In Prague, on November 17, 1989, students marching in a procession to commemorate the shooting of a student by the Nazis were attacked by the Communist police. With East Germany falling, the Czech regime believed they needed to make a show of force. Rallies protesting the regime grew in numbers every day after the attack.


The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

This then is the paradox and the price of conceiving of fiction and politics in terms of individual moral adventures: it negates possibility itself. As for the non-human, it is almost by definition excluded from a politics that sanctifies subjectivity and in which political claims are made in the first person. Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm [parts per million]?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ For the body politic, this vision of politics as moral journey has also had the consequence of creating an ever-growing divergence between a public sphere of political performance and the realm of actual governance: the latter is now controlled by largely invisible establishments that are guided by imperatives of their own.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Eastern Europe was lagging behind, but only by a few years.80 In developed societies, consumption grew by around 5 per cent per year in the period 1952–79; slightly faster in Japan (8 per cent); more slowly in the United Kingdom (3 per cent).81 The figures for the USSR in the 1960s–’70s are comparable (c.6 per cent),82 although it started from a lower point. And there was more leisure time in which to spend rising incomes. In West Germany in the 1960s, wages doubled and free time rose by an hour to three hours forty minutes a day, with free Saturdays and a rise in paid holidays from fourteen to twenty days.83 On the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the socialist GDR, people had to work longer but nonetheless they, too, gained an extra hour of leisure a day between 1974 and 1985.84 Travel, mobility and communication grew by leaps and bounds. The first charter flights for Spain and Corsica took off in the early 1950s. The same period saw the democratization of the car.

The Prague uprising in 1968 and conflict in Poland in 1970 were followed by promises of more goods and greater openness to youth culture. While there is some truth to this, it tells us little about how goods were changing daily life in these societies. Socialist consumption was a product of internal tensions as well as external stimuli. American goods turned the Iron Curtain into a net curtain. Before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it was easy for East Germans to visit exhibitions or watch American movies in one of the border cinemas in the Western zone, helped by a subsidized exchange rate. In June 1956, Polish workers used the Poznan´ international trade fair, which in addition to the ubiquitous modern fitted kitchen had a packed American fashion show, for anti-Soviet protests.173 The problem for socialist regimes was lack of vision as much as poor economics.

The German Democratic Republic perfected a nationwide network for the collection of secondary materials, the so-called Kombinat für Sekundärstofferfassung (SERO), which in the 1980s brought a pink elephant – its mascot, ‘Emmy’ – to the lakes of Mecklenburg and the chalk hills of Saxony. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, SERO operated 17,200 collecting points and 55,000 containers; there were additional points for metal recycling and containers for food waste. More, not fewer, returnable bottles made the rounds.53 East Germans recycled an estimated 40 per cent of their refuse – something Britons only managed in 2010 and Italians and Spaniards have yet to accomplish.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

In 1957, its successor – the R7, better known by its NATO codename SS6 ‘Sapwood’ – came into production with a range of 5,000 miles, dramatically raising the threat posed by the Soviet Union to the west.41 The launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the following year, along with the introduction of a fleet of Tupolev Tu-95 ‘Bear’ and Myasishchev 3M ‘Bison’ long-range strategic bombers, focused the minds of American military planners further still: it was vital that the US should be able to monitor missile tests, keeping an eye open for developments in ballistic capabilities as well as possible hostile launches.42 The Cold War often prompts thought of the Berlin Wall and eastern Europe as the principal arena for confrontation between the superpowers. But it was the swathe of territory within the Soviet Union’s underbelly where the real game of Cold War chess was played out. The strategic value to the US of the countries along the USSR’s southern flank had long been recognised.

In order to effect this, he set aside a substantial sum for covert operations: $100 million.10 Ever since the 1920s, the US had been actively involved in propping up regimes that suited its wider strategic interests. Washington was now showing once again that it was willing to consider regime change in order to impose its vision on this part of the world. The muscular ambition of the US at this time was partly fired by the profound geopolitical changes witnessed in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had come down not long before the invasion of Kuwait, and in the months after the defeat of Iraq the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. On Christmas Day 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union and announced the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen independent states.

INDEX Ābādān, here, here, here, here, here, here Abbās Mīrzā, Prince, here Abbās, Shah, here Abbasid caliphate, here, here, here, here, here Abd al-Ilha, Crown Prince, here Abd al-Malik, Caliph, here Abdullāh, King (of Jordan), here Aberdeen, Lord, here Abivard, here Abraham, here, here, here, here Abrams, Elliott, here Abu Abbas, here Abwehr, here Aceh, here Achaemenid empire, here Acheson, Dean, here Acre, here, here, here, here, here, here Adelard of Bath, here Aden, here, here Adenystrae, here adhān, here Aeschylus, here Afghan Wars, here, here Afghanistan bi-tarafi policy, here and Cold War, here, here, here, here and defeat of al-Qaida, here defence of, here, here and Northern Distribution Network, here poppy cultivation, here Soviet invasion, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here US-led invasion, here, here US support for insurgents, here, here Afrika Korps, here Agathias, here, here Agra, here Amad Sanjar, Sultan, here Ai Khanoum, Delphic maxims at, here AK-74 assault rifles, here Akbar I, Emperor, here, here al-Afghānī, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn, here Alans, here Alaric the Goth, here Alaska, here, here, here Albright, Madeleine, here Albuquerque, Alfonso de, here Aleppo, here, here, here Alexander the Great, here, here, here, here Alexander I, Tsar, here Alexander II, Tsar, here Alexander III, Tsar, here Alexandretta, here Alexandria, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and European economic development, here rise of, here and spice trade, here Alexandria ad Caucasum, see Bagram Alexandria in Arachosia, see Kandahar Alexandria in Aria, see Herat Alexios I, Emperor, here, here, here Algeria, here Ali (cousin of the Prophet), here Aligrodo, James, here Aliyev, Ilham, here Allenby, General Edmund, here Almaty, here Almeida, Francisco de, here aloe wood, here Alp Arslan (Seljuk ruler), here Alsace-Lorraine, here Amalfi, here, here, here, here, here Amanullah, King (of Afghanistan), here, here amber, here, here ambergris, here American War of Independence, here Amery, Leopold, here Amin, Hafizullah, here amphorae, Roman, here amputation, as punishment for theft, here Amsterdam, rise of, here, here, here An Lushan (Sogdian general), here Andropov, Yuri, here Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, here, here, here, here Anglo-Persian Oil Company, here, here, here, here, here Anglo-Russian Convention, here Anna Komnene, here Annals of St Bertin, here Antioch, here, here, here, here, here, here anti-Semitism, here, here, here, here, here, here Antwerp, rise of, here Anzac Corps, here Aphrahat, abbot, here Apollo, cult of, here, here Aq Saray palace, here Aqaba (Mongol warlord), here Aqaba, Crusader attack on, here Aquinas, Thomas, here Arab nationalism, rise of, here Arab pirates, here, here Arab–Israeli War (1948), here Arak, here Aramaic, here, here, here, here, here, here Araya peninsula, here Ardashīr I, King (of Persia), here Arguim, here Aristotle, here, here, here Ark of the Covenant, here Armenian church, and Mongol threat, here Armenian traders, here, here, here Arsaces (Persian ruler), here Arsuf, here Artaxerxes, King (of Persia), here asceticism, here, here Ashgabat, here, here Ashmolean Museum, here Ashoka, Emperor, here, here al-Askarī, Jafar, here al-Assad, Hafez, here Assarsson, Vilhelm, here Astana, here, here astronomy, here, here Aswan dam, here Athens, here, here, here Atil, here, here, here, here atomic bombs, here Atoms for Peace programme, here Attila the Hun, here Auchinleck, General Claude, here Augustus, Emperor, here, here, here Auschwitz, here Avars, here, here Avaza tourist region, here Awrangzīb, Emperor, here ‘axis of evil’, here Axum, kingdom of, here Ayas, here, here Ayla, here Ayn Jālūt, battle of, here Aziz, Tariq, here Azores, here, here Aztecs, here, here Bābur, Emperor, here, here Babylon, here, here, here, here Backe, Herbert, here, here, here Bactra, here Bactrian camels, here Badr, battle of, here Badr offensive, here Baeza, Pedro, here Bāgh-i Naqsh-i Jahān, here Bāgh-i Wafa, here Baghdad architectural transformation, here assassinations and Qasim coup, here British occupation, here, here, here, here expansion of textile industry, here founding and rise of, here, here, here Gertrude Bell dinner in, here indifference to Crusades, here loss of authority, here Rumsfeld visits, here sack of, here Seljuk conquest of, here and slave trade, here, here Viking Rus’ and, here Baghdad Pact, here Bagram, here, here Baha’i faith, here Bahrain, here, here, here, here Baikonur Kosmodrome, here Baker, James, here Baker, Matthew, here Bakhtiar, Shapur, here Baku, here, here, here, here, here oilfields, here, here, here Al-Balādhurī, here Balalyk-tepe, here Balāsāghūn, here, here Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem, here Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, here Balfour, Arthur, here, here Balfour Declaration, here Balkan Wars, here, here Balkh, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ballistic missiles, here, here Bamiyan Buddhas, here Ban Chao, General, here Bandar Abbas, here, here, here Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan, here Barakatullāh, Muammad, here Barbaricum, here Barchuq (Uighur ruler), here Barmakid family, here Barygaza, here, here Bashgird tribe, here Basil II, Emperor, here Basra, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bastarnians, here Batavia, here Batnae, here Battle of Britain, here Batumi, here Bayterek tower, here Bāzargān, Mahdī, here BBC Persian Radio Service, here Beckwith, Colonel Charlie, here Becudo, Mathew, here Bedouin (‘desert people’), here Begin, Menachem, here Behistun, inscription at, here Beijing, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Beirut, here, here, here, here Beja people, here Béla IV, King (of Hungary), here Belgium, here, here Bell, Gertrude, here, here, here, here, here Beloozero, here Bengal, here, here, here, here, here Ben-Gurion, David, here Berbera, here Berenike, here Berke (leader of the Golden Horde), here Berlin–Baghdad railway, here Berlin Wall, here, here Bernard of Clairvaux, here Bertie, Sir Francis, here Beth Lapat, see Gundeshāpūr Bethlehem, here Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, here Bevin, Ernest, here Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, here Bicker, Andries, here Bijns, Anna, here Bilbais, plague in, here bin Laden, Osama, here, here birch bark, here birds, worship of, here birds of prey, here, here Birka, expansion of, here al-Bīrūnī, Abū Rayān, here Bismarck, here Black Death, here, here Blair, Tony, here Blake, Admiral Robert, here Blake, William, here Blix, Hans, here blood transfusion, first, here Boccaccio, Giovanni, here, here Bodrum, here Boer War, here Bohemond, here, here Boleyn, Anne, here Bolsheviks, here Bombay, here, here, here bombers, strategic, here Boniface VIII, Pope, here Book of Psalms, here Book of the Crown, The, here Book of the Laws of the Countries, here Borodin, Alexander, here Borodino, here Bosnia, annexation of, here Boston Tea Party, here Bougie, here Bowrey, Thomas, here Brackenbury, Henry, here brazil-wood, here Brest, here Brest-Litovsk, here Brezhnev, Leonid, here Britain (British empire) domination of India, here, here First World War aims, here increasing national debt, here intentions in Mesopotamia, here, here, here, here and Jewish immigration, here loss of North American colonies, here policy towards Iran, here rapprochement with Russia, here relations with Persia, here relations with Russia, here, here, here, here Roman conquest, here rise of empire, here template for invasion of Soviet Union, here withdrawal from east of Suez, here see also England British Museum, here British Petroleum, here, here Britons (the name), here Brooke, Rupert, here Bruges, rise of, here Brydon, Dr William, here Brzezinski, Zbigniew, here, here Buddha, here, here, here, here Buddhism, here, here, here Mongols and, here reconciled with Christianity, here Buddhist art, here Buddhist monasteries, endowment of, here Buddhists, here, here, here, here, here Bukhara, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bukharin, Nikolai, here Buhtīshū family, here Bulgaria, post-war, here Bullard, Sir Reader, here, here, here Bunsen, Sir Maurice de, here Burke, Edmund, here Burma, evacuation of, here Burmah Oil Company, here Burne-Jones, Edward, here Burnes, Alexander, here Bush, George H.


pages: 180 words: 61,340

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

Commerzbank executives had taken him there to show him how, in full view of the world below, he could shit on Deutsche Bank. The Commerzbank chairman, Klaus-Peter Müller, actually works in Berlin, inside another very German kind of place. His office is attached to the side of the Brandenburg Gate. The Berlin Wall once ran, roughly speaking, right through the middle of it. One side of his building was once a field of fire for East German border guards, the other a backdrop for Ronald Reagan’s famous speech. (“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) From looking at it you would never guess any of this.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

Answer: NATO expanded to the East, in violation of verbal agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, reaching right to the borders of Russia in ways that are by now raising a serious threat of confrontation. The official role of NATO was also changed. Its mandate became control over the global energy system, sea lanes, and pipelines, while it serves in effect as a U.S.-run intervention force. Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, the United States invaded Panama in order to kidnap a minor thug, Manuel Noriega, who had fallen out of favor when he began defying U.S. orders. U.S. forces bombed poor residential areas, killing many people, several thousand according to Central American human rights organizations. After a vulgar assault on the Vatican Embassy where Noriega had taken refuge, U.S. forces apprehended him and brought him to the United States where he was tried and sentenced mostly for crimes that Washington had praised when he was committing them while on the CIA payroll.


pages: 162 words: 61,105

Eyewitness Top 10 Los Angeles by Catherine Gerber

Berlin Wall, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, East Village, Frank Gehry, haute couture, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, transcontinental railway

High-tech exhibits focus on Nixon’s achievements, but also include a gallery about Watergate. A recreation of the Lincoln Sitting Room, Nixon’s favorite in the White House, is another highlight. d 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd, Yorba Linda • 714-993-3393 • Open 10am–5pm daily (from 11am Sun) • Adm • www.nixonlibraryfoundation.org Reagan Library ) Ronald A chunk of the Berlin Wall, a cruise missile, and a recreated Oval Office are the highlights of this museum devoted to the 40th US president (1911–2004). Exhibits trace Reagan’s life from his childhood, through his Hollywood career to his political ascent, first as California governor, then as president during the waning Cold War years. d 40 Presidential Dr, Simi Mission San Buenaventura church, Ventura Valley • 800-410-8354 • Open 10am–5pm daily • Adm • www.reaganlibrary.com 49 Los Angeles Top 10 Left California Science Center Center Natural History Museum Right Los Angeles Zoo LA for Children Studios !


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

At a time when even Richard Nixon was pronouncing that “we are all Keynesians now,” how could their maximalist rhetoric be anything but out of step? The debate on the calculation problem continued to unfold in the pages of obscure economic journals. The world, however, had moved on. But shortly after Nixon’s startling declaration of allegiance, the existing economic orthodoxies on both sides of the Berlin Wall were violently thrown into question. By the 1970s, “really existing socialism” was mired in economic crisis, its cracks beginning to show. The “free world” was troubled, too, experiencing its most severe economic crisis of the postwar period. Political and economic elites saw in the crisis an opening to unwind their postwar compromise with labor, a compact borne not of love, but out of their fear of revolution.


pages: 200 words: 64,329

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

Ireland, Portugal and Spain were all objects of the need, especially in Germany, to satisfy a crudely religious imperative that sinners must be severely punished if the virtue of fiscal discipline is to flourish. A polity that inflicted such pointless suffering on some of its most vulnerable citizens through so-called austerity is morally askew. The EU lost its moral compass when the Berlin Wall fell. Before that, it was in a competition against communism. The generation of Western European leaders that had experienced the chaos of the continent in the 1930s and 1940s were anxious to prove that a market system could be governed in such a way as to create full employment, fair opportunities, decent public services and steady progress towards economic equality.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Long-term legacy Milton Friedman has had a huge influence on the development of economic theory, on the application of monetarism as an economic policy, and on the outlook of many major politicians. He emerged as an economic political thinker at exactly the right time. His writing and theories on economics chimed with a growing disillusionment with the result of the 158 The Great Economists Keynesianism that many governments had tried to follow. Meanwhile the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that his and his wife’s writing on the political aspects of individualism received attention on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He certainly helped himself in this regard. Between 1966 and 1983, Friedman wrote a regular column on current affairs for Newsweek magazine.


pages: 184 words: 60,229

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life by Lucy Kellaway

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, lockdown, Martin Wolf, stakhanovite, wage slave

I’ve just asked David – who is still, 40 years on, writing about social trends – why he became a journalist all those years ago and why he’s still at it. He said what I knew he was going to say: he wanted to change the world. He wanted to be in the thick of things: he covered Chernobyl, Hillsborough, the miners’ strike, the Berlin Wall – jobs don’t get more exciting than that. My motivation was quite different. I was frightened of news, and of missing the story. It never occurred to me for a single second I might be capable of changing the world; I wasn’t even quite sure which bits were in need of changing. My interests have always been, in the language of economics, micro.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

Thus, the adoption of the centralized, hyperpresidential constitution of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in 1958 was a political act in response to the crisis in Algeria, but also very much in keeping with French politicocultural traditions. It was a characteristically French solution to the problem of the political disorder of the Fourth Republic, a solution that had many precedents in French history. Because culture is a matter of ethical habit, it changes very slowly—much more slowly than ideas. When the Berlin Wall was dismantled and communism crumbled in 1989-1990, the governing ideology in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union changed overnight from Marxism-Leninism to markets and democracy. Similarly, in some Latin American countries, statist or nationalist economic ideologies like import substitution were wiped away in less than a decade by the accession to power of a new president or finance minister.

INDEX Adoption in Chinese societies, 89, 173, 174 in France, 118 in Japan, 89,130, 172-173, 181, 206 in South Korea, 132 AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts- Gesellschaft),31,213 Aerospace industry, 113 Aérospatiale, 123 African-Americans, 10, 62, 292, 295-300, 302-304, 337, 352 Afrikaners, 44 Agnelli family, 101 Ad to Families with Dependent Children, 314 Akers, John, 156 Algeria, 40 Alienation, 228 Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft(AEG), 212 Amoral familism, 56, 99, 100, 107 Amsden, Alice, 14, 72 Anarchosyndicalism, 121 Ancestor worship, 172 Anger, 358 Anomie, 6 Anticapitalism, 116 Antistatism, 15, 29,51, 279 Apparel industry, 102-103, 109 Apprenticeship system, 219, 237-238, 240-242, 245, 247,248, 250 Argentina, 41 Aristotle, 36, 285 Arrow, Kenneth, 151-152 Asea Brown Boveri, 212 Asian-Americans, 297-302, 304 Assemblies of God, 290 Ataturk, 138 AT&T, 24, 25, 278 Authority, 15, 35 French and, 119, 121 Japanese and, 178-179 obedience to, 28, 85-86 parental, 85-86, 131, 172, 285 Weber’s view on, 222 Automobile industry, 7, 8, 16, 48,114, 163-164, 170, 180, 199, 200, 210, 214, 225, 226, 256-265, 317 Baker, Hugh, 89 Balladur, Edouard, 102 Banfield, Edward, 9, 56, 98-100, 106, 337 Bank of Japan, 169, 202-203 Baptists, 46, 288, 289 BASF (Badische Analin und SodaFabrik),211 Bayer, 211 Becker, Gary, 13, 17 Bellah, Robert, 182 Benetton, 103, 109 Benhamou, Eric A, 308 Bentham, Jeremy, 19 Berle, Adolph, 65, 168 Berlin Wall, 40 Berlusconi, Silvio, 102 Biddle, Nicholas, 273 Bill of Rights, 285 Birdzell, L. E, 154 Bismarck, Otto von, 217, 219 Blim, Michael, 109-110 Boeing, 197, 199 Bon Marché, 117 Boy Scouts, 31 Brand names, 31, 79-80,137, 203, 275 Brazil, 45,52 Briefs, Goetz, 232 Broadbanding, 317 Buchanan, James, 17 Buddenbrooks phenomenon, 78, 83-95 Buddhism, 37, 84, 131, 182-183, 287, 344 Bureaucracy Chinese, 84 French, 115, 118-122 Japanese, 52, 170 Weber on, 222 Bushido, 179, 360 Cadbury-Schweppes, 213 Calabria, 100 Calvinism, 44 Campbell Soup, 64 Canada, 47,163, 279, 345 Capitalism, 3, 4, 11, 28, 40, 41, 44, 311-312, 350, 351, 353, 354, 356, 358-361 Carnegie, Andrew, 276 Cartels, 14, 157, 158,204, 214-215, 332 Catholic Church, 40-41, 44, 108,286, 288, 304-305 Chaebol system, 73, 128-130, 133-138, 142,144,145, 333 Chandler, Alfred, 65, 212 Chaplin, Charlie, 228 Character, concept of, 35-36 Charles VII, King of France, 120 Cheating, 152 Chemical industry, 142, 211, 212 Chiang Kai-shek, 138 Chile, 41, 45 China, 16, 31, 52 Chinese-Americans, 300-302 Chinese societies, 20, 28, 69-95. see also specific countries adoption in, 89,173, 174 Confucianism in, 29, 31, 34, 36, 56, 57,84-86,92,93,115,131,134, 172, 177-180, 284, 285, 287, 343, 344, 350 familism in, 56-57, 62, 65, 66, 70, 73-95, 97-98, 107, 111, 114, 115, 345 family structure in, 34, 83, 88, 90-91, 94, 106, 115 firm size in, 79, 345 industrial policy and structure in, 57 inheritance in, 77, 79, 88, 173-174 lineage in, 91-92, 175, 176 management style in, 70, 75-78 self-sufficiency in, 87-88 women in, 90, 93 Chinyang Company, 134 Chonmin class, 132 Christianity, 141-142, 284, 286, 287 Chrysler, 199 Chu Hsi school, 179 Chung Ju Yung, 133, 135,137, 139, 145 Ciba-Geigy, 211 Civic community, 100, 104 Civilizational clash, 5 Civil Law of 1898 (Japan), 167 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 314, 352 Civil rights movement, 314 Civil society, 4-5, 54-55, 150, 360 Classical economics, 17-18, 226 Classical liberalism, 31, 285-286 Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 204, 214, 276 Clinton, Bill, 4, 61, 185 Coal industry, 16 Coase, Ronald, 200, 204 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 122 Coleman, James, 10 Commercial law, 64, 149-151, 223, 275, 330, 336, 350 Commercial Law of 1893 (Japan), 167 Commission for the Dissolution of Zaibatsu, 168 Communications revolution, 23-25, 125, 340-341, 353, 354 Communism, collapse of, 40, 189, 352, 353 Communist Party (France), 121 Communitarian capitalism, 28 Companies des Machines Bull, 123 Compaq, 24 Comparative advantage, 31 Competitiveness literature, 49, 50, 271 Complex family, 105-106 Computer industry, 24, 69-70, 80-81, 114, 165, 170, 340, 341 Concubinage, 174 Conformism, 277 Confucianism, 29, 31, 34, 36, 56,57, 84-86, 92, 93, 115, 131, 134, 172, 177-180, 284, 285, 287, 343, 344, 350 Congregationalists, 289 Conspiracy theories, 53 Constitution of the United States, 273, 285, 288, 315-316 Contract, 26, 27, 63, 65, 149-152, 187, 222-223, 336, 350 Cooperativeness, 43, 46 Corruption, 15, 358 Counter-Reformation, 44 Courtney’s, 79 Craft production, 224, 229, 232 Crédit Lyonnais, 123, 124 Crédit Mobüier, 122, 214 Crime, 11, 51, 310 Criminal organizations, 101, 337-338 Cross-shareholding, 170, 203, 206, 332 Crozier, Michael, 118-119, 235 Culture, 5-6, 15, 34-41, 43-48 Culture of poverty, 38 Cunningham, John, 69 Czech Republic, 361 Daewoo Foundation, 130, 133, 134, 265 Dai-Ichi Kangyo group, 198 Daimaru department store chain, 168-169 Daimler-Benz, 7, 8,214 Decentralized decision making, 65 Declaration of Independence, 273, 284-285 Defense contracting, 153 de Gaulle, Charles, 39 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 39 Deng Xiaoping, 71, 94 Denmark, 345 Dependency theory, 298 Deterding, Henry, 250 Deutsche Bank, 7, 9,214 Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft, 212 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 165 Division of labor, 3, 27, 31, 87, 227-228 Divorce, 51, 309 Dore, Ronald, 28, 190 Downsizing, 24, 48, 185, 271, 340 Dreyfus, Pierre, 114 Du Bois, W E.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

We drive in a landscape that looks virtually the same wherever we go: A red light in Morocco means the same thing as it does in Montana. A walk “man” that moves us across a street in Berlin does the same in Boston, even if the “man” looks a bit different. (The beloved jaunty, hat-clad Ampelmännchen of the former German Democratic Republic has survived the collapse of the Berlin Wall.) We drive on highways that have been so perfectly engineered we forget we are moving at high speeds—indeed, we are sometimes barely aware of moving at all. For all this standardized sameness, though, there is much that is still simply not known about how to manage the flows of all those people in traffic—drivers, walkers, cyclists, and others—in the safest and most efficient manner.

: The story about color blindness and traffic signals comes from Clay McShane, “The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals,” Journal of Urban History, March 1999. p. 396. roles of city streets: Jeffrey Brown, “From Traffic Regulation to Limited Ways: The Effort to Build a Science of Transportation Planning,” Journal of Planning History, vol. 5, no. 1 (February 2006), pp. 3–34. collapse of the Berlin Wall: For a fascinating discussion of how German Democratic Republic traffic engineering was affected by the reunification of Germany, and the cultural underpinnings and consequences of those decisions, see Mark Duckenfield and Noel Calhoun, “Invasion of the Western Ampelmännchen,” German Politics, vol. 6, no. 3 (December 1997), pp. 54–69.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

Diverting even a tiny part of the vast reserves of hard currency spent on Warsaw Pact weapons programmes to underwrite industrial struggles, he argued, would be highly effective in terms of its political impact. Using the IMO’s Dublin solidarity trust as a prototype, the British miners’ leader lobbied for the creation of a £30 million fund to help support international trade-union action. Some thought he had lost touch with reality. Others were highly receptive. A year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Scargill discussed the scheme with Erich Honecker, the East German Communist leader, and Harry Tisch, head of the country’s trade unions, who, he claims, agreed in principle to commit £2 million to a wider solidarity fund. He also had talks in Moscow in January 1990 with Gennadi Yanayev – the Soviet vice-president who would later achieve notoriety as the front man in the bizarre ‘coup’ of August 1991 – about the scheme.

Both Sergei Massalovitch, who complained to the British Fraud Squad about Scargill’s ‘diversion’ of Soviet aid, and Yuri Butchenko, who followed in his footsteps under Miller’s tutelage, were later expelled from the Vorkuta strike committee for misappropriating the organization’s equipment. Butchenko subsequently set up his own ‘information agency’.60 Meanwhile, long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the international trade-union movement carried on fighting the Cold War. Trade unions remained locked into structures which held back the kind of cross-border action that could match the globalization of capital. As the centrist British union leader John Edmonds predicted, the implosion of the WFTU in the wake of the collapse of the East did not reunite the international trade-union movement, but left it more fragmented than ever.


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

The status quo was unacceptable to the Soviets: hundreds of East German refugees were crossing the border every day. At the Vienna summit in June 1961, the Soviet leader threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and eliminate Allied rights to West Berlin. Two months later, he chose a different option, erecting a 104-mile-long "anti-Fascist defense barrier," more commonly known in the West as the Berlin Wall. But tensions continued. On October 26, 1961, American and Soviet tanks had faced each other directly at Checkpoint Charlie in a two-day standoff. It was the first direct American-Soviet confrontation of the nuclear age, with "soldiers and weapons eyeball to eyeball." The fate of Berlin had been on the minds of the president and his advisers from the moment they first learned about the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuba.

balance of power Ball, George ballistic missiles cruise missiles compared with long-range see also ICBMs IRBMs MRBMs Baltic fleet Baltic Sea Bandilovsky, Nikolai Banes Barry, Dan Barter Island Bartlett, Charles Bastian Pinto, Luís Batista, Fulgencio property of uprising against Bay of Pigs invasion CIA duping of Stevenson and communication problems in defense of Cuba in effects on Castro of failure of Khrushchev's views on press silence about prisoners from veterans of Beale, USS "Bears" and "Bisons," Bejucal nuclear storage bunker near Statsenko's underground command post in Beloborodov, Nikolai Beria, Lavrenty Berlin access routes to Checkpoint Charlie and fear of Soviet retaliation in Key West compared with Berlin Wall Bermuda Bermuda Naval Air Station Bert the Turtle Betancourt, Romulo Billings, Lem Bird, George Bismarck, Otto von Black Sea Blue beach Blue Moon Mission Blue Ridge Mountains, underground bunker in Boeing EC-135 aircraft Boggs, Hale Bolivia Bolshakov, Georgi Boltenko, Boris Bomb Alarm System, 336 bombing, bombs atomic, see atomic bombs at Matahambre mine in Rolling Thunder testing of in World War II, seeWorld War II, bombing in see also air strike option, U.S.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class. We need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs. In the last half-century, and in particular in the two decades that stretched from 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the restructuring and global 54 T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T expansion ofcapitalist production have been accompanied by a transformation ofproletarian struggles. As we said, the figure ofan international cycle ofstruggles based on the communication and translation ofthe common desires oflabor in revolt seems no longer to exist.

Obviously they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises.’’8 We cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium, but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example ofthe power ofdesertion and exodus, the power ofthe nomad horde, 214 I N T E R M E Z Z O than the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the collapse ofthe entire Soviet bloc? In the desertion from ‘‘socialist discipline,’’ savage mobility and mass migration contributed substantially to the collapse ofthe system. In fact, the desertion of productive cadres disorganized and struck at the heart ofthe disciplinary system ofthe bureaucratic Soviet world.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Just think of Nogales. What separates the two parts is not climate, geography, or disease environment, but the U.S.-Mexico border. If the geography hypothesis cannot explain differences between the north and south of Nogales, or North and South Korea, or those between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it still be a useful theory for explaining differences between North and South America? Between Europe and Africa? Simply, no. History illustrates that there is no simple or enduring connection between climate or geography and economic success. For instance, it is not true that the tropics have always been poorer than temperate latitudes.

Uzbekistan, like the other Soviet Socialist Republics, was supposed to gain its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and develop a market economy and democracy. As in many other Soviet Republics, this is not what happened, however. President Karimov, who began his political career in the Communist Party of the old Soviet Union, rising to the post of first secretary for Uzbekistan at the opportune moment of 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was collapsing, managed to reinvent himself as a nationalist. With the crucial support of the security forces, in December 1991 he won Uzbekistan’s first-ever presidential election. After taking power, he cracked down on the independent political opposition. Opponents are now in prison or exile.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

But Germany has also pushed reform in many other ways: It has a core of medium-size industrial companies known as the Mittelstand, whose family owners are known for thinking in the long term, and they have made smart strategic use of the abundant supply of cheap, well-educated labor that opened up to them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many have invested in new factories in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as in the United States and China, effectively exporting the German industrial model. 2010 was the first year in which German car companies made more cars abroad than at home, helping to forge what is arguably the leading global industrial power.

“Mahatma,” 236 Garotinho, Anthony, 78 Gates, Bill, 104, 119, 124 GDP (gross domestic product): analysis of, 407 and civil wars, 142 and credit markets, 300, 301n, 302 and current account, 273, 296 and debt, 149, 216, 291, 300, 317, 320, 328 global, 2–3, 19, 243 and government spending, 135–39, 164 and inflation, 235, 238 and investment, 202–3, 204, 205–6, 217, 231–32 and leadership, 86–87 and manufacturing, 204–6, 214–15 per capita, 345–46, 347 and population growth, 30 rising, 8 and wealth gap, 107–10 Geographic Sweet Spot (Rule 5), 166–200, 402–3; see also location geopolitics, 172–75 Germany, 93, 138, 192, 208 billionaires in, 116, 121, 122, 388 currency in, 294 economic strength of, 286, 387–88, 391, 400 fall of Berlin Wall in, 215 Hartz reforms in, 215, 387 hype about, 335 and immigration, 45, 50, 53, 388 industrialization in, 144, 215 leadership in, 387, 388 and location, 388 per capita income in, 32 population growth rates in, 26, 45 retirement in, 37, 39, 45 slump in (1860s), 6 state bank in, 245, 388 workforce in, 19, 32, 37, 41, 55–56, 388 Ghana, 12, 87, 354 Giang Ho, 336 Gini coefficient, 99–100 global cities, 197–200 global economy: competition in, 17, 57, 68, 173–74, 193, 295 cycles in, 2, 3, 10, 172 protection measures, 172–73 global financial crisis (2007–2009): and debt, 300, 302–3, 327–28 effects of, vii, viii, xi–xii, 59, 69–70, 102, 253, 274–75, 279, 324–25, 328 and emerging markets, 146–48, 280 and global trade, 2, 172–75 and government spending, 146–47, 164 and new regulations, 276 onset of, 338 preceding events (BC), 1, 5, 13, 101, 102, 132, 177, 276, 358, 359 reality in years following (AC), 1, 5–6, 71, 134, 137, 173, 400 recovery from, 17, 23–24, 60, 93–94, 150 and state banks, 151–52, 276 as systemic crisis, 23 unexpectedness of, 5, 11, 337–38 globalization: and asset prices, 257–58 deglobalization, 274–77, 296, 394, 399 trends in, 1, 8, 199, 211, 295 and wages, 101 gold standard, end of, 252 Goldstone, Jack, 92 “golf course capitalism,” 331, 351 Good Billionaires/Bad Billionaires (Rule 3), 95–131 bad billionaires defined, 100, 105–6, 111, 121–22 billionaire lists, 100, 103–5, 111–12, 116–17, 120–21 and corrupt societies, 127–29 good billionaires defined, 104–5, 111 quality: good vs. bad, 110–15, 121–24 rise of billionaire rule, 129–31 see also wealth Goodhart’s Law, 13, 18 governments: key tasks of, 135 meddling, see Perils of the State too-small, 141–43 government spending, 135–41, 145–51, 164 Great Depression (1930s), 172, 173, 254, 258, 299, 325 Great Recession (2007–2009), see global financial crisis Greece, 5, 20 backsliding, 288, 346 corruption in, 137, 164 currency crisis in, 286, 293 debt crisis in, 51, 127, 137–38, 163–64, 300, 301, 327 economic cycle in, 88, 286 government collapse (2011), 80 tourism in, 288 Gref, German, 60, 67 Guericke, Konstantin, 49 guns versus butter, 158 Haiti, 346 Hanushek, Eric, 16 Harari, Yuval, 199 Henry I, king of England, 264 Hessler, Peter, 42 Hong Kong, 171, 176, 253, 254, 346 Huang, Yukon, 196 Humala, Ollanta, 76 Human Development Index (HDI), 10 Hungary, 151, 176, 320 Hussein, Jaffer, 246 Hussein, Saddam, 89 hype: applying the rules to, 351–55 of commodity economies, 340–42, 343 constant vigilance in, 344–47 on convergence myth, 338–41, 352 cover stories, 334–38, 347, 349–52 and disaster scenarios, 343–44 of emerging nations, 4, 8, 9, 333–34, 338–40 focus on one growth factor, 11, 14 indifference vs., 332, 333, 347–51 and media negativity, 349–50 of need for structural reform, 62–63 time differentiation in, 330, 335 Hype Watch (Rule 10), 329–55 Iceland, 88 immigration: anti-immigrant forces, 27, 44, 49, 53 and capital flight, 52–53 economic, 2, 48, 170 highly skilled, 48–54 and social services, 50 student visas, 49 and workforce, 28, 44–54 incremental capital output ratio (ICOR), 149 India, 157, 174, 283 bureaucracy in, 133, 162, 209 corruption in, 105–6, 112, 129, 164 economic cycle in, 8, 10, 62, 63, 94, 358, 375 GDP of, 4–5, 12, 175 and geopolitics, 172–73, 175 government spending in, 149, 150, 164 HDI ranking, 10 hype about, 4, 10, 333, 334, 336, 338, 345, 358, 370 and immigration, 50, 52 inflation in, 4, 236–38, 250–52, 374 infrastructure in, 374 international business in, 18, 375, 394 investment in, 205, 208–9, 231, 250, 374 leadership in, 70, 79, 81, 94, 350–51, 373–75 location of, 185, 374–75 manufacturing in, 208–10, 213 nationalism in, 81–82 population centers in, 195–97 population growth rates in, 26–27, 30, 31 prices in, 234–38 and regional alliances, 180–81, 375 service jobs in, 212–13, 218, 221 social unrest in, 4, 31, 70, 73, 74, 236 stagnation in, 6, 75 state banks in, 151–52, 153–54, 374 state intervention in, 135–36, 196 tax evasion in, 128–29 war with Pakistan, 97, 375 wealth gap in, 102, 105, 112, 116, 120, 129 workforce in, 32, 42–43, 44, 209 Indonesia, 116, 120, 326 and budget deficit, 148, 158, 163 closed economy of, 174, 178 commodities economy of, 227, 342, 376 currency of, 292, 293, 321 debt in, 320–23, 324, 325, 327 economic growth in, 82, 349 energy subsidies in, 157–58 financial deepening in, 327 GDP of, 175, 205 and hype, 330–31, 349 and international trade, 179–80, 293 leadership in, 59–60, 82, 93, 143 population growth rates in, 30 and regional alliances, 377 social unrest in, 70, 321 state banks in, 151, 320–23 industrialization, 98 and investment, 205 and population growth, 195 state assistance in, 144, 145–46 see also manufacturing Industrial Revolution, 6, 35, 255 inflation, 234–61 containment of, 21, 65 and currencies, 264–65, 292 and deflation, 5, 252–57 and economic growth, 238–40, 326, 365 and GDP, 235, 238 and government collapse, 242, 247 hyperinflation, 69, 97, 155, 239 and investment, 233, 238, 240 persistence of, 252 and prices, 237, 240–42, 257–61 stagflation, 64, 65, 240, 395 war on, 240–46 infrastructure, 10 and export trade, 207–8 inadequate, 141–43 investment in, 21, 135, 158, 175, 232–33 interest rates, 229, 235, 239, 240, 244, 260, 306, 335 International Monetary Fund (IMF): bailouts from, 5, 65, 68, 272, 280, 354, 372 on capital flight, 280 and debt, 299 on economic growth factors, 12, 152 forecasting record of, 336–38 on global debt crisis, 259, 324 global recession defined by, 2 and hype, 335–37 on inflation, 241 reforms required by, 68, 248, 372 WEO database of, 407 on women’s opportunities, 43 Internet, 1, 8, 221 censorship of, 308 “crowdfunding” sites on, 313 and global trade, 176, 197, 199 hype in, 334 information flow on, 1 service jobs for, 210, 211–13 shopping via, 257–58 investment: in commodities, 223–29 as economic indicator, 15, 202–3, 205–6, 233 in education, 16–18 by entrepreneurs, 158, 209, 226 and GDP, 202–3, 204, 205–6, 217, 231–32 good vs. bad, 203 ideal level of, 205–6 and inflation, 233, 238, 240 in infrastructure, 21, 135, 158, 175, 232–33 in manufacturing, 203–6, 232 and price shifts, 344 in real estate, 222–23, 229–31 shift from private to public, 149 speculation, 229–31, 313–14, 382 in technology, 218–21, 229, 233, 255 weak, 231–33 Iran, 174, 190 birth rate in, 26 economic cycle in, 87, 88, 346, 348 hype about, 346, 348 as Shiite theocracy, 170 trade with, 170–71 workforce in, 42 Iraq: economic cycle in, 87, 88, 89 hype about, 346, 348 leadership in, 89 refugees from, 2, 44 wars in, 167, 346 Ireland, 29, 288, 300, 346 Islam, Shiite-Sunni divide, 170 Israel, 175, 218–19 Italy, 83, 136, 192, 204 birth rate in, 26 debt in, 310, 385 internal devaluation in, 287 leadership in, 70, 81 wealth gap in, 102, 116–17, 121, 122 workforce in, 32, 39, 44 Jaitley, Arun, 106 Jamaica, 5, 66, 339 Japan, 26, 141, 190, 194 agriculture in, 384 bank crises in, 316, 319 billionaires in, 110, 116, 121 currency in, 294, 385 debt in, 300, 307, 316, 317, 318–19, 320, 384, 385 deflation in, 253–54, 256, 260 economic cycle in, 8, 57, 83, 93, 94, 175, 238, 308, 310, 317, 335 economic reform in, 384 and global trade, 176, 178, 184, 187, 294 hype about, 329–30, 334, 335, 348, 351 and immigration, 47, 50, 52, 384 industrialization in, 144, 178 insularity of, 46 investment in, 221, 238, 253, 318, 385 manufacturing in, 203, 212–13 and per capita GDP, 346 population decline in, 46, 383 reconstruction period in, 29 and regional alliances, 179, 183, 384 slump (1990s), 6, 258, 329, 335 technology in, 295 tourism in, 384–85 workforce in, 32, 37, 41, 43, 44, 55–56, 384, 385 “zombie companies” in, 318–19 Jim Yong Kim, 48 jobs: availability of, 32, 37, 55 in government or state-owned companies, 155–56 manufacturing as source of, 15 new, 57 replaced by machines, 16, 24, 101 and service sector, 202, 209–13, 221 Jobs, Steve, 49 Johnson, Simon, 176 Jonathan, Goodluck, 226, 352, 398 Jordan, 88, 206 Jordà, Òscar, 259 Jospin, Lionel, 34 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 80 Kahneman, Daniel, 56 Katz, Lawrence, 55 Kaunda, Kenneth, 96 Kenya, 31, 181–82, 190, 238, 354–55, 398–99 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 355, 399 Keynes, John Maynard, 149–50 Khan, Genghis, 8, 187 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 350 Kim Dae-jung, 66–67, 71 Kim Il-sung, 96 Kim Jong-il, 74, 86, 94 Kirchner, Nestor, 9, 64, 74, 76, 98 Kissinger, Henry A., 79 Kiss of Debt (Rule 9), 297–328 Zielinski play, 297–98, 299, 323 see also debt Kohler, Hans-Peter, 35 Koizumi, Junichiro, 335, 351 Kudrin, Alexei, 60, 67, 74 Kuznets, Simon, 101, 299 Lagarde, Christine, 58 Laos, 180 Latin America, 364–70 economic cycles in, 93, 291, 310, 342 infrastructure in, 186 and location, 177 regional alliances, 179, 182–83, 366 wealth gap in, 95–96, 97, 125–26 see also specific nations Lavagna, Roberto, 74 leadership: aging, 3, 59, 71–72, 75, 114 arrogance of, 59, 60, 61, 62, 71, 72 autocrats vs. democrats, 21, 63, 82, 85–91, 132, 333, 365 charismatic, 61, 68, 69 in circle of life, 60–62, 364–65 corruption of, 3, 12, 60, 61, 67, 91, 97, 105–6, 114, 127–29, 226, 320, 379 and elections, 364–65 fresh, 63, 64–70, 75, 76–77, 86, 94, 388 populist, 59, 77–80, 96–99, 363–64 and regional alliances, 179 stale, 21, 59, 61, 63, 70–77, 86, 92, 94, 249, 376, 392–93 technocrats, 63, 80–85, 237 tenure of, 73–75, 90 Li, Robin, 113 Libya, 4, 74, 92, 167, 168, 185 life expectancy, 10, 19, 25, 26, 28, 44 and retirement, 37, 38–40 Li Keqiang, 84, 150, 312 location, 166–200 and economic growth, 175–78, 199–200 and global trade, 171–75, 176–89, 199–200 population centers, 189–97 regional alliances, 173–75, 178–84, 199 service cities, 197–200 and shipping routes, 185–86, 402–3 long term, myth of, 399–401 López Michelsen, Alfonso, 188 Lucas, Robert, 280 Lucas paradox, 280 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 66, 69, 71, 74, 79, 284 Ma, Jack, 113, 114 Macri, Mauricio, 83, 365–66 Maduro, Nicolás, 158 Ma Huateng, 113 Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al, ruling family of, 166–67 Malaysia, 190, 342 banking crisis in (1990s), 316 debt in, 299, 300, 306, 315, 325 economic cycle in, 29, 327, 378–79 and global trade, 174, 178, 180 hype about, 330, 331, 345, 348 immigration to, 48, 51 investment in, 206, 231 leadership in, 60, 76, 379 manufacturing in, 205 state banks in, 151, 323–24 wealth in, 107, 118 Malta, 342, 348 Malthus, Thomas, 27, 343 Manuel, Trevor, 341 manufacturing: and economic growth, 15–16, 216, 227, 341 for export, 207–8 and GDP, 204–6, 214–15 and innovation, 15, 204 international, 213–15, 216 investment in, 203–6, 232 and productivity, 15, 204–5, 207 stabilizing effect of, 215–17 virtuous cycle of, 206–10, 215, 221, 228 Mao Zedong, 84 Marcos, Ferdinand, 7, 79, 334 Marino, Roger, 49 markets: cycles of, viii–x, 74–75 and leadership, 79–81 predictive power of, 13–14, 75 Marx, Karl, 92 Mauro, Paolo, 336 Mboweni, Tito, 245 Meirelles, Henrique, 69, 245 Menem, Carlos, 82 Mercosur trade bloc, 182–83, 366 Merkel, Angela, 45, 387, 388 Mexico, 368–70 breakdown in government functions, 201–2 corruption in, 141 currency crisis (1994) in, 5, 65, 148, 273, 281, 285, 298, 324 debt of, 291, 298, 324–25 economic cycle in, 98, 348, 400 government spending in, 140, 141, 148 and immigration, 53–54 inflation in, 242, 246, 370 infrastructure in, 232, 369 investment in, 203, 205, 220, 232, 368, 369 leadership in, 81, 94, 98, 368–69 location of, 168, 169, 177, 193, 199–200, 370 manufacturing in, 369–70 and oil, 130, 368, 369 population centers in, 193–94, 199 population growth rates in, 26, 30, 369 and regional alliances, 183, 199, 370 social unrest in, 70, 77, 98 technology in, 219–20 wealth gap in, 115, 120, 364 workforce in, 40, 43 middle class: anger of, 3, 5, 72–73, 76–77 growing, 204 jobs for, 213 and wealth inequality, 102 Middle East: Arab Spring, 4, 31, 76, 91–92, 167, 242 energy subsidies in, 156, 157 investment in, 169–70 political unrest in, 167, 168, 169, 170, 396 restrictions on women in, 42 see also specific nations middle-income trap (hype), 344–45 Mikitani, Hiroshi, 110 Modi, Narenda, 79, 94, 210, 350–51, 370, 373–75 Mohamad, Mahathir, 60, 231, 280, 330 money flows, 2, 5, 268–70, 275, 277, 279–90, 292, 295–96 Monti, Mario, 81 Morales, Evo, 76 Morocco, 168, 185, 190, 199 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 234–35 Mozambique, 225, 354 Mubarak, Gamal, 133 Mubarak, Hosni, 76, 92 Mugabe, Robert, 86, 88–89, 96–97, 373 Musk, Elon, 123–24 Myanmar, 187, 333, 334 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 46 Nanda, Ramana, 220 natural resources, 223–29 Nehru, Vikram, 81, 82 Netherlands, 41–42, 50, 176, 224–25, 255, 256, 299 news media, see hype New Zealand, 244 Nguyen Tan Dung, 90–91 Nicaragua, 98 Niger, 66, 339 Nigeria: commodities economy of, 4, 174, 223, 225–27, 228, 293, 394, 398 corruption in, 226–27, 398 economic cycle in, 88, 348, 398 GDP in, 12, 87, 227 government spending in, 141–42 hype about, 348, 398 inflation in, 242 leadership in, 352–53, 365, 398 and regional alliance, 182 slipping backward, 202, 205, 232, 398 workforce in, 19, 29, 31, 185 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 183 North Korea, 74, 86, 96, 136, 174 Norway, 90, 225, 300, 346, 348 Nyerere, Julius, 96 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 398 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 40, 44, 48–49 oil: and bad billionaires, 100, 111 and corruption, 226 curse of, 12, 169, 224, 227 and “Dutch disease,” 224–25 exporters of, 155, 174, 341, 394 extraction of, 124–25 investment in, 223, 224, 225, 228 offshore, 130 price of, 4, 29, 60, 62, 64, 65, 89, 111, 114, 154–55, 227–29, 257, 268, 282, 293, 333, 342, 348, 362, 393, 394, 398 shale, 228–29 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi, 227 Oman, 342 Omidyar, Pierre, 49 OPEC, 64, 65, 240, 333 Ortega, Daniel, 98 Osborne, Michael, 54 Osnos, Evan, 145 Ostry, Jonathan, 125–26 Ozden, Caglar, 51 Pacific Alliance, 183–84, 199 Pakistan, 142, 180, 370–73 infrastructure in, 187, 372 leadership in, 77, 94, 96, 372 service jobs in, 212 war with India, 97, 375 workforce in, 31, 42, 370–71, 373 Palaiologos, Yannis, 164 Paldam, Martin, 241 Palestine, 175 Papademos, Lucas, 80 Paraguay, 182, 183, 242 Park Chung-hee, 85 Park Geun-hye, 47, 383 pattern recognition, 7–11 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 94, 115, 368–69 People Matter (Rule 1), 23–57; see also workforce per capita income, 10, 339–40, 348 Perils of the State (Rule 4), 132–65 and bad billionaires, 127–29 devaluing the currency, 290–96, 381 energy subsidies, 156–58 and leaders, see leadership meddling in private companies, 158–62, 246, 250–51 and population growth, 33, 35–36 privatization, 161–62, 177 sensible role for state, 162–65 state banks, 134, 151–54, 243–44 state companies as political tools, 154–56, 165 Perón, Juan, 333 Persson, Stefan, 174, 179 Peru, 52, 188, 190, 291 commodities economy of, 174, 228, 368 investment in, 228 leadership in, 98 and Pacific Alliance, 183–84 workforce in, 43 pessimism, prevailing fashion of, 9, 275, 360, 399 Philippines, 180, 193, 194, 198 economic recovery in, 327, 350, 375–76, 378 economic slowdown in, 346 hype about, 333, 334, 348 investment in, 232, 375–76 leadership in, 79, 97, 376 population growth in, 31 service jobs in, 212–13, 221 social unrest in, 70, 77 wealth redistribution in, 97 workforce in, 19, 31 Piketty, Thomas, 104 Piñera, Sebastián, 34–35, 95–96, 98, 102, 126 Pinochet, Augusto, 82, 98, 99 Pires, Pedro, 353 Poland, 139, 190, 339 billionaires in, 109, 120, 391 currency of, 288–90 debt in, 391 investment in, 205, 215, 391 leadership in, 74–75, 365 location of, 168, 176, 177, 198–200 political shift in, 391 population growth rate in, 30, 39 private economy in, 159, 160, 161 workforce in, 39, 391, 392 population growth: baby bonuses, 33–36 decline in, 19–20, 24–32, 44, 56, 392, 394, 399 and economic growth, 29–32, 57 forecasts of, 25, 27, 28, 32 measurement of, 21 and replacement fertility rate, 26, 33, 37, 47 and workforce growth, 18–19, 39, 57 populism, 59, 60, 77–80, 81–82, 96–99, 100, 247, 363–64, 389 Portugal, 29, 30, 39, 288 Price of Onions (Rule 7), 234–61; see also inflation; prices prices, 234–61 asset, 257–61 of commodities, 111, 114, 174, 228, 263, 278, 341–42, 354, 365, 386; see also oil consumer, 235, 256, 257–61 and currency, 294 and deflation, 256 falling, 4, 5, 253–54 of food, 234, 235, 236, 241–42, 365 to foreign buyers, 258 “Mapping the World’s Prices,” 265 of money, 304 public anger about, 237, 241–42 stabilizing, 261 of stocks, 313 validity of data about, 13 wage-price spiral, 240 Pritchett, Lant, 336, 347 production: chain of, 27 as growth factor, 15–16 productivity: elusive x factor in, 20 and government spending, 148–49 and ICOR, 149 and immigration, 51 in manufacturing, 15, 204–5, 207 measurement of, 17, 18–21 and population trends, 39, 57 and technology, 220–21 Putin, Vladimir, 18, 42, 392–94 and billionaires, 114, 115, 350 and economic reforms, 58–59, 60, 61, 67–69, 78, 284 hype about, 342, 350, 393, 394 and populism, 59 rise to power, 61, 66, 67 and social unrest, 73–74 and stale leadership, 60, 71–72, 76, 114, 159–60, 392 and state intervention, 159–60, 350 Qaddafi, Muammar el-, 74 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur, 96 Rajan, Raghuram, 251 Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 180, 373 Rao, Jaithirth, 209–10 Razak, Najib, 379 Reagan, Ronald, 64–65, 66, 70 Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER), 265, 267, 272 real estate: bad billionaires in, 100, 105, 107, 108, 110–11, 364, 369 and debt, 310–13 investment binges in, 222–23, 228, 229–31, 382, 387 prices of, 108, 257–61, 309, 312, 382, 389 and state banks, 154 recessions: 1930s (Great Depression), 172, 173, 254, 258 1970s, 2, 64, 65 1980s, 2, 64, 305 1990s, 2, 6, 13, 64, 66, 68, 83, 138, 148, 161 2007–2009, see global financial crisis in Asia (1997-1998), see Asia China as possible source of, 2–3 cycles of, 2, 14, 64–66, 87–88 debt as cause of, 260, 298–99, 301, 303–4, 308–10, 317–19 dot-com bust, see dot-com bubble forecasting of, 14, 337–38, 400 official documentation of, 14 U.S. origins of, 2, 132, 303–4, 305–6, 308–9, 327–28, 362 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, 173 rent-seeking industries, 110–11, 122, 123, 124 Renzi, Matteo, 81, 94 Rhodes-Kropf, Matthew, 220 Rickards, James, 168 Robinson, James, 176 robots, 27, 36, 54–57, 214 Rockefeller, John D., 124 Rodrik, Dani, 207 Romania, 87, 162, 238, 348, 391–92 Rothschild, Baron de, 349 Rousseff, Dilma, 80, 152–53, 155, 366, 368 Roy, Nilanjana, 236 Rubin, Robert, 341 Russia, 193, 326, 344 aging population in, 72 authoritarianism in, 3, 60 author’s speech in, 58–59 banking crisis (1990s), 61 billionaires in, 103, 107, 114–15, 116, 119, 120, 364, 393 birth rate in, 26 brain drain from, 52 capital flight from, 52, 281, 282, 367 commodities economy in, 4, 205, 225, 341, 367, 376, 393, 397 currency of, 263, 265, 268, 281, 282, 289, 291, 393, 394 debt in, 59, 291, 327, 394 economic growth in, 17, 60, 63, 66, 69, 159, 340, 358 economic slowdown in, 346, 392 education in, 17 financial deepening in, 327 GDP of, 4, 175, 394 government spending in, 139, 149, 394 hype about, 4, 338, 347, 348, 350 inflation in, 241, 242, 246 international business in, 18, 394 international sanctions against, 282 investment in, 205, 208, 232, 394–95, 397 leadership in, 349, 392–94; see also Putin, Vladimir oil in, 29, 60, 62, 72, 114, 155, 159, 265, 282, 341, 342, 393, 394 oligarchs in, 107, 114–15, 160, 268 per capita income in, 61, 68 political cronyism in, 4, 159, 160 reforms in, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68, 78 social unrest in, 4, 73–74 state banks in, 151–52, 159, 282 stock exchange in, 161 tech companies in, 17, 159–60 workforce in, 30, 42, 155, 393 Rwanda, 181, 182, 199 Rybolovlev, Dmitry, 107 Sakurauchi, Yoshio, 329–30 Samuelson, Paul, 13 Santos, Manuel, 188, 189 Sassen, Saskia, 197 Saudi Arabia, 29, 42, 170, 190 currency of, 396 energy subsidies in, 156, 157 GDP in, 87 government spending in, 139, 396 leadership in, 87, 396 and oil prices, 227–28, 279, 333, 394 roller-coaster economy of, 227–28 savings, 16, 277–79 Scandinavia, 35, 42 Schlumpeter, Joseph, 360 Schularick, Moritz, 259 service businesses, 204, 210–13 service cities, 197–200 Sharif, Nawaz, 94, 372 Sharma, Rahul, 170–71 Shinawatra, Thaksin, 79, 97 Shinawatra, Yingluck, 78–79, 217 Sierra Leone, 225 Silk Road, 8, 187–88, 399 Singapore, 32, 33, 175, 182, 238, 346, 348 Singh, Manmohan, 62, 73, 74–75, 133, 187, 234–37, 250 Sirisena, Maithripala, 181 Sisi, Abdel Fattah el-, 76, 157 social upheavals: Arab Spring, 4, 31, 76, 91–92, 167, 242 “middle-class rage,” 72–73 as revolts against stale leadership, 21, 61, 70, 72, 73–74, 77, 92 spread of, 3, 91–92 South Africa: commodities economy in, 223, 225, 263, 376, 397 corruption in, 164 currency in, 397 debt of, 291 decline in development of, 3, 6, 205, 346, 397 economic growth in, 10, 38, 90, 340 HDI ranking, 10 immigration to, 48 investment in, 232, 397 leadership in, 76, 90, 352–53, 397 life expectancy in, 10 social unrest in, 4, 73, 74 South Asia, 370–75, 400 commodities economies in, 371 political instability in, 180, 373 regional alliances, 179, 180 restrictions on women in, 42 Southeast Asia, 375–80 economic cycle in, 310, 324, 326, 327, 349, 375–76, 400 and global trade, 176, 178, 179–80 and hype, 330, 331 South Korea, 190, 197–98 and China, 382 debt in, 216, 321 economic growth in, 10, 66–67, 87, 175, 216, 238, 308 government spending in, 140, 146 HDI ranking, 10 homogeneity in, 46–47 hype about, 333, 334, 339 inflation in, 237, 246 and international business, 179, 382–83 investment in, 205, 206, 218, 221, 225, 238, 253 leadership in, 66–67, 82, 85, 93, 349 literacy in, 17 manufacturing in, 205, 212–13, 214–15, 216, 225, 382–83 per capita income in, 215, 316 productivity in, 20 robots in, 56 technology in, 218, 221, 295, 382 wealth in, 107–8, 109, 116, 117–18, 120, 121–22, 383 workforce in, 40, 43, 44, 47, 56, 140, 383 Soviet Union: after 1991, see Russia central plan of, 81, 85 fall of, 29, 67, 107, 109, 151, 198, 208, 242 Spain, 29, 32, 192 current account in, 288 debt in, 327–28, 389–90 internal devaluation in, 287 manufacturing in, 387 Spence, Michael, 341 Spence Commission, 341–42 Sri Lanka, 180–81, 187, 212, 365, 370–71, 373 stagflation, 64, 65, 240, 395 stagnation, 6, 83, 88, 91, 105, 172, 192 state banks, 134, 151–54 state capitalism, 133–35, 155 stock markets: best time to buy in, 349 and crisis of 2008, 146–47 mania/crash, 258–61, 313–14, 318 signals from, 13, 74–75, 133, 134, 258, 313 state-run companies in, 135 “structural reform,” 62–63, 163 Studwell, Joe, 17, 143–44 Sudan, 142, 185 Suharto, 59–60, 82, 93, 293, 320–21, 330 Summers, Lawrence, 104, 336, 347 supply and demand, 256–57 supply networks, 235, 238, 239–40, 243, 253, 292, 365 supply side, 24 Surowiecki, James, 13 Sweden, 42, 50, 136, 138 billionaires in, 108, 116, 121, 123 debt in, 300 economic cycle in, 17, 90, 256 financial crisis (1990s), 317 and inflation, 245 Switzerland, 41, 50, 121, 138–39, 198, 294 Syria: and Arab Spring, 92, 167 civil war in, 4, 92, 168, 224 economic cycle in, 87, 88 leadership in, 89 refugees from, 2, 44, 48 Taiwan, 144, 151, 190 banking crises in (1995, 1997), 316, 317 and China, 382–83 debt in, 291, 307, 317–18 economic growth in, 87, 175, 238, 308, 348 government spending in, 140, 146 hype about, 333, 334, 345, 346, 348 and international business, 382–83 investment in, 205, 218 leadership in, 82, 86, 93 literacy in, 17 per capita income in, 316 and regional alliances, 179, 383 and technology, 221, 295 wealth in, 107–8, 118, 120, 122 working-age population in, 383 Tanzania, 96, 181–82 taxes: corporate, 63, 138 cutting, 67 evading, 128, 137, 142, 164 failure to collect, 141–43 and government spending, 136–37 import tariffs, 172 inheritance, 124 and public services, 140 Taylor, Alan M., 259, 304, 310 technology: automation, 214 cycle of, 8, 124, 218–21 driverless cars, 54 and immigration, 51–52 investment in, 218–21, 229, 233, 255 and jobs, 101, 211, 212 and leisure time, 199 and productivity, 20, 51, 119, 220–21 robot workers, 27, 36, 54–57, 214 and service businesses, 210, 211–13 3-D printing, 8, 214 Tetlock, Philip, 400 Thailand, 47–48, 189–90 capital flight from, 272, 292 commodities economy in, 342, 379 credit binge in, 199, 297, 298–302, 306, 315, 328, 380 currency of, 217, 267, 271–73, 273, 285–86, 292 economic contraction in, 286, 349, 379 economic growth in, 79, 217, 256, 348, 380 economic recovery of, 288, 302, 325, 327 and hype, 330, 349 infrastructure in, 207–8, 230 and international trade, 174, 178, 179–80, 216 investment in, 206, 217, 225, 230–31 leadership in, 78–79, 97, 379–80 manufacturing in, 216–17, 225, 227, 379 military coup in (2014), 379–80 population growth rates in, 30, 47 social unrest in, 78–79, 189, 190, 217 state banks in, 151, 321, 323–24 Thatcher, Margaret, 64–65, 68, 94 Thiel, Peter, 104, 119, 125 thrift, 16, 277–79 Time, 331, 334–35, 347, 349, 350, 352 tourism, 2, 37, 199, 211, 288, 384–85 trade balance, 269 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 173, 179 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 173, 178, 361, 377, 378, 383, 384, 386 Trudeau, Justin, 386 Trump, Donald, 53, 364 Tsai Ing-wen, 383 Tunisia, 91–92, 224 Turkey, 190, 326 currency of, 273–74, 280, 283, 291, 292, 293, 396 debt of, 291, 306, 327, 328 economic growth in, 66, 69, 72 financial deepening in, 327 government spending in, 139, 247–48 hype about, 345, 348 immigration to, 48 inflation in, 241, 242, 246, 247–50, 326 leadership in, 60, 66, 71–72, 74, 349, 395 and location, 395–96 per capita income in, 68, 331, 348 population growth in, 31 populist nationalism in, 60, 72, 247 reforms in, 67–68, 72, 248, 249, 331 social unrest in, 4, 61, 72, 73, 74 wealth in, 114, 116, 120 Tusk, Donald, 74–75 Uganda, 87, 181, 354–55 United Arab Emirates, 167, 170 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations (UN), 10, 47 on population growth, 19, 25, 27, 33, 44–45 United States, 194–95, 360–64 billionaires in, 107, 108, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, 123–25, 364 birth rate in, 26 checks and balances in, 364 credit markets in, 13, 298, 303–4, 305–6, 316 currency of, 266, 271, 272, 362–63 current account deficit in, 278, 362–63 debt in, 363 economic growth in, 3, 288, 337–38, 340 economic recovery in, 24, 64–65, 102, 360 economic strength of, 266, 400 financial speculation in, 102 and geopolitics, 172–73 and global trade, 184, 185, 402–3 government spending in, 138, 139 and hype, 361–62 and immigration, 45, 49–50, 52, 53, 360 industrialization in, 144, 215 inflation in, 240–41, 258 infrastructure in, 207, 208 life expectancy in, 39, 40 and location, 176–77, 200 long boom of, 255–56 manufacturing in, 204, 213, 214, 215, 361 oil and gas in, 228–29, 362 per capita income in, 32, 66, 339, 346 polarization in, 62–63, 132, 363–64 productivity in, 20, 51–52, 220–21, 257, 303 recessions originating in, 2, 132, 303–4, 305–6, 308–9, 327–28, 362 and regional alliances, 173–75, 178, 183, 188, 199, 361, 383, 384, 386 “second term curse” in, 70–71 technology in, 20, 218, 221, 294, 303, 361–62 Treasury bonds, 280 Washington Consensus, 132–33 and wealth gap, 101, 102, 364 workforce in, 19, 32, 37, 41–42, 43–44, 360 Uribe, Álvaro, 77, 183, 350 Uruguay, 300 Velasco, Juan, 98 Venezuela, 4, 158 economic cycle in, 87, 346, 365 leadership in, 64, 69, 76, 77, 98, 365 oil in, 333, 334 and regional alliances, 182, 366 Vietnam, 42, 202 billionaires in, 118 Communist Party in, 377–78 currency in, 295 fiscal deficit in, 377 and global trade, 174, 176–78, 180, 295 hype about, 345 inflation in, 378 investment in, 378 leadership in, 90–91 location of, 168, 177–78, 185, 378 manufacturing in, 213, 378 per capita income in, 178, 378 population centers in, 190, 191, 199 Viravaidya, Mechai, 47 Volcker, Paul, 241, 245, 335 wage-price spiral, 240 Walton family, 119 Wang Jianlin, 114 wealth: balance in, 103 billionaire lists, 100, 103, 104, 116, 117, 120–21 and capital flight, 52–53, 107, 279–81, 292 creation of, 99, 103, 115 crony capitalism, 105–6, 112, 130, 332 of entrepreneurs, 118–19, 122 in family empires/inherited, 104, 116–21 measures of, 101 redistribution of, 95, 96–98, 99, 101, 126 of robber barons, 124 scale of, 107–10 and state meddling, 127–29 wealth gap, 95–96, 99–102, 364 and corruption, 127–29 and easy money, 101–2, 108 and economic declines, 125–27 rise of, 129–31 welfare states, 64, 65, 93, 97, 126, 138, 140–41 Wen Jiabao, 307, 308, 311–12 Widodo, Joko, 143, 157, 163, 376–77 Wiesel, Elie, 331–32 wildebeest, survival of, viii, ix, xi women: and birth rates, 18, 25–26, 28, 33–36, 43, 44, 47, 392 economic restrictions on, 42 education of, 26, 41 working, 28, 34, 35, 36, 40–44, 47 workforce: aging, 392 and available jobs, 32, 37, 55 and baby bonuses, 33–36 and economic growth, 24, 26, 52 global, 55–56 growth rate in, 28–32 highly skilled, 48–54 hours worked by, 18 and immigration, 28, 44–54 manual labor, 213 new people in, 28, 36, 57 participation rate in, 36–37 and pension funds, 279 and population declines, 24–32, 35, 38, 43, 44, 56 and productivity data, 18–19, 39 replaced by machines, 16, 24 and retirement, 36–40 robots in, 54–57 skilled, 48–54 wages, 101, 184, 185, 204, 214, 243, 257 women in, 28, 34, 35, 36, 40–44, 47 World Bank: on convergence, 339, 341 data set of, 407 on economic growth factors, 12, 18, 342, 346 forecasting record of, 336, 338 on inflation, 242 on infrastructure, 186, 187 on middle-income trap, 345 on new business, 48 on service sector, 210–11 Spence Commission, 341–42 on wealth gap, 100 on workforce, 42, 51 world economy, 358–401 absence of optimism in, 359 combined scores of, 358–59 crisis (2008), see global financial crisis disruptions of, 358–59 potential growth rate of, 359 world maps, 356–57, 402–3 see also specific nations World Trade Organization, 177 Wu Jinglian, 314 Xiao Gang, 311 Xi Jinping, 120, 156, 187, 208 Yellen, Janet, 101 Yeltsin, Boris, 67, 242 Yemen, 92 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (SBY), 93, 157 Zambia, 96, 354 Zambrano, Lorenzo, 219–20 Zeihan, Peer, 184 Zielinski, Robert, The Kiss of Debt, 297–98, 299, 323 Zimbabwe, 86, 88–89, 96–97, 373 Zoellick, Robert, 242 “zombie companies,” 318–19 Zong Qinghou, 113 Zuckerberg, Mark, 104, 119, 124 Zuma, Jacob, 352, 397 ALSO BY RUCHIR SHARMA Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ruchir Sharma is head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, with more than $20 billion of assets under management.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

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

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

Now our creditability is gone: we are seen to have a political system in which one party tries to disenfranchise the poor, in which money buys politicians and policies that reinforce the inequalities. We should be concerned about the risk of this diminished influence. Even if things had been going better in the United States, the growth of the emerging markets would necessitate a new global order. There was just a short period, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when the United States dominated in virtually every realm. Now the emerging markets are demanding a larger voice in international forums. We moved from the G-8, where the richest industrial countries tried to determine global economic policy, to the G-20, because we had to: the global recession provided the impetus, but one could not deal with global issues, like global warming or global trade, without bringing others in.

The words we use can convey notions of fairness, legitimacy, positive feelings; or they can convey notions of divisiveness and selfishness and illegitimacy. Words also frame issues in other ways. In American parlance, “socialism” is akin to communism, and communism is the ideology we battled for sixty years, triumphing only in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hence, labeling anything as “socialism” is the kiss of death. America’s health care system for the aged, Medicare, is a single-payer system—the government pays the bill, but the individual gets to choose the provider. Most of the elderly love Medicare. But many are also so convinced that government can’t provide services efficiently that they believe that Medicare must be private.


pages: 615 words: 175,905

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, South China Sea

During the Cuban missile crisis, communications equipment established in the White House after the Bay of Pigs incident allowed the president to monitor and control military operations from his desk in the Oval Office.32 The Defense Department installed high-volume communications and data display systems that let the White House Situation Room monitor closely the most technical aspects of military deployments and activities.33 Rather than give the military the mission to enforce the blockade, McNamara and the president orchestrated the specific activities of U.S. ships.34 The Cuban missile crisis was the best known of the Cold War flare-ups that dominated the beginning of the Kennedy administration. The Cuban crisis of 1962 and the Berlin crisis of 1961 (during which the Soviet Union began to build the Berlin Wall and threatened to close off Western access to the divided city) were direct confrontations between the two superpowers. In 1961, however, Soviet premier Khrushchev announced a subtler form of conflict between his bloc and the West. He declared his support for Communist insurgents fighting wars of national liberation in the countries of the developing world.

Alexis, 26, 208, 228, 230, 252 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) administrative system, 17–18, 74 advice on covert activity, 59 advice on warfare in Vietnam and “hard knock” approach, 43, 63–65, 68–80, 85–87, 92, 94, 100–3, 137–39, 141, 142–50, 159–60, 166, 168–71, 176, 182, 186, 187, 191, 192–93, 209–10, 261 appointment of chairman, policy on, 108 and Bay of Pigs, 5–7, 16, 22, 24, 27 and Congressional responsibility, 331 “Courses of Action in Southeast Asia,” 180–89 and Cuban invasion plans, 25, 27–28 deceptions and lies to, 92–93, 94, 101–2, 176, 192, 298, 301 and deployment of troops, 210, 217–18, 262–64, 269, 300–22 Diem coup, opposition to, 45–46, 66 and Eisenhower, 5, 12–13 formation of, 13–14 and Gulf of Tonkin incident, 127–36 and graduated pressure doctrine, 64, 70, 72–76, 78, 79, 81, 92–93, 99, 100–3, 116, 147, 154, 177–78, 185–89, 207–8, 238, 247, 273, 327–28 interservice rivalries/divisiveness, 14, 18, 21, 23, 81–83, 113–14, 142–43, 152–54, 168, 217–18, 225, 249, 255, 272, 304, 327 and Johnson, 5, 49–50, 54, 63–65, 67–68, 85-89, 94, 113, 175, 187–88, 244, 261, 264–65, 284, 313–19 and Kennedy, 5–23, 43, 46 and Laos, 7–8 loss of presidential access/influence, 54–56, 65, 67, 85–89, 90–92, 98–103, 111, 113, 114, 115–17, 139, 147–48, 151–154, 186, 189, 192, 208–9, 222, 225, 285–86, 303, 328–29 loyalties, conflicting, 311–12, 329–33 and McNamara, 64, 71–87, 90–91, 98–99, 147, 151, 168, 175–76, 185–87, 208–9, 222, 249–50, 285–86, 295–96, 298, 301–22, 328, 329 memoranda on escalation, 247 and ordering action in Vietnam, 160–62, 222, 233–34 philosophies of members, 44–45, 64, 103–4 silence and consensus of, 167, 178, 181–82, 191–92, 196, 217–18, 225–26, 243, 247, 261, 298, 317–18, 319, 329 targets recommended, 93, 127, 147, 158, 173, 186, 192, 214, 221, 222, 226, 238, 286 and Taylor, 14–17, 21, 22, 27–28, 42–45, 76–79, 85, 87–88, 94, 97, 101–3, 115–17, 278 war games, 89–91, 155–58 and Wheeler chairmanship, 108–10, 116, 225–26 withdrawal memo, 175–76 Kattenberg, Paul, 203 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 294, 295 Keating, Kenneth, 24 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 105 Kennedy, John F. appointments, 2–4, 22, 31, 43 approach to decision-making and administration, 4–5, 6, 15, 21, 23, 39 assassination, 47 Bay of Pigs, 5–7, 8, 11, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25 and Berlin Wall, 23, 31 and Bundy, 3–4, 15–16 Castro, personal antipathy toward, 25 Cuban missile crisis, 24–31 decision to withdraw one thousand advisers from Vietnam, 40 and Department of Defense/Pentagon, 2, 5, 23 and Diem coup, 38–41, 46 election of, 1–2 and the JCS, 5–23, 28, 43, 46 Laotian crisis, 7–8, 22, 23, 32 and LeMay, 43 and McNamara, 2–4, 15, 17–22 military policy, 10–11, 32, 43, 109 and NSC dismantlement, 4–5, 6 personality and style, 15–16 and Rusk, 3–4 and Soviets, 8, 30, 43 speech to West Point graduating class, 1962, 32 and Taylor, 8–17, 21–22, 105, 109 and Vietnam, 22, 23, 32, 37–41, 324 Kennedy, Robert and Castro assassination attempts, 25 and Cuban missile crisis, 26, 28 and Diem ouster, 40–41 and presidential appointments, 3 and Taylor, 208 Khrushchev, Nikita and Cuban missile crisis, 28, 158, 159 and escalation of Vietnam war, 159–60 and Kennedy, 23 and Laos, 8 policy on insurgencies, 31–32 Kohler, Foy, 284 Korean War, 7, 9, 34, 44, 52, 144, 214, 224 Krulak, Victor, 59–60, 96, 101, 172 Lam Van Phant, 164 Lansdale, Edward, 205 Laos, 98.


pages: 589 words: 162,849

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

An official commission was formed to collect documents and testimony from the surviving Soviet intelligence officers who had worked with Sorge, and the results – including surprisingly extensive extracts from the top-secret Fourth Department cable traffic with Tokyo – were published as a book. The Soviet leadership decided that Sorge should join the official pantheon of Soviet saints. The Berlin Wall had recently gone up and the East German people needed a pro-Soviet, anti-fascist hero – a good German who was also a Soviet patriot. Sorge was made a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union, and a bulky stone gravestone decorated with an image of the medal joined Hanako’s original, more dignified monument over his grave in Tokyo.

You are invited to contact the publisher if your image was used without identification or acknowledgement Index Abe Noboyuki, General here Alighieri, Dante here Akiyama Koji here, here, here Alliluyeva, Anna here Andropov, Yury here Anti-Comintern Pact here, here, here, here, here Antonov-Ovseyenko, Anton here Aoyama Shigeru here, here, here, here, here Araki Mitsaturo here, here Araki Sadao, General here, here Aritomi Mitsukado here, here Artuzov, Artur here Asahi Shimbun here, here, here, here, here Austrian Anschluss here Babel, Isaac here Baku here, here Baldwin, Stanley here Barbé, Henri here Barbusse, Henri here Barmine, Alexander here Basie, Count here Basov, Konstantin Mikhailovich here, here, here, here Beethoven, Ludwig van here, here, here Beneš, Edvard here Beria, Lavrenty here, here, here, here Berlin Mayflies here Berlin University here, here Berlin Wall here Berzin, General Jan Karlovich here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here dismissal and execution here, here and Japan spy ring here, here, here, here, here resignation and demotion here, here Beurton, Len here Bey, Essad here Bezymensky, Lev here Bibikov, Boris here Bibikov, Isaac here Bibikov, Major Yakov here Bickerton, William here Bir, Izaia here Bismarck sinking here ‘Black Reichswehr’ here Blok, Alexandr here Blomberg, General Werner von here Blücher, Prince Gebhard Leberecht von here Blum, Léon here Blyukher, General Vasiliy here, here, here, here Borodin, Mikhail here Borovich, Colonel Alexander here Breakfast Group here, here, here, here, here, here, here Brest-Litovsk victory parade here Britain, Soviet spies in here Bronin, Yakov here, here Brooke-Popham, Air Chief Marshal Robert here Browder, Earl here, here Brundin, Thorberg and Ernest here Buchrucker, Major Bruno Ernst here Budak, Milo here Bukharin, Nikolai here, here, here, here Bulgakov, Mikhail here Bülow, Bernhard von here Burgess, Guy here Cain, Frank here Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm here, here, here Catherine the Great, Empress here Chamberlain, Neville here, here, here Chambers, Whittaker here, here, here, here Changkufeng incident here, here, here, here Chaplin, Charlie here Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath here, here, here Cheka here, here, here Chekalova, Lydia (Baroness Stahl) here, here Chen Han-seng here, here, here Cherry Society here Chiang Kai-shek here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chichibu, Prince Yasuhito here China annexation of Manchuria here, here, here, here, here, here civil war and famine here communist insurgency here, here, here, here press censorship here proposed partition here Railway Zone here, here Soviet intelligence in here war with Japan here, here, here, here China Institute here Chinese Communist Party here, here, here, here, here, here Chiyo Yamaki here Chuev, Felix here, here Churchill, Winston here, here, here, here Ciampi, Yves here, here Clausen, Anna (nee Wallenius) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Clausen, Max here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here disillusion with communism here, here, here, here, here, here and exposure of spy ring here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here feted as Soviet hero here loyalty to Germany here, here and motorcycle accident here radio expertise here, here radio operator in Shanghai here, here, here, here suffers heart attack here Comintern here, here, here, here, here, here, here and China here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and exposure of spy ring here, here, here, here, here, here IKKI committee here, here, here, here mass arrests here OMS here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and popular fronts here and spying in Britain here Stalin and here, here, here, here, here Communist Party of Great Britain here Communist Party of Japan here, here, here, here Communist Party of the United States here, here, here, here Correns, Erich here, here, here Cox, Jimmy here Craigie, Sir Robert here Cuneo, Ernest here Czechoslovakia, annexation of here Dalburo here, here Dalrymple, James here Danish Communist Party here, here, here de Forest Bayly, Benjamin here Deakin, William here, here Debuchi Katsuji here, here Dekanozov, Ambassador Vladimir here Deutsch, Arnold here Deutsche Getreide Zeitung here, here, here Dimitrov, Georgy here Dirksen, Ambassador Herbert von here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Domei press agency here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dönitz, Grand Admiral Karl here Duclos, Jacques here Duranty, Walter here During, Dorothea von here Dutch East Indies here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Du Yuesheng here Dzerzhinsky, Count Felix here, here, here East Asia Common Script School here East Asia Problems Investigation Association here, here, here, here Ebert, Friedrich here Einstein, Albert here Eisenstein, Sergei here, here Eisler, Gerhard here Ellis, Charles ‘Dickie’ here, here Engels, Friedrich here, here Erdmannsdorf, Counsellor Otto Bernard von here Etzdorff, Hasso von here, here, here Ewert, Arthur here, here February 26th incident here First World War here, here, here, here, here, here Fischer, Edwin here Fischer, Ruth here Fitin, General Pavel here, here Frankfurter Zeitung here, here, here, here, here, here, here Freikorps here, here, here, here Fuchs, Klaus here, here Fujita Isamu here Fukuda Tori here, here Galland, Adolf here Gendin, General Semyon here, here, here, here, here Gerlach, Christiane, see Sorge, Christiane Gerlach, Kurt here, here, here German Communist Party here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here German Statistical Yearbook here, here Germany and Axis pact here, here covert rearmament here, here, here, here economy under Hitler here, here femegerichte murders here leaves League of Nations here Lebensraum doctrine here oil supplies here, here and Pact of Steel here, here and recognition of Manchukuo here relations with Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here revolutionary movements here rise of Nazi Party here, here Weimar government here, here, here, here, here see also Nazi–Soviet pact Gestapo here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Giglo, Beniamino here Givens, Chief Detective Inspector Thomas (‘Pat’) here Glovatsky, Boris and Sonya here Goebbels, Joseph here, here Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von here Golikov, General Filip here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gordon, Boris here Göring, Reichsmarschall Hermann here, here, here, here Gorky, Maxim here Gouzenko, Igor here GPU here, here, here Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere here, here, here, here, here Greene, Graham here Grew, Ambassador Joseph here, here, here Gross, Babette here Gu Shun Jian here Guderian, Major General Heinz here Gudz, Colonel Boris here, here, here, here, here Gurvich, Colonel Alexander (‘Gorin’) here, here Hack, Dr Friedrich Wilhelm here, here Hamburger, Rudolf here Hamburger, Ursula, see Kuczynski, Ursula Harich-Schneider, Margarete (‘Eta’) here, here, here, here, here, here, here Harnack, Arvid here Hasebe Taiji here Hashimoto Takashi here Hata Shunroku, General here, here Haushofer, Albrecht here Haushofer, General Dr Karl here, here, here, here, here Hegel, G.


pages: 546 words: 164,489

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space by Stephen Walker

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, fake news, Gene Kranz, lockdown, lost cosmonauts, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, South China Sea, Ted Sorensen

As with Gagarin, Titov received a hero’s welcome in Red Square on August 9, when once again Khrushchev boasted of Communism’s triumphs from atop Lenin’s tomb. Just four days later, on Sunday, August 13, East German Communist troops closed the border between East and West Berlin. In a move that dangerously escalated tensions across the Iron Curtain, construction workers began building the Berlin Wall. Titov never flew in space again. Like Gagarin and sometimes alongside him, he was sent off on exhausting trips around the world to advertise the glories of the Soviet space programme and the system that had spawned it. Both men suffered from the experience, both sometimes turning to drink and occasional womanising, but Titov did not possess Gagarin’s audience-pleasing skills nor his smile, and a less than triumphant tour of the United States in 1962 earned him the enmity of the American press.

(Avariynyy Podryv Obyekta) (‘Emergency Object Destruction’) (Vostok on-board bomb/device) 11–12, 13, 14–15, 167, 169, 209–10, 226, 234, 257 Apollo programme 25, 74, 189, 198, 350, 396–7, 399–400, 403–4, 407; Apollo 1 189; Apollo 11 407; Apollo 13 74; Apollo 14 404 Armstrong, Neil 417 Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Huntsville, US 56, 59 Atlas rocket 59, 68, 148 Augerson, William 127 Aviation Week 114, 141, 143, 151 Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum, Kazakhstan 407, 416 Balanina, Maria (mother of Sergei Korolev) 92 Barbree, Jay 54–5, 69, 73, 134, 137, 146, 163, 330, 401 Barmin, Vladimir 176, 182 Barnes, Donald 113 Bay of Pigs (1961) 215–18, 255, 376, 397–9, 401 Belka (dog) 10–11, 23, 69–71, 115, 152, 166, 181, 406–7 Bell, David 199, 395, 396 Berle, Adolph 217 Berlin Wall 411 B.F. Goodrich 239 Bhabha, Homi 284 Bissell Jr, Richard 180, 215–16, 217 Bobrovsky, Eduard 261 Bogdashevsky, Rostislav 84, 229, 299 Bondarenko, Anna 186, 189 Bondarenko, Valentin 184–9, 190, 198, 209, 262 Borisenko, Ivan 245, 364 Botkin Hospital, Moscow 184–5, 188 Brezhnev, Leonid 150, 362, 384, 391, 408–9, 413 Bruevich, Yura 315 Bruevich (née Gagarina), Zoya 39, 40, 315, 327, 328, 357, 358, 359, 375, 384 Bushuyev, Konstantin 16, 45, 105 Butova, Margarita 370, 371 Bykovskaya, Valentina 79 Bykovsky, Valery 33, 88, 174, 211, 220, 222, 286, 305, 410 Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida ix, 17, 54–5, 68–9, 71, 72, 106, 107–22, 109, 144, 177, 189, 192, 201, 400, 405; ‘Cape cookies’ 146–7; Launch Complex 5/6 123–35, 193–9 Carpenter, Malcolm Scott 26, 27, 65–6, 86 Castro, Fidel 46, 140, 198, 215, 216, 217, 218, 376, 397, 398, 416 Central Scientific-Research Aviation Hospital, Moscow 82 Cernan, Gene 25 Chaffee, Roger 189 Chandler, William ‘Curly’ 123–4 Chekunov, Boris 292, 300, 302, 303, 308, 311–2 Chernushka (Blackie) (dog) 164, 167, 169, 170, 203, 406 Chertok, Boris 47, 96, 169–70, 180, 192, 206, 227, 337 chicken switch 121, 293 chimpanzees 17, 22, 23, 27, 61–2, 73, 106, 107–35, 139, 141, 143, 148, 193, 197, 241, 363, 368, 378, 406 see also individual chimpanzee name Chkalovsky air base, USSR 31, 35–6, 87, 153, 155, 185, 186, 218–19, 220, 315, 326, 359, 412 Chrysler 72 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): Cuba and 198, 199–200, 215–16, 217, 255, 376, 397, 398; Korolev and 5, 90, 103; R-7, ‘kidnap’ upper propulsion stage of 101–2; R-7, photographs 4, 101, 180, 181–2, 215, 245; R-16 and 181–2; Russian dog flights and 167; U-2 spy plane/high-altitude spy pilots and 64–5, 180–1, 215, 283, 334; Vietnam and 46 Clarke, Arthur C. 46, 52 Clifton, Major General 284–5 Cocoa Beach, Florida 71, 107, 146, 155, 179, 239, 330, 368, 405, 460 Commission for Interplanetary Communications, USSR 103 Communist Party, USSR 38, 41, 45, 93, 207, 235, 249, 259, 260, 283, 329, 354, 384, 389, 409; Central Committee 105, 208, 210, 212, 218, 222, 223, 226, 228, 243, 323, 328, 386 Congo 45 Convair 72 Cook, Captain Jim 110 Cooper, Leroy ‘Gordo’ 26, 27, 67, 68, 146 Cooper, Trudy 67 Corona (spy satellite) 181–2 Cosmonaut Training Centre of the Air Force, USSR (TsPK or Tsentr Podgotovki Kosmonavtov) (Military Unit 26266) 29–42, 86, 153, 222, 235, 269, 412 Cronkite, Walter 402 Cuba 46, 140, 198–9, 215–18, 255, 333, 376, 377, 397–9 Cushing, Cardinal Richard 43–4 Daily Worker 261–2 Dana, Bill 147 Davidyants, Viktor 283 Debus, Kurt 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 142, 144, 197 Democratic Party, US 20, 52, 405 Dimbleby, Richard 388 Discovery Space Shuttle 405 Dittmer, Edward 109, 110–11, 116, 117, 118, 121, 125, 127 dogs, space flights involving see individual dog name Donlan, Charles 64 Douglas, William 145–6 Dryden, Hugh 199, 262–3, 395, 396 Dubovitsky, Aleksey 380 Durov Animals Theatre 116 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 20, 43, 52, 53, 60, 64, 180, 181, 198, 377 Elizabeth II, Queen 413 Engels Air Base, Saratov District, USSR 156, 354–5, 361–6, 372, 373 Explorer 1 57, 58 Faget, Maxime 119–20, 126–7 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) 245, 307 Feoktistov, Konstantin 265, 266, 356 Filatova (née Bruevich), Tamara 315, 357–8, 359, 384, 415, 461 Flickinger, Brigadier General Donald 64 F-106 Delta Dart 144–5 Ford, Gerald 52, 407 Freedom 7 (Mercury capsule) see Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) Friendship 7 (Mercury capsule) 405 Frunze Central Aerodrome, Moscow 87 Fulbright, William 217 Fulton, James 383 Gagarin, Aleksey 38–9, 41, 314–15, 328–9, 340, 358, 359, 384, 386, 415 Gagarin, Boris 39, 40, 315, 384 Gagarin, Valentin 39, 40, 315, 358, 384 Gagarin, Yuri 5, 6, 33, 35–6, 37–8; birth and childhood 38–41, 249; Bondarenko and 188; celebrity 283, 354, 374, 380–4, 390–1, 392, 411–13, 415–16; Communism and 248; death 414–15; ejection from Vostok 3A 340–1, 342; Engels Air Base reception after Vostok 3A flight 361–6, 373; falls from second-floor balcony, Crimea 413; family first hear of Vostok 3A flight 326–9; flying, first experiences of 40–2; funeral 415; helmet 283, 350; Khrushchev and 323–4, 363, 380, 384, 385, 386, 387–8, 389–90, 413; Korolev and 105, 200, 229–30, 249–50, 266, 267, 271, 282, 288, 304, 375, 409, 413, 414, 415; Kryazh Air Base reception after Vostok 3A flight 373; letter written to wife and daughters night before Vostok 3A flight 272, 392; Luostari posting 77; Major, promoted to 323–4, 352, 362, 364, 374, 385; manned space programme, selection for USSR 42, 77–8, 82, 83, 84, 85–6; mannequin flights and 171–2, 200, 201, 203, 249, 282; medicals, Vostok 3A flight 270, 280–1, 362, 366; Order of Lenin and Gold Star, awarded 391; pay as astronaut 154–5; personality cult after death 415–16; physical fitness 155–6; radio announcement of Vostok 3A flight 322–31, 345, 346, 357, 359, 366; re-entry into earth’s atmosphere, Vostok 3A and 333–5; R-7, first sees 173; rewards, Soviet government shower with 412; Road to the Stars (ghosted autobiography) 41, 77–8, 235, 249; Site 1 launch pad, Tyuratam Cosmodrome, first sees 176, 177; smile/appearance 42, 250, 364; Soyuz spacecraft and 413–14; Star City apartment 412; technical college, Saratov, attends 41, 42, 91, 155, 333; Titov and 36, 37–8, 42, 84, 87, 249–50, 252, 373–4, 375, 388, 390, 411; travels around world after Vostok 3A flight 412–13; United Nations, address (1963) 413; Vanguard Six selection process and 33; Vanguard Six training 35–6, 37–8, 42, 87, 88, 105, 155–8, 210–12, 213, 222–4, 232–3, 240, 248–52, 253, 254, 258–60; victory parade, Moscow (1961) 379–80, 384–92; Vostok 3A flight/orbit and 304–55; Vostok 3A flight, selection as astronaut for 37–8, 42, 105, 210–12, 213, 222–4, 248–52, 253, 254, 258–60; Vostok 3A landing and 342–55, 365–6, 369, 382; Vostok 3A launch and 3–6, 275, 277–303, 304; Vostok 3A launch preparations and 219–20, 221–2, 232–3, 234, 235, 265, 266–7, 269, 270–2, 273, 416; Zvezdochka and 200 Gagarina, Anna 39, 40, 41, 153, 314–15, 327–8, 340–1, 359, 360, 386, 392, 416 Gagarina, Elena 40, 77, 152, 153, 171, 219, 326–7, 360, 414, 415, 416 Gagarina, Galina 171, 219, 326–7, 360, 415, 416 Gagarina, Maria 315, 327, 328 Gagarina, Valentina: birth of second child and 152, 153, 158; death 416; gifts/rewards, receives after Vostok 3A flight 412, 416; letter written from husband to on night before Vostok 3A flight 272; Luostari posting of husband and 77; meets and marries Yuri Gagarin 77; Moscow victory parade and Kremlin reception for Yuri Gagarin and 384, 386, 392, 395; secrecy of Vanguard Six mission and 84, 87, 153, 171; Star City apartment 415, 416; Titov family and 35, 36, 252, 326; Vostok 3A flight and 278, 326–7, 359; Yuri Gagarin death and 415; Yuri Gagarin leaving for Vostok 3A mission, on 219–20; Yuri Gagarin speaks to after Vostok 3A flight 375 Gallai, Mark 115, 228, 229; R-7, on 176; space horror, on threat of 246; Vanguard Six selection process and 192; Vostok 3A launch and flight and 301, 304, 312, 355–6, 372; Vostok 3A launch preparations and 247, 248, 264, 267–8, 270, 281, 288, 291 Gassiev, Major Akhmed 334, 335, 345, 351, 352, 353, 354, 362 Gavrilov, Svyatoslav 201 Gee-Whizz machine 113–14 Gemini spacecraft 350, 408 Gilruth, Robert 27–8, 37, 38, 75, 142, 143–4, 147, 148, 156, 159, 194 Giraudo, John 237–8 Gitelson, Josef 95 Glenn, Annie 68 Glennan, T.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

And Bill Easterly’s study of seventy different measures of quality of life covering health, education, rights, the environment, and access to infrastructure found that a global pattern was a driving explanatory factor for progress in nearly all of them over the past thirty years.7 Of course, there are exceptions—AIDS and civil war can stall and even temporarily reverse progress on health, and have done so. The fall of the Berlin Wall considerably accelerated progress toward greater respect for civil and political rights. Nonetheless, the transition to a higher quality of life overall follows a similar pattern across measures and countries alike. The apparent importance of processes that are broadly common across countries—whatever their economic performance, policy behavior, or institutional development—suggests conclusions about the role of governments or country circumstances in speeding or retarding progress on quality of life.


pages: 224 words: 69,494

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

Abolition followed serious, sustained effort to bring about that change. The British Empire did not wake up one morning and suddenly agree with the “Quit India” campaign. The decision to abandon “the jewel in the crown” was the result of sustained effort and by major political changes that made it inevitable. A similar story can be told about the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany. Sorting out mobility, transport, urban design and public health may not be as momentous as slavery, India and Berlin but it is up there with a list of major social changes and paradigm shifts that have happened or are waiting to happen and it will happen.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Some background information on the Zumba prostitute ring in Kennebunk came from the story ‘Modern-Day Puritans Wring Hands Over Zumba Madam’s List Of Shame’ by Patrik Jonsson, which was published in the Christian Science Monitor on 13 October 2012. For more on Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s days at Stanford, I recommend ‘The Birth of Google’ by John Battelle, which was published in Wired magazine in August 2005. All my information about the Stasi came from Anna Funder’s brilliant Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, published by Granta in 2003 and by Harper Perennial in 2011. My research into the terrible story of Lindsay Armstrong took me to ‘She Couldn’t Take Any More’, which was written by Kirsty Scott and published in the Guardian on 2 August 2002. My thanks to Kirsty for her article and for her help in putting me in touch with Lindsay’s mother, Linda.


Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Howard Zinn, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan

As described by Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, that historic decision led to a change from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” That hideous chapter in the history of Latin American travail for five hundred years—now mercifully coming to an end, in significant measure—was brought to a peak of fury by Reagan’s terrorist wars in Central America. These ended immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite unit of the US-trained and -armed Salvadoran army, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy school of counterinsurgency, under the direct orders of the Salvadoran High Command. The twenty-fifth anniversary passed in the usual silence accorded to our own crimes.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

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

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

And even as the European Union continues to open borders between its member states, it is allocating millions to head off flimsy boats on the Mediterranean Sea. This policy hasn’t made a dent in the flood of would-be immigrants but is helping human traffickers do a brisk business and is claiming the lives of thousands in the process. Here we are, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from Uzbekistan to Thailand, from Israel to Botswana, the world has more barriers than ever.46 Humans didn’t evolve by staying in one place. Wanderlust is in our blood. Go back a few generations and almost everybody has an immigrant in the family tree. And look at modern China, where 20 years ago the biggest migration in world history led to the influx of hundreds of millions of Chinese from the countryside into its cities.


pages: 202 words: 8,448

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

The next chapters, then, will be less about the what of nonviolent action and more about the how, the principles without which no movement can survive. To begin this section of the book, let’s go to Belarus. There are few better places I can think of to start in. This lovely country, right next to Russia, somehow missed the fall of the Berlin Wall and is today still living the Soviet dream. Now, let’s go back in time and pretend it’s 2010, on the eve of Belarus’s presidential elections. Since 1994 the country has been under the thumb of a ruthless and corrupt despot named Alexander Lukashenko, who lords over the last dictatorship in Europe.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Here is a quick profile of your gifts and gaps: A keen commercial sense: We saw how Ben Weiss capitalized on the intersection of “good for you” and “great tasting” to create the new beverage juggernaut called Bai Brands. It was that same sense that still leads Howard Lerman to leap back into his “pirate ship” to shape the next big idea at Yext. Laurie Spengler was driven by the same force, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as she saw the opportunity to help emerging entrepreneurs fuel their dreams by showing them how to raise investment capital. A creative impulse that enables you to convert customer need to a product or service that fits: Mi Jong Lee, the fashion designer, applies this impulse to serve professional women ages forty to fifty-five.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Bioluminescent trees that glow in the dark, providing lighting for city streets.14 DNA hard drives—rewritable data-storage systems that can store information within cells.15 Bioengineered plants that “produce plastic exactly in a desired shape, from a drinking cup to a house.”16 And yes, engineered humans immune to disease, capable of recalling every fleeting experience like Funes the Memorious, no longer just homo sapiens but transformed by imported bits from other species. “The interspecies barrier is falling as fast as the Berlin Wall did in 1989,” George M. Church writes in his book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Not just occasional horizontal transfer but massive and intentional exchange—there is a global marketplace for genes. Not the isolating effect of islands or valleys resulting in genetic drift and xenophobia, but a growing addiction to foreign gene products, for example, humans “mating” with wormwood for antimalarial drug precursor artemisinin, and with Clostridium for Botox.17 If you think that all this sounds comfortably science-fiction-like and distant, take a moment to consider how you might have reacted in 1985 if someone had told you that within your own lifetime, you would carry a Cray 2 supercomputer in your pocket, as would farmers in rural India.


pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

FEET IN THE DOOR John Armstrong’s life has been characterized by successive waves of service, going back to his Boy Scout years. After graduating from West Point, like his father and his grandfather and greatgrandfather before him, Armstrong—a towering figure, with the bearing of a Canadian Mountie—spent six years in the U.S. Army. When he finished his tour (he was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down), Armstrong got an MBA at the University of Washington in Seattle, worked for a decade as a financial analyst in the corporate world, and then put in five years at Hewlett-Packard. As Armstrong approached forty, he and his wife joined the Peace Corps, where he served as a marketing adviser in Slovakia, helping to build up civil society there.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

No convincing answer was advanced, and the few instances in which a supposedly scientific ideology was able to achieve its ideal society ended in complete disaster. By the latter half of the 20th century, the debacle of Nazism and communism had caused a serious loss of faith in ideals. Some even saw the fascist concentration camps and the communist gulags as a legacy of the Enlightenment, arguing that it was time to put on the brakes. The fall of the Berlin Wall put the final nail in the coffin of ideology, and so the idea of an engineered society was shelved. Change and perfectibility remained keywords, but the focus now shifted to the individual. The end of the previous century marked the beginning of a radical new take on identity. People became responsible for perfecting themselves, for engineering their own success.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Credit swaps. Subprime loans. Discounted free cash flow. Man, this stuff is harder than Chinese arithmetic. I guess what intrigues me is that the Czech Republic even has stocks to trade in the first place. One day the government owns every business, bloated with beer-breath bureaucrats, and then boom! The Berlin Wall falls, Prague is wrapped in Velvet, and the next day it’s capitalism? That’s got to be a tricky transition. So I asked. In Soviet-style communism, the chairman explained, the state owned everything. All of a sudden, democracy and capitalism rolled into town, and no one quite knew how to go from a system of shared public ownership to private property and a functioning economy with price discovery and resource allocation and wealth creation.


pages: 232 words: 66,229

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, index card, Maui Hawaii, PalmPilot, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

I climbed under a table and held Cheryl in my arms. I whispered her name over and over, but her gaze only met mine once, before her head fell back, her eyes on the third gunman, who had been captured beneath a large, heavy tabletop. Students were now fighting each other for a place on top of the table, like people on the Berlin Wall in 1989, and then they all began to jump in unison, crushing the body like a Christmas walnut, one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE; and the distance between the tabletop and the floor shrank with each jump until finally, as I held Cheryl in my arms, the students-unbeknownst to the forces of the law outside-might just as well have been squishing mud between the floor and table.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

Ireland, Portugal and Spain were all objects of the need, especially in Germany, to satisfy a crudely religious imperative that sinners must be severely punished if the virtue of fiscal discipline is to flourish. A polity that inflicted such pointless suffering on some of its most vulnerable citizens through so-called austerity is morally askew. The EU lost its moral compass when the Berlin Wall fell. Before that, it was in a competition against communism. The generation of Western European leaders that had experienced the chaos of the continent in the 1930s and 1940s were anxious to prove that a market system could be governed in such a way as to create full employment, fair opportunities, decent public services and steady progress towards economic equality.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

Tax avoidance and evasion do not bloom spontaneously; as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, they’re fueled largely by the peddlers of tax dodges. And the tax-avoidance industry does not function in a vacuum: the ideological, economic, and legal context in which it operates matters. In the 1990s, all the lights turned green. The Berlin Wall had just fallen; free-market ideas were triumphing. A new generation of executives, indoctrinated into the shareholder-is-king model in the 1980s, were taking up the reins of America’s multinationals. At the same time, globalization was opening new tax-saving opportunities. Up to the 1980s, US companies made less than 15% of their earnings abroad.


pages: 229 words: 67,752

The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg: A Fast Paced Portal Adventure by Eva St. John

3D printing, Berlin Wall, clean water, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, off grid, off-the-grid, performance metric

Where was the fun if there was no risk? Shortly after that we'd been reassigned schools to a place more suitable to our skills and attitudes. The Library of Alexandria. ‘So, an egg!’ Paul looked as excited as I felt. The last egg hunt had involved an exploding tanker, and the one before that had taken part during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fun times. ‘Which teams do you reckon they'll pick?’ We were both in with a chance. No one could step within seven days of their last step; it was a simple safety protocol. For the next week none of us could be considered, but on day eight we'd be eligible. So long as we weren't then assigned to another retrieval.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

A new world order The Rhône-Poulenc saga brings to mind those who despair of where the world is headed. To find a sense of order in this ‘chaos’, they latch on to clean divides: countries of the north and countries of the south; countries of the east and countries of the west (once separated by the Berlin Wall); emerging countries and developed countries; the Orient and the Occident; the free world versus the axis of evil; ‘Old Europe’ against the vibrant ‘New World’; and so on. But there may be an even deeper divide that began thirty years ago — one that tells the story of the world of our making. It did not follow a treaty in Versailles, a congress in Vienna, or a conference in Yalta.


ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

During this time, there were three points of support. First, the already existing network of community projects in the German speaking arena, and the experience they brought. Secondly, the UN Conference in 1992 in Rio that set goals for social and ecological sustainability. Lastly, the social climate in former East Germany: after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, socialism broke down, but not the longing for community. In 1990, we organised a community festival with 1,000 people. Some people from the East who felt a longing for real community met with existing communities from the West. Our ecovillage initiative had its first public appearance.


pages: 209 words: 64,635

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum by Tamika Lechee Morales

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Hangouts, neurotypical, stem cell, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, TikTok

At five years old, Caroline was thriving, eating food by mouth, communicating effectively using an augmentative and alternative communication device (AAC) that’s like an iPad, and demonstrating her outlandish personality. I began to realize one reason my dad and Caroline connected so well: she was a female, nonverbal, autistic version of my dad. Despite being born in the 1940s, entering the military as a teenager, guarding the Berlin Wall immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, limiting his run-ins with the law to a few nights in jail (none in prison), he found Caroline to be his new reason for living. “She’s my hero,” he would proclaim after I would tell him how she stripped off her clothes and streaked through the movie theater or was caught trying to purchase airline tickets to Australia to see her favorite band, The Wiggles.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

THE GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC RECESSION In 1991, the late Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “the third wave” to describe a surge of political liberalization and democratic governance across the globe that started in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. According to Huntington, the first wave involved the gradual spread of democracy in the nineteenth century, and the second occurred in the decades after World War II. Each wave was followed by reversals, with some countries slipping back into autocracy.

See HIV/AIDS al-Falih, Khalid “America First” America First Committee Áñez, Jeanine anticolonialism anti-lockdown protests Arce, Luis artificial intelligence AstraZeneca vaccine Atlantic Charter Australia autocratization, third wave of Azar, Alex B.1.17 (variant) B.1.351 (variant) Ban, Ki-moon Banbury, Tony Bangladesh Barry, John BBIBP-CorV vaccine Beasley, David Beer Hall Putsch Berlin Wall, fall of Biden, Joe COVID-19 response foreign policy and relations Johnson, Boris, and presidential debates presidential election of 2020 World Health Organization and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bin Salman, Mohammed (MbS) Birx, Deborah Black Lives Matter movement Blinken, Antony Blyth, Mark Bolivia Bolsonaro, Jair Bolton, John Borrell, Josep Brainard, Lael Branstad, Terry Brazil Bremberg, Andrew Brennan, Margaret Brexit Brown, Gordon Brundtland, Gro Harlem Bullitt, William C.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

As a police officer commented in an episode of Between the Lines, looking at an anti-cuts demonstration outside a town hall: ‘It’s hardly ’84, is it?’ A number of factors contributed to this decline, most spectacularly the unqualified victory of the West in the Cold War, and the subsequent collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc. In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was still standing, the American commentator Francis Fukuyama had published his essay ‘The End of History’, arguing that the world’s ideological conflicts had been resolved in favour of capitalist democracy. Whether or not this were true, the proposition found a receptive audience and confirmed what had become unavoidably apparent over the last decade: that the intellectual tide had turned in favour of free-market economics.

The European Community had once been embraced by Conservatives as a bulwark against both international communism and domestic socialism, but now that the external threat was imploding and the power of the trade unions had been curbed at home, there seemed little further need of anything save the free market, operating on as wide a basis as possible. Everything else about the EU – its aspirations to exert influence in social matters and foreign affairs, for example – was inherently suspect. The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed an instinctive patriotism to reassert itself, while the Manichean rhetoric of the Cold War era survived, to be directed now at the EU; any hint that it might seek to impede the free workings of capitalism was portrayed as socialism in disguise, a return to the bureaucratic statism of Eastern Europe.

Index Aberfan disaster ref 1 abortion ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 About a Boy (Nick Hornby) ref 1 Absolutely Fabulous (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Adam Smith Institute ref 1, ref 2 Adams, Gerry ref 1, ref 2 Adams, Tony ref 1 Admiral Duncan pub bombing ref 1 Afghanistan ref 1 age of consent ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Aherne, Caroline ref 1, ref 2 AIDS ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 air industry, deregulation of ref 1 air traffic control ref 1 Aitken, Jonathan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Al-Fayed, Dodi ref 1, ref 2 Al-Fayed, Mohammed ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Albarn, Damon ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 alcohol see drinking culture alcopops ref 1 Alder Hey Children Hospital ref 1 Allason, Rupert ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Allen, Keith ref 1 Allitt, Beverley ref 1 Amazon ref 1 American cultural influences ref 1 Amess, David ref 1 Amiel, Barbara ref 1 Amis, Kingsley ref 1 Amis, Martin ref 1 anal intercourse ref 1 The Anarchist (Tristan Hawkins) ref 1 Anderson, Janet ref 1 Andrew, Prince ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Anne, Princess ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Archer, Jeffrey ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 armed forces ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 arms-to-Iraq affair ref 1, ref 2 Arsenal ref 1, ref 2 ASBOs ref 1 Ashby, David ref 1 Ashcroft, Michael ref 1 Ashdown, Paddy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20 Ashton, Joe ref 1 Asian films and music ref 1, ref 2 asylum seekers ref 1, ref 2 Atherton, Mike ref 1 Back to Basics agenda ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Bacon, Francis ref 1 Baddiel, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12 Baker, Danny ref 1, ref 2 Baker, Kenneth ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Ball, Zoë ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Balls, Ed ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Bangles ref 1 Banham, Sir John ref 1 Bank of England ref 1, ref 2 Banks, Morwenna ref 1 Banks, Tony ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Barnett Formula ref 1 Bashir, Martin ref 1 Bateman, Nick ref 1 Bayley, Stephen ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Beatles ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Beckett, Margaret ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Beckham, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Beckham, Victoria ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Bell, Martin ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Bell, Stuart ref 1 Bell, Tim ref 1 Benn, Hilary ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Benn, Tony ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33 Bennett, Alan ref 1, ref 2 Berlin Wall, fall of ref 1 The Best a Man Can Get (John O) ref 1 Best, George ref 1 Between the Lines (TV) ref 1, ref 2 The Big Breakfast (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Big Brother (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 The Big Issue ref 1 Billy Elliot (film) ref 1 Birmingham pub bombings ref 1 Birmingham Six ref 1 Birt, John ref 1 Black, Conrad ref 1, ref 2 Black Lace ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Black Wednesday ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Blair, Cherie ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Blair, Tony ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37, ref 38, ref 39, ref 40, ref 41, ref 42, ref 43, ref 44, ref 45, ref 46, ref 47, ref 48, ref 49 on his achievements ref 1 Blair–Brown rivalry ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 and bombing of Iraq ref 1 and cabinet politics ref 1 Catholic faith ref 1 cavalier approach to facts ref 1, ref 2 and Clause IV ref 1, ref 2 ‘control freak’ ref 1 and Cool Britannia ref 1, ref 2 ‘demon eyes’ poster ref 1 and devolution ref 1, ref 2 and Diana death ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Ecclestone affair ref 1, ref 2 and electoral reform ref 1 fascination with wealth ref 1 flaunting of personal life ref 1 and fox hunting ban ref 1 Granita pact ref 1, ref 2 and John Smith death ref 1, ref 2 Labour leadership ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 leadership style ref 1 and Lib–Lab ties ref 1 loses support ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 on Major ref 1 marginalisation of Parliament ref 1 and the Millennium Dome ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 and monarchical reform ref 1 moral crusade ref 1, ref 2 no experience of government ref 1, ref 2 and the Northern Ireland peace process ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 oratory ref 1 and overseas interventions ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 patriotic rhetoric ref 1 persona ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 repackaged Conservatism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 show-business element ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 and the single currency ref 1, ref 2 Third Way politics ref 1, ref 2 and the trades unions ref 1 vision for the future ref 1, ref 2 Blake, Peter ref 1 Blunkett, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27 Blur ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 Boateng, Paul ref 1 body piercing ref 1 Booker, Christopher ref 1 Booth, Hartley ref 1 Boothroyd, Betty ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Bottomley, Virginia ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 Bowie, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 boxing ref 1, ref 2 Boycott, Geoffrey ref 1, ref 2 Boyle, Danny ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Bragg, Billy ref 1, ref 2 Bragg, Melvyn ref 1 Brand, Jo ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Brandreth, Gyles ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 Branson, Richard ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Brass Eye (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Brassed Off (film) ref 1, ref 2 Braveheart (film) ref 1 Bremner, Rory ref 1, ref 2 Britain (Mark Leonard) ref 1 British National Party (BNP) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 British Rail ref 1, ref 2 British Social Attitudes Survey ref 1, ref 2 Britishness ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Britpop ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 The Brittas Empire (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Brooke, Peter ref 1 Brookmyre, Christopher ref 1, ref 2 Brookside (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Brown, Arnold ref 1 Brown, Craig ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Brown, Gordon ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27 Blair–Brown rivalry ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 bullying ref 1 on class differences ref 1 and devolution ref 1 dislike of Liberal Democrats ref 1 Granita pact ref 1 leadership contest ref 1, ref 2 and monetary policy ref 1, ref 2 personal awkwardness ref 1, ref 2 prime minister ref 1 ‘psychological flaws’ ref 1 and the single currency ref 1 Brown, James ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Brown, Nick ref 1, ref 2 Bruton, John ref 1 Bryan, John ref 1 BSE crisis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 BSkyB ref 1 Buckley, Fiona ref 1 Bulger, James ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 bulldog, British ref 1 Burchill, Julie ref 1, ref 2 Burdon, Eric ref 1 Bush, George ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Byers, Stephen ref 1, ref 2 Cable, Vince ref 1, ref 2 Cadbury, Peter ref 1 Caine, Michael ref 1 Calcutt Enquiry ref 1 Callaghan, James ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 Cameron, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Campbell, Alastair ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37, ref 38, ref 39, ref 40, ref 41, ref 42, ref 43, ref 44, ref 45, ref 46, ref 47, ref 48 Campbell, Naomi ref 1 Canary Wharf bombing ref 1 Canavan, Dennis ref 1 cannabis ref 1 Cantona, Eric ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Carey, George, Archbishop of Canterbury ref 1, ref 2 Carlisle, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Carlyle, Robert ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Cartland, Barbara ref 1 Cash, Bill ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 cash for questions scandal ref 1, ref 2 Castle, Barbara ref 1, ref 2 Catholic Church ref 1, ref 2 Chalker, Lynda ref 1, ref 2 Champions League ref 1 Changing Rooms (TV) ref 1 Channel Tunnel ref 1, ref 2 Charles, Prince of Wales ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17 Charter 88 ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 ‘chavs’ ref 1, ref 2 chick lit ref 1 child benefit ref 1 Chippendales ref 1 Christian, Terry ref 1, ref 2 Christian Socialist Movement ref 1 Church of England ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Churchill, Winston ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Citizen Smith (TV) ref 1 Citizens’ Charter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 city academies ref 1 civil liberties ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 civil partnerships ref 1 civil service ref 1, ref 2 Clark, Alan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Clarke, Charles ref 1 Clarke, Kenneth ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20 Clarke, Roy ref 1, ref 2 Clary, Julian ref 1, ref 2 the Clash ref 1, ref 2 classless society rhetoric ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Clifford, Max ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Clinton, Bill ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Clough, Ian ref 1 club scene ref 1, ref 2 Cluedo ref 1 Clunes, Martin ref 1 coal pit closures ref 1, ref 2 coalition government ref 1 cocaine ref 1 Coe, Sebastian ref 1, ref 2 Cohen, Nick ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Cole, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Collymore, Stan ref 1 comedy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 see also individual performers and programmes Commonwealth Games ref 1 community, sense of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 computer games ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Cones Hotline ref 1 Conran, Terence ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Conservative Party ‘clear blue water’ strategy ref 1 ‘common sense revolution’ ref 1 defections ref 1 election defeat (1997) ref 1 election victory (1992) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Euroscepticism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 internal hostilities ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 leadership contests ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 membership profile ref 1 the ‘nasty party’ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 reforms ref 1 response to Blair ref 1 sleaze ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12 consumer credit ref 1, ref 2 Coogan, Steve ref 1, ref 2 see also Partridge, Alan Cook, Peter ref 1 Cook, Robin ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25 The Cook Report (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Cool Britannia ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21 Cooper, Mick ref 1 Cooper, Yvette ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Copeland, David ref 1 Coren, Giles ref 1 Coronation Street (TV) ref 1, ref 2 corporal punishment ref 1 Couch, Jane ref 1 council tax ref 1 counterculture, 1980s ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Countryside Alliance ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Cox, Sara ref 1 Cracker (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 cricket ref 1, ref 2 crime rates ref 1, ref 2 Critchley, Julian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 cronyism ref 1 Crosland, Tony ref 1 Cryer, Barry ref 1 cuisine, British ref 1, ref 2 cultural renaissance ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Cunningham, Jack ref 1, ref 2 currency speculation ref 1 Currie, Debbie ref 1 Currie, Edwina ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22 cynicism, national ref 1, ref 2 D-Day anniversary ref 1 Dacre, Paul ref 1, ref 2 Daily Express ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Daily Mail ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16 Daily Mirror ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25 Daily Telegraph ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Danziger, Nick ref 1, ref 2 Darling, Alistair ref 1 The Darling Buds of May (TV) ref 1 Davies, Ron ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 The Day Today (TV) ref 1, ref 2 de la Billière, General Peter ref 1 The Deal (TV) ref 1 Deayton, Angus ref 1, ref 2 Dee, Jack ref 1 Deeson, Martin ref 1 defence cuts ref 1 democratisation of popular taste ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Dempster, Nigel ref 1 Desert Island Discs (radio) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Design Museum ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Desmond, Richard ref 1 devolution ref 1, ref 2 Dewar, Donald ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Diamond, John ref 1 Diana, Princess of Wales ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 Diego Garcia ref 1 diet, national ref 1 Dinnerladies (TV) ref 1 disabled people rights and benefits ref 1, ref 2 diversity, tolerance of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Dobbs, Michael ref 1, ref 2 Dobson, Frank ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 docusoaps ref 1 dogging ref 1 Dorrell, Stephen ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 dot-com bubble ref 1 Draper, Derek ref 1, ref 2 drinking culture ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Drop the Dead Donkey (TV) v, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17 drugs ref 1, ref 2 Dunblane massacre ref 1, ref 2 Duncan, Alan ref 1 Duncan Smith, Iain ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12 EastEnders (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Ecclestone, Bernie ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Eclair, Jenny ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 economic growth ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 economic liberalism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 ecstasy ref 1 education ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Edward, Prince ref 1 Edwards, Jonathan ref 1 Eldorado (TV) ref 1 electoral reform ref 1, ref 2 Elizabeth II, Queen ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 Elizabeth, the Queen Mother ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Elton, Ben ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Emin, Tracey ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 ‘end of socialism’ (Margaret Thatcher) ref 1, ref 2 energy bills ref 1 Enfield, Harry ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 English, David ref 1, ref 2 Enterprise Allowance Scheme ref 1 environmental concerns ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Essex girls ref 1 Eugenie, Princess ref 1 euro ref 1 Europe cultural attitudes to ref 1 relationship with ref 1, ref 2 European Convention on Human Rights ref 1 European Court of Human Rights ref 1 European Parliament ref 1, ref 2 European Union ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Eurotrash (TV) ref 1 Eurovision Song Contest ref 1 Evans, Chris ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Evans, David ref 1 Evening Standard ref 1 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 FA Premier League ref 1 Face (film) ref 1 Falconer, Charlie ref 1, ref 2 Falklands War ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 fantasy fiction genre ref 1 Fantasy Football League ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Farage, Nigel ref 1, ref 2 fashion ref 1, ref 2 The Fast Show (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Father Ted (TV) ref 1, ref 2 feminism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 ‘feral children’ ref 1 Ferguson, Alex ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 festival culture ref 1, ref 2 Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby) ref 1 FHM ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Field, Frank ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 film industry ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 see also specific films Flack, Roberta ref 1 Flint, Caroline ref 1 Floyd, Keith ref 1 flu epidemic ref 1, ref 2 fly-on-the-wall documentaries ref 1 focus groups ref 1, ref 2 Fogle, Ben ref 1 Foot, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 foot-and-mouth outbreak ref 1 football ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 football hooliganism ref 1 foreign policy and international relations ref 1 Formula One ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Forsyth, Michael ref 1 Forth, Eric ref 1 Four Weddings and a Funeral (film) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Fowler, Robbie ref 1 fox hunting ref 1 Francis, Ted ref 1 Frankie Goes to Hollywood ref 1 Freedom of Information Act ref 1 Freeman, Gillian ref 1 French, Dawn ref 1, ref 2 From Wimps to Warriors (TV) ref 1 Fry, Stephen ref 1, ref 2 fuel tax protests ref 1 The Full Monty (film) ref 1 Galliano, John ref 1 Galloway, George ref 1 game shows ref 1, ref 2 gangsta rap ref 1 Gard, Toby ref 1 Garel-Jones, Tristan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Gascoigne, Paul ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 gastropubs ref 1 gay marriage ref 1 gender roles ref 1 general elections 1992 ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 1997 ref 1, ref 2 2001 ref 1, ref 2 German reunification ref 1 Girl Guides ref 1 ‘girl power’ ref 1, ref 2 Glitter, Gary ref 1 Goldsmith, Sir James ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Good Friday Agreement ref 1 Goodnight Sweetheart (TV) ref 1 Goody, Jade ref 1 Gorman, Teresa ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 Gormley, Antony ref 1 Gould, Bryan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Gove, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 GQ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Graham, George ref 1 Grand National ref 1 Grand Theft Auto computer game ref 1 Granita ref 1, ref 2 Grant, Bernie ref 1, ref 2 grant-maintained schools ref 1 Greater London Authority ref 1 Greatrex, Neil ref 1 Green, Jonathon ref 1 Greer, Germaine ref 1 Griffiths, Jane ref 1 Groucho Club ref 1 Ground Force (TV) ref 1 Group4 435 Guardian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20 Guildford Four ref 1 Guinness trial ref 1 Gummer, John Selwyn ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 gun control ref 1 Gunnell, Sally ref 1 Hague, William ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 debating skills ref 1 misjudged photo-opportunities ref 1 resigns as leader ref 1 and the single currency ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 wins leadership election ref 1 Hain, Peter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Hamilton, Andy ref 1 Hamilton, Christine ref 1, ref 2 Hamilton, Neil ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Hamilton, Willie ref 1 Hamish Macbeth (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Hannan, Daniel ref 1, ref 2 Harman, Harriet ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 Harry, Prince ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Harry Potter books ref 1 Harvey, PJ ref 1, ref 2 Hastings, Max ref 1, ref 2 Hatfield rail crash ref 1 Hattersley, Roy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Have I Got News for You (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 Hawking, Stephen ref 1, ref 2 Hawkins, Tristan ref 1 Hayes, Jerry ref 1, ref 2 Healey, Denis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Hearn, Barry ref 1 Heath, Edward ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Heffer, Eric ref 1 Heffer, Simon ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Hemingway, Wayne ref 1 Hemingway Chair (Michael Palin) ref 1 Henri, Adrian ref 1 Heseltine, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35 Hewitt, James ref 1 Higgins, Alex ref 1 High Fidelity (Nick Hornby) ref 1 Hill, Benny ref 1 Hill, Damon ref 1 Hillsborough enquiry ref 1 Hilton, Steve ref 1 Hindley, Myra ref 1 Hindujas passports affair ref 1 Hirst, Damien ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Hislop, Ian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 historical apologies ref 1, ref 2 history, media interest in ref 1 Hitchens, Peter ref 1, ref 2 Hogg, Douglas ref 1 Holden, Anthony ref 1, ref 2 Holocaust Memorial Day ref 1 home ownership ref 1 homelessness ref 1 homosexuality ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17 Hong Kong ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Hornby, Nick ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 House of Commons voting arrangements ref 1 House of Lords reform ref 1, ref 2 house repossessions ref 1, ref 2 Housing Action Trusts ref 1 Howard, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16 Paxman interview ref 1 ‘something of the night’ ref 1 Howe, Geoffrey ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Howells, Kim ref 1 Huggy Bear ref 1, ref 2 Hughes, Simon ref 1 human rights abuses ref 1 Human Rights Act ref 1 Hume, John ref 1, ref 2 Hurd, Douglas ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Hurley, Elizabeth ref 1 Hussein, Saddam ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Hutton, Will ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Hynde, Chrissie ref 1 Iannucci, Armando ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 identity cards ref 1 identity politics ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 immigration ref 1, ref 2 In Sickness and in Health (TV) ref 1, ref 2 In the Name of the Father (film) ref 1 Independent ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 Independent on Sunday ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Indonesia, arms sales to ref 1 industrial decline ref 1 inflation ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 information superhighway ref 1, ref 2 Ingham, Bernard ref 1, ref 2 Inspector Morse (TV) ref 1, ref 2 interest rates ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 International Criminal Court ref 1 internet ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 internet urban myths ref 1 IRA ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 Iraq bombing of ref 1 invasion of Kuwait ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Ireland, Colin ref 1 Irvine, Derry ref 1 Islington ref 1, ref 2 Izzard, Eddie ref 1, ref 2 Jack, Ian ref 1, ref 2 Jackson, Glenda ref 1 Jackson, Ken ref 1 James, Alex ref 1 James, Clive ref 1, ref 2 Jane and Her Master (Stephen Rawlings) ref 1 Jenkin, Guy ref 1 Jenkin, Roy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Jenkins, Simon ref 1 Jesus and Mary Chain ref 1 Jiang Zemin ref 1 John, Elton ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Johnson, Alan ref 1 Johnson, Boris ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Johnson, Frank ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Johnson, Paul ref 1, ref 2 Jonathan Creek (TV) ref 1 Jones, Bridget ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Jones, Vinnie ref 1 Jonsson, Ulrika ref 1 Jopling, Jay ref 1 Jowell, Tessa ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 joyriding ref 1 Judge John Deed (TV) ref 1 Junor, John ref 1 Jupitus, Phill ref 1, ref 2 Just When We Are Safest (Reg Gadney) ref 1 juvenile crime ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 K Foundation ref 1 Kaufman, Gerald ref 1, ref 2 Keegan, Kevin ref 1, ref 2 Keeping up Appearances (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Kennedy, Charles ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Kennedy, Helena ref 1 Kennedy, Ludovic ref 1 Kennedy, Nigel ref 1, ref 2 Kent, Bruce ref 1 Kick Racism Out of Football ref 1 King, Mervyn ref 1 King, Oona ref 1, ref 2 Kingham, Tess ref 1 Kinnock, Neil ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20 knife crime ref 1 Kray, Ronnie and Reggie ref 1, ref 2 Kuwait, invasion of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Labour Party big business relations ref 1 ‘Blair babes’ ref 1, ref 2 centralising tendency ref 1 Clause IV ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 election defeat (1992) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 election victory (1997) ref 1 election victory (2001) ref 1 leadership contests ref 1, ref 2 media and politics ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 membership profile ref 1 micromanagement ref 1 modernisers ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 NEC ref 1, ref 2 New Labour ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 New Labour lexicon ref 1 one member, one vote reform ref 1 one-nation rhetoric ref 1 patriotic rhetoric ref 1 public disenchantment with ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 southern England alienation from ref 1, ref 2 spin ref 1, ref 2 targets, obsession with ref 1, ref 2 tax policies ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 welfare reform ref 1, ref 2 laddism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 ladettes ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 lads’ mags ref 1 Lamacq, Steve ref 1 Lamarr, Mark ref 1 Lamont, Norman ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24 lang, kd ref 1 Lara Croft ref 1, ref 2 Last of the Summer Wine (TV) ref 1 law and order ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Lawrence, Philip ref 1 Lawrence, Stephen ref 1, ref 2 Lawson, Nigel ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Le Pen, Jean-Marie ref 1 leasehold reform ref 1 Lederer, Helen ref 1, ref 2 Lee, Stewart ref 1 left, death of the ref 1 Lennon, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Leonard, Mark ref 1, ref 2 lesbianism ref 1, ref 2 Letwin, Oliver ref 1, ref 2 Lewis, Derek ref 1 Liberal Democratic Party ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 life peerages ref 1 Lilley, Peter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14 Little Britain (TV) ref 1 Littlejohn, Richard ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Liverpool ref 1 Livingstone, Ken ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12 Llewellyn, Edward ref 1 Lloyd, Nicholas ref 1 Lloyd Webber, Andrew ref 1 Loach, Ken ref 1 Loaded ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 local council elections ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 London Eye ref 1 London mayoral elections ref 1 London Underground ref 1 Lulu ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Lynk, Roy ref 1 Lynn, Vera ref 1, ref 2 Maastricht Treaty ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 McAlpine, Alistair ref 1, ref 2 Macaulay, Sarah ref 1 McCartney, Stella ref 1 McGuinness, Martin ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 McKellen, Ian ref 1 MacKenzie, Kelvin ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Macmillan, Harold ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Macpherson Report ref 1, ref 2 McQueen, Alexander ref 1, ref 2 Madchester ref 1 The Madness of King George (Alan Bennett) ref 1, ref 2 magazines ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Major, James ref 1 Major, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37, ref 38, ref 39 and the 1992 general election ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 and the 1997 election ref 1 ‘back to basics’ ref 1, ref 2 and Black Wednesday ref 1, ref 2 BSE crisis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Citizens’ Charter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 classless society philosophy ref 1, ref 2 and coal pit closures ref 1 espousal of ERM ref 1 ‘greyness’ ref 1 humble origins story ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 on Kinnock ref 1 and the Kuwaiti War ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 leadership challenge ref 1 Maastricht Treaty ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 on national identity ref 1, ref 2 and the Northern Ireland peace process ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 parliamentary career ref 1 perceived ineptitude ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 persona ref 1 resigns as party leader ref 1, ref 2 and the single currency ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 soapbox ref 1, ref 2 on the underclass ref 1 wins party leadership ref 1 Major, Norma ref 1 makeover shows ref 1 Mallalieu, Ann ref 1 Man and Boy (Tony Parsons) ref 1, ref 2 Manchester bombing ref 1 Manchester United ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Mandela, Nelson ref 1 Mandelson, Peter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37 Manic Street Preachers ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Manning, Bernard ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Mansell, Nigel ref 1 Maples, John ref 1 Marr, Andrew ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Marr, Johnny ref 1 Martin and John (Dale Peck) ref 1 Martin, Michael ref 1 Martin, Tony ref 1 Massive Attack ref 1, ref 2 Massow, Ivan ref 1 Matrix Churchill ref 1 Maude, Francis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Maxim ref 1 Maxwell, Robert ref 1, ref 2 Meacher, Michael ref 1 Meades, Jonathan ref 1, ref 2 media and politics ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Mellor, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 Melody Maker ref 1, ref 2 Men Behaving Badly (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Mercury, Freddie ref 1 meritocracy ref 1, ref 2 Merton, Paul ref 1, ref 2 Metropolitan Police ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Michael, Alun ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Miliband, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Miliband, Ed ref 1, ref 2 Miliband, Ralph ref 1 millennium ref 1, ref 2 Millennium Bridge ref 1 Millennium Bug ref 1, ref 2 Millennium Dome ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Milligan, Spike ref 1, ref 2 Milligan, Stephen ref 1 Mills, Barbara ref 1 Mills, David ref 1 Mills & Boon ref 1, ref 2 minimum wage ref 1 minority lifestyles, acceptance of ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Mitchell, Austin ref 1 MMR vaccination ref 1 ‘mockney’ ref 1 Mole, Adrian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 monetary policy ref 1 Money (Martin Amis) ref 1 Monkhouse, Bob ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Monks, John ref 1, ref 2 Montserrat ref 1 Moore, Bobby ref 1 Moore, Charles ref 1, ref 2 Moore, Jo ref 1 Moore, Suzanne ref 1, ref 2 Morgan, Peter ref 1 Morgan, Rhodri ref 1 Morley, Paul ref 1 Morrissey ref 1 Morrissey, Neil ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Mortimer, Bob ref 1, ref 2 Morton, Andrew ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Mosley, Max ref 1 Moss, Kate ref 1 Mowlam, Mo ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Mr Bean (TV) ref 1 Mugabe, Robert ref 1 Mullin, Chris ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14 multinationals, protests against ref 1 Murdoch, Rupert ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 music ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14 see also Britpop My Name is Joe (film) ref 1 Nadir, Asil ref 1 NAFTA ref 1 Naked (film) ref 1 national decline, public perception of ref 1, ref 2 National Front ref 1, ref 2 National Lottery ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 National Trust ref 1, ref 2 nationalism ref 1 Needham, Ed ref 1 New Age travellers ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 new consensus ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 New Deal ref 1, ref 2 New Man fantasy ref 1 The New Statesman ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Newbury bypass protest ref 1 Newman, Rob ref 1 News of the World ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 NHS ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Nicholson, Emma ref 1 Nicholson, Viv ref 1 Nickell, Rachel ref 1, ref 2 Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman) ref 1 Nixon, Richard ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 ‘no such thing as society’ (Margaret Thatcher) ref 1 Nolan Committee ref 1 Norris, Steven ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 North Square (TV) ref 1 Northern Ireland ref 1 Notham, Ian ref 1 Nott, John ref 1 Nye, Simon ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Oasis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Observer ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 O, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 OFSTED ref 1 O, Sean ref 1, ref 2 old certainties, yearning for ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Oldman, Gary ref 1, ref 2 Oliver, Jamie ref 1 Olympic Games (1992) ref 1 Omagh bombing ref 1 On the Hour (radio) ref 1 One Foot in the Grave (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 one-nation rhetoric ref 1, ref 2 online shopping ref 1 Oratory ref 1 Orwell, George ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Osborne, George ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Our Friends in the North (TV) v, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 out-of-town shopping sites ref 1 Owen, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Oxbridge ref 1, ref 2 paedophilia ref 1, ref 2 paganism ref 1 Paisley, Ian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Parker-Bowles, Camilla ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Parkinson, Cecil ref 1 Parliament broadcasts from ref 1 marginalisation of ref 1 Parris, Matthew ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Parsons, Tony ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 participatory democracy ref 1, ref 2 Partridge, Alan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Pasternak, Anna ref 1, ref 2 patriotic rhetoric ref 1 Patten, Chris ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17 Patten, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10 Pavarotti, Luciano ref 1, ref 2 Paxman, Jeremy ref 1, ref 2 Payne, Sarah ref 1 Peck, Dale ref 1 pensions ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Penthouse ref 1 People ref 1, ref 2 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Phillips, Melanie ref 1 Pie in the Sky (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Pinochet, Augusto ref 1 Plant, Robert ref 1 Platell, Amanda ref 1, ref 2 police ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 political advisors ref 1 political career paths ref 1, ref 2 political correctness ref 1 political monoculturalism ref 1 The Politician Wife (TV) ref 1 poll tax ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 pop charts, corruption in ref 1 pornography ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Portillo, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26 ‘posh’, revival of ref 1 Post Office ref 1 post-war consensus ref 1 post-war generation ref 1 Powell, Enoch ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Powell, Jonathan ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13 prank television ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Pratchett, Terry ref 1 Prescott, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30 Prescott, Pauline ref 1, ref 2 Press Complaints Commission ref 1 Price, Lance ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 Prime Suspect (TV) ref 1 prison service ref 1, ref 2 Private Eye ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9 private finance initiative (PFI) ref 1 privatisation ref 1 profanity of language ref 1 Proops, Marjorie ref 1 property market ref 1 proportional representation ref 1 Pulp ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 punk ref 1, ref 2 Puttnam, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 The Queen and I (Sue Townsend) ref 1, ref 2 Queer as Folk (TV) ref 1 Quinn, Marc ref 1 Quite Ugly One Morning (Christopher Brookmyre) ref 1 racism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Radice, Giles ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21 radio phone-in shows ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Radiohead ref 1 Rankin, Ian ref 1 Rat Boy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Ravenhill, Mark ref 1 raves ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Rawnsley, Andrew ref 1, ref 2 Raynsford, Nick ref 1 Reagan, Ronald ref 1, ref 2 reality television ref 1 rebranding of Britain ref 1 recession ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Red Wedge ref 1 Redgrave, Steve ref 1 Redwood, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20 Rees-Mogg, William ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Reeves, Vic ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Referendum Party ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Reid, John ref 1 religious sensibilities ref 1, ref 2 Renwick, David ref 1 republicanism ref 1, ref 2 restaurants, celebrity ref 1, ref 2 retailing ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Rice, Tim ref 1 Richard, Cliff ref 1, ref 2 Rickman, Alan ref 1 Riddell, Peter ref 1 Ridley, Nicholas ref 1 Rifkind, Malcolm ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 The Right Man (Nigel Planer) ref 1 Rimington, Stella ref 1 Riot Grrrl movement ref 1, ref 2 Ritchie, Guy ref 1 River Café 121 Robinson, Geoffrey ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Rock Against Racism ref 1 Rolling Stones ref 1, ref 2 Root, Henry ref 1 Ross, Paul ref 1 rough sleeper initiative ref 1 Rowling, J.K. ref 1 royal family ref 1, ref 2 The Royle Family (TV) ref 1, ref 2 rugby ref 1 Saatchi, Charles ref 1 Sacks, Jonathan ref 1 sadomasochism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 St George, flag of ref 1 SAS ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 satire ref 1 Saunders, Jennifer ref 1, ref 2 Savage, Jon ref 1, ref 2 Savage, Lily ref 1, ref 2 Scargill, Arthur ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Scarman Report ref 1 Schlesinger, John ref 1 Scott, Nicholas ref 1, ref 2 Scottish devolution ref 1 SDP/Liberal Alliance ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 see also Liberal Democratic Party Second World War ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Secure Training Centres ref 1 Securities and Investments Board ref 1 September 11 terrorist attacks ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 service industries, rise of ref 1 sex scandals, political ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 sexual politics ref 1 Shearer, Alan ref 1, ref 2 Sheffield rally ref 1, ref 2 Shephard, Gillian ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Shipman, Dr Harold ref 1 Shooting Stars (TV) ref 1 Shopping and Fucking (Mark Ravenhill) ref 1 Shore, Peter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Short, Clare ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Sierra Leone ref 1, ref 2 single currency ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 single mothers ref 1, ref 2 Sinn Fein ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 sitcoms ref 1 see also individual entries 606 (radio) ref 1, ref 2 Skinner, Dennis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Skinner, Frank ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8 Smith, Chris ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Smith, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25 Smith, Linda ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 the Smiths ref 1, ref 2 smoking ref 1 Snow, Peter ref 1 Soames, Nicholas ref 1, ref 2 soap operas ref 1, ref 2 see also individual entries Social Chapter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 social deprivation ref 1, ref 2 social disorder ref 1 see also law and order social housing ref 1 social liberalism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 social mobility ref 1 social relationships, breakdown in ref 1 Soldier, Soldier (TV) ref 1 Soley, Clive ref 1 solvent abuse ref 1 Songs of Praise (TV) ref 1 Souter, Brian ref 1 Spence, Laura ref 1 Spencer, Earl ref 1 Spencer, Tom ref 1 Spice Girls ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Spicer, Michael ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 spin doctoring ref 1, ref 2 spirituality ref 1, ref 2 Spitting Image (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 sporting heroes ref 1 Squidgygate ref 1 Stagg, Colin ref 1 standards in public life, concerns over ref 1 Starkey, David ref 1, ref 2 Starr, Edwin ref 1, ref 2 Stars in Their Eyes (TV) ref 1 The State We In (Will Hutton) ref 1 ‘stealth taxes’ ref 1 Steel, Mark ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Stewart, Allan ref 1 stock market ref 1, ref 2 stop and search ref 1 Straight Talking (Jane Green) ref 1 Straw, Jack ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18 Stuff ref 1 Suede ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 suicide rates ref 1 Sun ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37, ref 38, ref 39 Sunday Telegraph ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Sunday Times ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Sunday trading ref 1 supermarket chains ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Swampy ref 1, ref 2 Swift, Amanda ref 1 talent contests ref 1 Talk Radio UK ref 1 Tapsell, Peter ref 1 Tatchell, Peter ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Tate Modern ref 1, ref 2 tattoos ref 1 tax credits ref 1 taxes ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15 Tebbit, Norman ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 teenagers drinking culture ref 1 juvenile crime ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 sexual behaviour ref 1 Temazepam ref 1 terrorism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Thatcher, Margaret ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23, ref 24, ref 25, ref 26, ref 27, ref 28, ref 29, ref 30, ref 31, ref 32, ref 33, ref 34, ref 35, ref 36, ref 37 ‘end of socialism’ ref 1, ref 2 memoirs ref 1 ‘no such thing as society’ ref 1 political demise ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Thatcherism ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Therapy (David Lodge) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Third Way politics ref 1, ref 2 This Life (TV) ref 1 Thompson, Ben ref 1 Thompson, Emma ref 1, ref 2 Thompson, John ref 1 The Times ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16 To Play the King (Michael Dobbs) ref 1 tobacco sponsorship ref 1 Today ref 1 Tomb Raider computer game ref 1 Top of the Pops (TV) ref 1, ref 2 Tory Boy ref 1 Townsend, Sue ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Toynbee, Polly ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 trades unions ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7 Trainspotting (film) ref 1, ref 2 transgender ref 1 Trimble, David ref 1, ref 2 Truss, Lynne ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Tully, Susan ref 1 Turner Prize ref 1 Twigg, Stephen ref 1 UK Independence Party (UKIP) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 UN weapons inspection programme ref 1, ref 2 underclass ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 unemployment ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11 Union Jack ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Van Outen, Denise ref 1 VAT ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 The Vicar of Dibley (TV) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 video diaries ref 1 visual arts ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Viz ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 voting apathy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Wade, Rebekah ref 1 Waite, Terry ref 1 Waiting for God (TV) ref 1 Waldegrave, William ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Walsh, John ref 1 wealth inequality ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 welfare state ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6 Weller, Paul ref 1 Welsh cultural renaissance ref 1 Welsh devolution ref 1 Wener, Louise ref 1, ref 2 Wenger, Arsène ref 1, ref 2 Westwood, Vivienne ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5 Whatever Love Means (David Baddiel) ref 1 Whelan, Charlie ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4 Whitaker, James ref 1, ref 2 Whitehouse, Paul ref 1, ref 2 Whitelaw, William ref 1, ref 2, ref 3 Whiteread, Rachel ref 1, ref 2 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Berliners and tourists alike ogle the cranes and skyscrapers of the Potsdamer Platz that is rising from the ruins left during the Cold War. They admire the restored Reichstag, which still retains its dedication ‘DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE’, ‘To the German Nation’, but whose heavy stone dome has been replaced by a light and airy glass one by the British architect Norman Foster. They gaze at the restored Brandenburg Gate, past which the Berlin Wall ran until recently, or at the re-gilded Siegessäule, the ‘Victory Column’, which commemorates the Franco-Prussian War. The mindless triumphalism of former times has gone, but there is no reluctance to recall Prussia’s days of non-military glory. The royal palaces at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are popular destinations; a decision was taken in 2010 to ignore financial prudence and to rebuild the Hohenzollerns’ Stadtschloss or ‘City-centre Palace’, that was demolished by the GDR.

When Gorbachev let it be known that East Germany could not count on the Soviet army to intervene, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, all the Communist leaders of the satellite states (except Ceauʂescu in Romania) saw the game was up, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Berlin Wall collapsed. Similarly in August 1991, when Gorbachev attempted to relax the terms of the Union Treaty (which defined the role of the USSR’s constituent republics), his own colleagues launched an abortive coup against him. His political credit was exhausted. Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), led a movement to recognize the independence of the fifteen Soviet republics, and in effect to terminate the Soviet story.

In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.77 The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage. In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did. In February 1990 elections to a Congress of Estonia turned into a de facto referendum on national statehood.


pages: 276 words: 74,074

The City Always Wins: A Novel by Omar Robert Hamilton

Berlin Wall, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, dark matter

Where are we supposed to go in this world where the only things that move freely are the floating refuse of fictional credit, where do we go when every inch of earth is already owned and valued and soon to be bought by Monsanto, when every cent spent holds another human in bondage before being smelted down to a bullet casing? What can we do with information or facts when the only currency that counts is guns and lies, when all anyone wants are guns and lies? Will we go on chattering forever in our digital echo chambers as Facebook throws up algorithmic borders around us uncrossable as the Berlin Wall, irresistibly invisible as gravity, corralling us into digital polities of irrelevant impotence that we occasionally emerge from, blinking, to discover the physical world of violence seething all around us? What use are our words when a republic of belief can be dissolved by a technician in California?


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

The effect of this is psychologically disruptive, sometimes extremely so; yet it’s rarely discussed alongside the received wisdom about social mobility, which is that it is unequivocally a Good Thing for individuals and for society as a whole. Second, and related to the first point, was my desire to explore more fully the idea of the ‘wall in the head’. When, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, this phrase (die Mauer im Kopf in German) was used to describe the lingering psychological effects on former East Germans of having been shut in by concrete for nearly thirty years. It seemed to sum up the gap between the life I’d been primed to expect – through innumerable cultural and educational signals – and the life I’ve ended up having.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

I had to go home by way of Kiev and Moscow to see that I was wrong, to begin to see how, and how deeply, she and her followers altered Britain. With hindsight, 1991 was a pivotal year. When it began, the free market economic belief system, with its lead proselytisers Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had been pushing back for more than a decade against various attempts to impose levelling communitarianism around the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, as had communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The market belief system, which holds that government is incompetent by default, that state taxation is oppressive, that the desire for wealth is the right and principal motivator of achievement and that virtually all human wants can best be met by competing private firms, was becoming entrenched in the non-communist world, from Chile to New Zealand.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

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

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

This forbidding building in Berlin-Lichtenberg was once the headquarters of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security, an organisation better known by its abbreviation – the Stasi. The Stasi was modelled on Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. It was in part a criminal investigation department. But it was also a secret intelligence agency and a political secret police. For nearly four decades – from 1950 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the Stasi conducted a sweeping campaign against the GDR’s ‘enemies’. These were, for the most part, internal. The Stasi’s declared goal was ‘to know everything’. On the first floor are the offices of the man who directed this campaign, Erich Mielke, the Stasi boss from 1957 to 1989. Seen through modern eyes, his bureau seems modest.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

language=en [cccxxxviii] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/sleep-tech-will-widen-the-gap-between-the-rich-and-the-poor [cccxxxix] Covered in detail in my previous book, “Surviving AI”. [cccxl] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_drugs_and_rock_and_roll [cccxli] I am that terrible old cliché: a socialist student whose left-wing views did not long survive contact with the world of work. As a trainee BBC journalist writing about Central and Eastern Europe long before the Berlin Wall fell, I soon realised how fortunate I was to have grown up in the capitalist West. I didn’t expect to be heading back in the other direction in later life. [cccxlii] https://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave [cccxliii] http://uk.pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/34778/news/will-a-robot-revolution-lead-to-mass-unemployment [cccxliv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [cccxlv] http://www.prisonexp.org/ [cccxlvi] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly/ [cccxlvii] https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium [cccxlviii] http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html [cccxlix] http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Brito_BitcoinPrimer.pdf [cccl] http://www.dugcampbell.com/byzantine-generals-problem/ [cccli] http://www.economistinsights.com/technology-innovation/analysis/money-no-middleman/tab/1 [ccclii] : The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Northern California, The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in England’s Oxford and Cambridge respectively, and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) in Massachussetts.


Frommer's New York City Day by Day by Hilary Davidson

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donald Trump, East Village, glass ceiling, Saturday Night Live

You can see per- 6★ formances by great personalities past and present—from Milton Berle to Jerry Seinfeld—at this interactive museum. Do your own computer search of the museum’s 75,000 choices for shows you halfremember from childhood, personal favorites, or great moments like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Then settle down in the comfy chairs for your own private screening. @ 1–3 hr., depending on the shows you pick. Call in advance to make a reservation. 25 W. 52nd St. (btwn Fifth & Sixth aves.). y 212/621-6600. www.mtr.org. Admission $10 adults, $8 seniors & students, $5 children under 13. Tues–Sun noon–6pm (Thurs until 8pm, Fri theater programs until 9pm).


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Supernotes are not super forgeries because of any technological prowess on the part of the North Koreans. It’s a matter of equipment. The North Koreans are apparently in possession of the same kind of intaglio printing press used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the notes are printed on similar high-tech paper.10 A leading theory is that in 1989, just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the press (possibly presses) made its way to North Korea from a clandestine facility in East Germany, where it was used to make fake passports and other secret documents. That same year, a teller at the Central Bank of the Philippines noticed that the paper of a $100 bill that had crossed her desk didn’t feel quite right.


pages: 288 words: 76,343

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, business climate, carbon tax, Doha Development Round, energy security, food miles, G4S, Global Witness, information asymmetry, Kenneth Arrow, megacity, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, search costs, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons

Near where I live is a street that became a cause célèbre in British social history. Initially, all the houses were privately owned, but then social housing was constructed. So outraged were the older residents by the intrusion of poorer people that the local authority built a wall across the street. Like the Berlin Wall, this wall eventually came down, and under Mrs. Thatcher the public housing was sold to private buyers. But the street’s history of division is still visible, now more than ever: in the half which has always been private the front gardens are now dominated by mature trees, but not in the half that was tenanted.


pages: 265 words: 74,000

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

Throughout the Cold War, cryptology was at the center of a mathematical arms race. Back then, the NSA team didn't need to delve into the human psyche. Their more sociable colleagues, the spies and the diplomats, handled that murky domain. However, by the time Schatz was promoted to head the math department, in 1994, changes were afoot. The Berlin Wall was in pieces, and the United States' new enemies, whether warlords, terrorists, or international money launderers, were scattered all over the world. The challenge at the NSA was less to crack their communications than to find them. How were they organized? Where did they get their financing? What were their plans?


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Where did that come from? Why is it observed all over the world? A suspected root of the meme is the “Kilroy was here” iteration, which features a bald-headed cartoon man with a long nose peeking over a wall. Kilroy can be found in countless locations, scribbled on beachheads, landmarks—even the Berlin Wall. No one is quite sure who Kilroy is, and even the name is up for dispute, with variants that include Foo, Chad, Smoe, Clem, and others. Some suspect that the phrase originated among US servicemen marking places they’d been during tours of duty. Some historians place Kilroy’s origins as far back as the 1930s.


pages: 280 words: 76,376

How to Write Your Will: The Complete Guide to Structuring Your Will, Inheritance Tax Planning, Probate and Administering an Estate by Marlene Garsia

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, credit crunch, estate planning

Your legacy or bequest could mean: ‡ Additional community workers, offering advice on EHQH¿WVHYHQWVDQGVXSSRUWVHUYLFHV ‡ A new day service in different areas of the community ‡6SHFLDOLVWPRELOHWUDQVSRUWIRUWKRVHZKRXVH wheelchairs ‡)XUWKHURXWUHDFKDFWLYLWLHVLQFOXGLQJVXSSRUWLQJWKRVH with multiple disabilities in daily life (shopping, meals out, family outings) ‡,QFUHDVHGDZDUHQHVVDQGGHYHORSPHQWWUDLQLQJ ‡2SSRUWXQLWLHVIRUHQJDJHPHQWZLWKVRFLDOHQWHUSULVH and learning schemes www.focusbirmingham.org.uk 0121 478 5220 Registered Charity 1065745 xliv Landing on the moon, seeing the Berlin Wall fall, following a star falling from the sky… Watching grandchildren grow, reading a newspaper, telling a story… Throughout our lives we all take these things for granted – whether it’s a worldwide event or something more personal, we all assume that our eyesight and our ability to communicate will stay the same.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Shortly after I came back to the US, Reagan was elected and began a similar exercise here, embracing tight monetary policy while pushing through sweeping deregulation and tax cuts. Around the world, countries with controlled economies began turning to more Friedmanesque policies to awaken their sclerotic economies. And then, after the long and bitter Cold War that pitted capitalism against communism, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed, revealing the economic rot that communism had caused. It soon appeared that Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, and their faith in markets had conquered the world. Capitalism was triumphant. I had the opportunity to visit Moscow shortly after the collapse of the Soviet regime and saw the gleaming new McDonald’s franchise constructed at Pushkin Square.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

Stars: Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Noah Emmerich. The innovation, as well as the beauty, of the FX series The Americans is that it turns the conventions of spy dramas inside out. Instead of watching secret agents in action as we infiltrate them, we watch as they infiltrate us. In the Reagan-era Cold War, with the Berlin Wall still standing and dividing, Keri Russell—the actress who, as the star of his Felicity series, J. J. Abrams mused might be an interesting college-age secret agent—now played Elizabeth Jennings, an American wife and mother, working part-time at the travel agency operated by her husband, Philip (Matthew Rhys).

It led to a full-fledged weekly NBC series two months later, hosted by the journeyman actor Elliott Reid. Ames and Phyllis Newman shared singing duties, and other regulars included Buck Henry and the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who won a Peabody Award for his silent piece, using just hands, to comment on the recently erected Berlin Wall. By the second season, David Frost had taken over as host, and Alan Alda and Tom Bosley had joined the cast. Writers included Herb Sargent (a pivotal early writer-producer of Saturday Night Live a decade later), Gloria Steinem, and Calvin Trillin. The show’s most valuable contributor of all, though he never appeared on camera, was the songwriter Tom Lehrer, whose biting satirical songs—“Pollution” and “Vatican Rag,” to name just two—were series highlights.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Gorbachev’s endeavors at reform during the latter half of the 1980s brought civil liberties, but also wrought a plunge in the already marginal living conditions of ordinary Russians as his tinkering made the sclerotic economic system worse. In 1989, in his desperate attempt to hold the Soviet Union together, he let Eastern Europe go and the Berlin Wall was torn down. Enraged, the old guard of the Party attempted to overthrow him in August 1991, in a coup that failed. Boris Yeltsin then led the Russian Republic out of the Soviet state and the empire that so many had for so long thought invincible broke into fragments. In doing so much to foster a nuclear stalemate, Schriever and his associates contributed mightily to buying the time necessary for the Soviet Union to exhaust itself.

Schriever, he said, “had the vision to see beyond the limits of technology and politics, to see the role space and ballistic missiles could play in deterring our enemies and preserving peace.… And he had the courage to press forward despite all the technical challenges and the critics who said it couldn’t be done.” He was glad, he said, that Bennie had lived “to see the end of the Cold War … the Berlin Wall come down … millions of people enjoying free speech and electing their own governments. These are a part of his legacy.” Myers moved to his conclusion. “At some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us … were we truly men of courage, were we truly men of judgment, were we truly men of integrity, were we truly men of dedication?


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The first represents the end of a momentous era, the second the beginning of what may prove to be an even more remarkable period. Given the opprobrium attaching to Communism in the West, especially after 1989, it is not surprising that this has greatly coloured Western attitudes towards the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Tiananmen Square suppression occurred in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, following the events of 1989, the Western consensus held, quite mistakenly, that the Chinese Communist Party was also doomed to fail. Western attitudes towards China continue to be highly influenced by the fact that it is ruled by a Communist Party; the stain seems likely to persist for a long time to come, if not indefinitely.

If the twentieth-century world was shaped by the developed countries, then that of the twenty-first century is likely to be moulded by the developing countries, especially the largest ones. This has significant historical implications. There have been many suggestions as to what constituted the most important event of the twentieth century: three of the most oft-cited candidates are the 1917 October Revolution, 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 1945 and the defeat of fascism. Such choices are always influenced by contemporary circumstances; in the last decade of the last century, 1989 seemed an obvious choice, just as 1917 did in the first half of the century. As we near the end of the first decade of the new century another, rarely mentioned candidate now presents itself in the strongest possible terms.


pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

After Rumsfeld’s third visit, the popular daily newspaper Echo ran the headline “Rumsfeld Is Interested in Oil!”40 Indeed, the flurry of U.S.-military-related activities in Azerbaijan, including the Blackwater deployment, was timed for the launch of one of the most diplomatically controversial Western operations on former Soviet soil since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the massive eleven-hundred-mile oil pipeline that for the first time would transfer oil out of the Caspian on a route that entirely circumvented Russia and Iran—a development both Moscow and Tehran viewed as a serious U.S. incursion into their spheres. The $3.6 billion pipeline project was heavily funded by the World Bank, the U.S.

But if it has outside parties that are doing somewhat similar things, it gives people something to benchmark against.” Comparing the military industry to the auto industry, Prince said, “General Motors can only get better if it looks at how Toyota and Honda do. It makes them think out of the box and it gives them a vehicle to perform against.” Prince told a story of how in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was driving down the Autobahn in Germany in a rented car. Suddenly, “a Mercedes S500 blew by me at about 140 mph. It was the latest and greatest Mercedes that was available, 300 horsepower, airbags, automatic transmissions, all the bells and whistles.” But after the West German-manufactured Mercedes passed Prince, a slow-moving Tribant—the national car of communist East Germany—changed lanes in front of the Mercedes, almost causing an accident.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

By the late 1950s its huge submarine force made the Soviet navy the world’s second largest,81 designed to shadow America’s fleets and deny them ‘command of the sea’ – defined as unchallenged control of the world’s seaways. Khrushchev was also determined to force Western agreement to the permanent division of Germany – the cause of the Berlin crisis in 1961. The Berlin Wall (which followed Western refusal) signalled the Soviet will to rule over its European raj for the foreseeable future. But the most radical feature of Khrushchev’s approach was his canny appraisal of what decolonization offered. The cracking of Britain’s Middle Eastern hegemony, the rush to independence in colonial Africa, and signs of social unrest in Latin America promised ways of escape from Eurasian containment, a Soviet breakthrough into the Outer World.

Without other means to keep old clients loyal, it might even prove fatal. What Moscowcould offer by way of economic inducements was paltry indeed compared with the West: this could already be seen in the slackening grip of Soviet power on Poland in the 1980s. So, with dizzying speed, East European reform turned into East European revolt. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, pro-Soviet governments collapsed, the East European ‘outer empire’ vanished. This disaster devastated the authority and legitimacy of the Soviet regime. The command economy broke down at home. In the following year (1990) the revolt spread quickly across the ‘inner empire’ of the Soviet Union.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

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

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

His brother Jeb, meanwhile, was elected governor of Florida in 1998 on 61 per cent of the Hispanic vote and his Mexican-American wife was viewed as an asset with Latino voters that would one day help him become president. The Bushes’ string of victories produced an optimistic mindset in which the Republican elite felt they could win Latino votes with a package emphasizing conservative social values and the work ethic. Ideologically, the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to an optimistic ‘End of History’ spirit among American neoconservatives and interventionist liberals, symbolized by Francis Fukuyama’s iconic book of 1992.40 With communism defeated, liberalism, capitalism and democracy, under American tutelage, could finally become universal. A global framework based on the Pax Americana and the shared values of the ‘Washington Consensus’ would revolutionize humanity.

If immigrants came from India or China instead of Muslim countries, I believe this would also stimulate these parties, though they wouldn’t reach the level of support they currently enjoy. ISLAM In today’s climate it’s easy to forget that prior to the 1990s Western European publics cared little about Islam. During the Cold War, Islamists were heroes who resisted communism in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. This began to change after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie and demonstrations in support of this by extremist British Muslims in 1989 shocked and angered Britain, but the effects faded. In 1995, the first Islamist terrorist attack on European soil took place in Paris in retaliation for that country’s support of the Algerian government against the Islamists of the FIS.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

The United States had a choice to make. There was little stomach in Washington for a strategy of containing China. U.S. policymakers saw the collapse of communism in Europe as “the triumph of the West” and “the end of history.” President George H. W. Bush was a sober pragmatist who had quipped he wouldn’t “dance on the [Berlin] wall” to celebrate the end of communism, and likewise cautioned against an “overly emotional” reaction to Tiananmen. As the need to triangulate the global balance of power against the Soviet Union faded, Bush sought to “engage” China, in part citing the powerful momentum of history toward freedom. Bush argued, “As people have commercial incentives, whether it’s in China or other totalitarian systems, the move to democracy becomes inexorable.”

“Tiananmen Square Protests,” History.com, updated June 9, 2020, https://www.history.com/topics/china/tiananmen-square; “Tiananmen Square Protest Death Toll ‘was 10,000,’” BBC News, December 23, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516; “Timeline: What Led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre,” PBS Frontline, June 5, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-tiananmen-square/. Thanks to CNAS research assistant Katie Galgano for background research. 68“the triumph of the West”: Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184. 68wouldn’t “dance on the [Berlin] wall” to celebrate: Richard Fontaine, “American Foreign Policy Could Use More Prudence,” The Atlantic, December 3, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/the-prudence-of-george-h-w-bushs-foreign-policy/577192/. 69“As people have commercial incentives”: Orville Schell, “The Death of Engagement,” The Wire China, June 7, 2020, https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/06/07/the-birth-life-and-death-of-engagement/. 69China’s annual GDP growth: “GDP Growth (Annual %)—China,” World Bank, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?


pages: 274 words: 85,557

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

The challenges posed to the region’s nascent computer engineers were so considerable that they developed an exceptional ingenuity in overcoming glitches and bugs. Furthermore, the software factories that the East Europeans built in the 1980s could not compete with Silicon Valley during the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall – there was no money to invest in research or equipment. But the powerful new organised-crime syndicates that exerted such a huge influence over the economies of the former communist countries saw the factories as a genuine opportunity. First, they acquired these facilities (usually by foul means rather than fair), then they employed those talented engineers to produce counterfeit software on an industrial scale.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

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

None of this is particularly consistent with neoliberal theory except for the emphasis on budgetary restraints and the continued fight against what by the 1990s was an almost non-existent inflation. Of course, there were always considerations of national security which would inevitably upset any attempt to apply neoliberal theory in pure terms. While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War generated a seismic geopolitical shift in imperial rivalries, they did not end the sometimes deadly dance of geopolitical jockeying for power and influence between major powers on the world stage, particularly in those regions, such as the Middle East, that controlled key resources, or in regions of marked social and political instability (such as the Balkans).


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Forced busing gave many parents the incentive to flee the public school system, choosing instead private schools they felt better served their children. Sometimes parents fled Boston altogether. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about flawed markets, it’s that people flee from them, either physically or by resorting to back channels and black markets. Either way, flawed markets can undermine not just communities but whole nations. The Berlin Wall was a monument to that fact. 10 Signaling AS WE SAW in the previous chapter, markets can be dramatically improved when their design encourages people to communicate essential information they might otherwise have kept to themselves. But sometimes markets suffer from too much communication.


The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles J. Murray

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Charles Babbage, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Silicon Valley

Fewer customers could afford $30-million supercomputers. In this market, Cray Research's managers could not afford to take risks, even if the risk taker was a friend and a mentor. PROLOGUE: AT THE CROSSROADS / 5 In a few months, international politics would reinforce the wis- dom of their decision. Giddy East Germans would mount the Berlin Wall to chisel away the final remnants of the Cold War. It would be an extraordinary moment in world history-one that would have a profound effect on the future of supercomputing. The Cold War had been mother and father of the supercomputer industry. It had supplied much of the funding for the develop- ment of Cray's revolutionary technology.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

How do market forces influence the price of gold? How will an expectant mother’s diet affect her child? When will a concussion permanently damage the brain? The world was complex in 1948 when Weaver wrote his influential article, and since then it has become significantly more so. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fates of the world’s economies have become more interwoven, with the number of international trade agreements increasing sixfold since 1990. Over the same time, global air traffic has increased nearly threefold, facilitating the mix of people and commerce around the world. Capital has followed trade, and in the past few decades the correlation between countries’ stock markets has more than doubled, while banks’ exposure to debt beyond their home markets has nearly tripled.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

With the founding of these institutions, the United States joined the rest of the developed world in providing state subsidy to creative endeavors. Direct government support of the arts petered out after the Cold War, during which fear of a Soviet planet prompted a variety of cultural outreach programs at the behest of the State Department, a concerted effort to contrast American dynamism to the drab Eastern Bloc. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the venture capital model has ruled supreme.10 Just as emphatically, technology is regarded as an arena that the government must not touch, the state said to be too ossified and slow to keep up with Silicon Valley’s rapid pace. The Internet, in particular, is presented as territory upon which regulation should not encroach.11 The weaknesses and hypocrisies of this libertarian fallacy aside, it is a philosophical orientation that, by holding up private enterprise and free markets as the primary drivers of innovation and progress, obscures a profound truth: the computer industry and the Internet would not exist without massive and ongoing funding from the federal government of the United States, which invested hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of many years to create it.


pages: 305 words: 79,356

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren C. Steffy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shock, peak oil, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh

He became one of Browne’s trusted inner circle, a turtle. After two years in Russia, Dudley technically left BP to become chief executive of TNK-BP, a joint venture between the company and a Russian concern controlled by a group of wealthy oligarchs. John Browne had been angling for a way to push BP into Russia since soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse 229 2 30 D R O W N I N G I N O I L of the Soviet Union created an opportunity for foreign oil companies, which saw a chance to tap Russia’s huge and underdeveloped oil reserves. The early post-Soviet years, though, were marked by widespread corruption and economic chaos, as a once centrally controlled economy tried to understand the concept of a free market.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It has been shown that this measure of subjective social status is linked to an unhealthy pattern of fat distribution139 and to obesity140 – in other words, obesity was more strongly related to people’s subjective sense of their status than to their actual education or income. If we can observe that changes in societal income inequality are followed by changes in obesity, this would also be supportive evidence for a causal association. An example of a society that has experienced a rapid increase in inequality is post-reunification Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, inequality increased in the former East Germany,141 and there is evidence from studies following people over time that this social disruption led to increases in the body mass index of children, young adults and mothers.142 Health and social policies for obesity treatment and prevention tend to focus on the individual; these policies try to educate people about the risks associated with being overweight, and try to coach them into better habits.


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Ernest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa. As a child roaming sparsely inhabited land along the Hudson in a paradise that is now carpeted with condominia and conference centers, I had gotten into the habit of eating the fruit, berries, or other crops that in various seasons would easily come to hand, whether in the wild or at the edge of fields or gardens.


pages: 287 words: 81,970

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

The chairman of Wells Fargo protested that his institution didn’t have problems with toxic mortgages and didn’t need a bailout. Too bad. “It was a take it or take it offer,” said one insider. An online writer for The Wall Street Journal favorably likened Paulson’s commandeering of the banks to Reagan at the Berlin Wall. “History often carries an air of inevitability,” he gushed. If there is inevitability to America’s becoming a command economy, it is a sorrowful day for human freedom. The Central Plan of the command economy is incompatible with dissent, disagreement, individual preferences, and your own plan, whatever it may be.


pages: 290 words: 87,084

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

MAYBE HE WAS BORN WITH IT The appointment of Owen-Jones as president and CEO in 1988 was a symbol of L’Oréal’s desire to become a global player. He certainly had little truck with the idea – still ingrained in the company’s culture – that L’Oréal was primarily a hair care business. On his watch, it was to become one of the first Western businesses to enter Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It expanded throughout Asia, setting its sights on China well before many of its competitors. Above all, it conquered the United States, taking full control of Cosmair and acquiring iconic American brands, which it then marketed around the world. In the history of L’Oréal, there is definitely a before and after Lindsay Owen-Jones.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

he exclaimed. ‘But… I have to say, I don’t think Danie will be much help for that.’ Arnold is in the early, mild stage of the disease, Dr Foell told me during our conversation in his office. Foell is a plain-speaking, eccentric physician. He immigrated to England shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and has been a general practitioner for the past thirteen years. A shade under six foot, he’s an astonishingly fit man who sits on an inflatable exercise ball during consultations and adopts a no-nonsense, almost predatory approach to solving his patients’ problems. I liked him immediately. It had been several weeks since I visited Arnold, and I wanted to learn more about how someone with Alzheimer’s is diagnosed.


pages: 290 words: 83,248

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

No sooner had they got used to the idea that China, not Japan, was the Asian honey pot than the Tiger markets collapsed in 1997. Companies that had spent years chasing a seat on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and had then switched their attention to Shanghai, swiftly de-emphasized and then had to re-emphasize the entire region. Eastern Europe came and went like the Berlin Wall, and India’s jewel in the crown remains an alluring prospect. Trying to steer a consistent business course between these constantly shifting sands requires concentration, agility and great management. The regenerative and innovative qualities of the investment banks are the most admirable things about them.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

And although European democracies face many problems, from weak economies to EU skepticism to anti-immigrant backlash, there is little evidence in any of them of the kind of fundamental erosion of norms we have seen in the United States. But Trump’s rise may itself pose a challenge to global democracy. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Obama presidency, U.S. governments maintained a broadly prodemocratic foreign policy. There were numerous exceptions: Wherever America’s strategic interests were at stake, as in China, Russia, and the Middle East, democracy disappeared from the agenda. But in much of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, U.S. governments used diplomatic pressure, economic assistance, and other foreign policy tools to oppose authoritarianism and press for democratization during the post–Cold War era.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

The change is an existential one, affecting the very texture of what we consider to be real. Home Movies Let’s go back, for a moment, to that ‘not long ago’ when a day in front of a camera was like a day on a different planet. When my maternal grandmother turned eighty, we rented a video camera for the first of two times. It was June 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. We were in the process of moving to Canada; the decade and our home were soon to change; and the day we filmed the small family garden party was hot, a school day in the ageing summer term, missed for non-glandular reasons. Life! Newcastle! This moment in June. The presence of the camera matched this spirit of modernity and maturity.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Nukes are conspicuously absent, making it more like World War II than III, but readers didn’t mind this improbable omission. When I was an army cadet, I remember officers walking around with this novel as if it were a strategic oracle. They still do this, with novels by Clancy’s successors. Clancy got everything wrong. Only three years after Red Storm Rising’s publication, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union with it. In reality, the USSR was never a threat to the West in the 1980s, not even close. That military officers thought Red Storm Rising prescient displays how clueless they were about the enemy. Then again, the CIA missed it, too—“missed by a mile” according to one former CIA director—in one of the biggest intelligence failures in history.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

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

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

But they don’t move it a lot, and such programs are very expensive and hard to maintain in an economic downturn. And any such downturn causes parents to hold off having kids. Fear of a gloomier future might also be helping to suppress the birth rate in Japan. Economic uncertainty is a powerful form of birth control. A similar situation occurred in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell, the fertility rate was a healthy 2.2 children per woman. But as the Russian economy careened toward collapse in the 1990s, the birth rate plummeted, bottoming out at 1.2 in the late nineties. Coupled with a reduced life expectancy brought on by rampant alcoholism, the Russian population began to decline, from 148 million in 1993 to just under 142 million in 2009.


pages: 309 words: 85,584

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

Instead, these were swamped, and US, German and Japanese banks moved in, with many City figures taking the money and running. I recall that in my early days on the Financial Times, banks were required to maintain strict liquidity and capital ratios. Such ‘fuddy-duddy’ conservative practices went out of fashion under the Thatcher market reforms of the 1980s. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the unleashing of an extreme free market approach, which I like to think I warned about in my book The Spectre of Capitalism. The banking crisis was the apotheosis of this trend. The invasion of the City of London by American investment banks had imported a new culture – harder working, longer hours, bigger risks and absurdly high rewards for what was deemed to be successful trading.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Kevin wanted to learn what he could from the past so he could plot the way forward. But the best way to do that was to get together in person, and he was in Lubbock, miles from anywhere. > CHAPTER 3 > THE CONS THE 1990s STARTED off a lot better than the 1980s for Kevin and the others in cDc. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, George H. W. Bush wasn’t as bad as they had feared, and soon Bill Clinton, whom they saw as a reasonable southern Democrat, would take the White House. Computing was still arcane but getting more and more usable, bringing knowledge closer to people everywhere. Texas had what might seem like a surprisingly strong crop of young hackers.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

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

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

By the time communism started unravelling in the 1980s, there was so much cynicism about the system that was increasingly incapable of delivering its promises that the joke was that in the communist countries, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’. No wonder central planning was abandoned across the board when the ruling communist parties were ousted across the Soviet bloc, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even countries such as China and Vietnam, which ostensibly maintained communism, have gradually abandoned central planning, although their states still hold high degrees of control over the economy. So, we all now live in market economies (well, unless you live in North Korea or Cuba). Planning is gone.


pages: 271 words: 82,159

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

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

“He is a micromanager,” says Anders Åslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “That’s why he succeeded where others failed. He went out to these unpleasant places, and made sure things worked. He’s this extremely stubborn character.” That’s conscientiousness. But what is the most striking fact about Kamprad’s decision? It’s the year he went to Poland: 1961. The Berlin Wall was going up. The Cold War was at its peak. Within a year, East and West would come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The equivalent today would be Walmart setting up shop in North Korea. Most people wouldn’t even think of doing business in the land of the enemy for fear of being branded a traitor.


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

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

everyone wanted to know. The only honest answer was that it had been very interesting and everything. But God, you wouldn’t want to LIVE there. Look down over people smiling Waving handkerchiefs to the sky Clouds hang over hills and mountains Moscow airport says goodbye Behind the Iron Curtain, across the Berlin Wall No news, no word can reach us There’s no one there at all I’m flying over Russia Looking where no man can go I’m flying over Russia Looking down on Russian snow Through the frosty window Looking at the guards below Just how happy are they? That’s something I’ll never know Now the hills and valleys Give way to icy plains I see the rising smoke From the eastern border trains I’m flying over Russia Looking where no man can go I’m flying over Russia Looking down on Russian snow But we don’t know And the Russian snow It never shows What only Russians know I wonder do you believe The lies that you’re sold I wonder do you ever Dream of being free They tell us you have to Do what you’re told Well, so do we ‘Flying Over Russia’, from Beach Party, 1981 IT’S THE NEW THING It’s January 1986, and the ICA are organising another Rock Week.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

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

Are economists who publish papers praising financial deregulation giving us an honest assessment of the facts and trends or courting extremely lucrative consulting fees from banks? In her book about the new global elite, Janine Wedel recalls visiting the newly liberated Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and finding the elites she met there, those at the center of building the new capitalist societies, toting an array of different business cards that represented their various roles: one for their job as a member of parliament, another for the start-up business they were running (which was making its money off government contracts), and yet another for the NGO on the board of which they sat.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

As big data makes increasingly accurate predictions about the world and our place in it, we may not be ready for its impact on our privacy and our sense of freedom. Our perceptions and institutions were constructed for a world of information scarcity, not surfeit. We explore the dark side of big data in the next chapter. 8 RISKS FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS, until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the East German state security agency known as the Stasi spied on millions of people. Employing around a hundred thousand full-time staff, the Stasi watched from cars and streets. It opened letters and peeked into bank accounts, bugged apartments and wiretapped phone lines. And it induced lovers and couples, parents and children, to spy on each other, betraying the most basic trust humans have in each other.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If you visited the Black Sea Shipyard in the mid-1990s, you would have come across the rusting remains of the Varyag. When shipbuilders laid down the keel for the Varyag in 1985, the massive steel hulk was to become the Soviet navy’s second Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier. But that was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Construction of the Varyag halted in 1992, after the Soviet navy stopped making payments to the shipyard. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, ownership of the Varyag was transferred to Ukraine. Instead of becoming the pride of the fleet, the Varyag, which was 70 percent complete, was stripped of her engines, electronics and rudder, and left to rust.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

It became progressively harder for official news agencies to deny that their countries were falling behind. And it became more obvious that the capitalist system, driven by consumerism and underpinned by materialistic values, was not just different. It was better. Eventually, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, many communist, and other, countries started adopting elements of this system too, especially materialistic values, conspicuous consumption and the throwaway culture. Just as it did over here, so it is now giving hundreds of millions over there better lives as well. Again, the way is not entirely clear, but international trade, with materialistic consumerism at its heart, is pulling more out of poverty now than ever before.


pages: 294 words: 85,811

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid

Berlin Wall, British Empire, double helix, employer provided health coverage, fudge factor, Kenneth Arrow, medical malpractice, profit maximization, profit motive, single-payer health, South China Sea, the payments system

The basic model—private health insurance provided through employers, with government acting as an umpire—has survived 125 years and massive political turmoil. The Bismarck era led to Germany’s shattering defeat in World War I, which led to the Weimar Republic (twenty-one governments in fourteen years), which led to the Nazis, which led to Germany’s shattering defeat in World War II, which led to the division of the country and the Berlin Wall and eventually to today’s united democratic Germany. Through all those political convolutions, the nation has stuck with the health care model designed by Otto von Bismarck. OTTO EDUARD LEOPOLD VON BISMARCK was born in 1815, six weeks before the battle of Waterloo ended Napoleon’s effort to redraw the map of Europe.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

First, its epicenter was in the neighborhood, giving them a built-in advantage. They’d also managed to link up with former U.S. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and signed him up as an adviser, the notion being that he could provide introductions and ideas. BDM was the first case. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the fall of the Berlin Wall reoriented the global landscape. Defense-related companies were cheap, largely because the larger companies who’d earlier swallowed them up didn’t see a bright future for Cold War-geared units. As part of a deal where Loral bought Ford Aerospace, Carlyle bought the BDM subsidiary from Loral. Carlyle and its investors made 14 times their money by the time they fully exited BDM seven years later, but D’Aniello and Conway both said BDM was as significant for what it taught Carlyle about the broader opportunity in defense and other government-related firms as well as the private sector “BDM changed everything,” Conway said.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

Rød-Larsen believed that the road to peace led through the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Officially, neither Israel nor the USA dealt with the PLO because they defined it as a terrorist organisation. When a Washington-led peace process opened in 1991, it involved other Palestinian leaders instead. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was optimism for a new world order, but by 1993 the talks were already foundering. The USA was not able to play the role of an even-handed mediator, because of both its alliance with Israel and its sheer military and economic might. The Palestinians mistrusted the Americans, while the Israelis railed against the pressure that the Americans put on them.


pages: 319 words: 84,772

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

He’s a very nice gentleman who happens to be an aviation legend.” Out of this meeting, the two native southerners who shared something rare developed a friendship. The bond grew stronger still when Lieutenant Colonel Yeilding was chosen for a very special mission. On December 20, 1989, just six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yeilding, then a Blackbird test pilot, joined RSO Tom Fuhrman to commemorate, two days early, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gilliland’s first flight. The Blackbird descended out of the bright-white haze at Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport as a large crowd of current and former Lockheed employees lined up along Runway 15-33.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The “liberal market democracy” frame, exemplified by the United States, faced no credible or coherent alternative for how to govern. So began a “unipolar moment” in world affairs. As the sole superpower, America exported its values and mental models globally—a march of ideas and ideals that was triumphalist and universalist. A year after the Berlin Wall fell, there were posters in the subway of the former East Berlin, advertising a cigarette brand called West, that read, “Test the West!” The giddy optimism defined the decade. Russia was open to investment and holding elections. China’s ascension into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was supported by the United States: few could fathom that the country wasn’t on the path of economic openness and greater human freedom.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

It’s easy to think that these countries were never close to the market economies, but in 1950 countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had a GDP per capita about a quarter higher than poor Western countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. In 1989, the eastern states were nowhere close. The eastern part of Germany was richer than West Germany before World War II. When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, East Germany’s GDP per capita was not even half that of West Germany’s.16 Of these countries, those that liberalized the most have on average developed the fastest and established the strongest democracies. An analysis of twenty-six post-communist countries showed that a 10 per cent increase in economic freedom was associated with a 2.7 per cent faster annual growth.17 Political and economic institutions have improved the most in the Central and Eastern European countries that are now members of the EU, not least the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

He heads a team of IT experts at GovCERT, the Dutch government’s Computer Emergency Response Team. Aart Jochem studied computer engineering at The Hague’s technical college in the 1980s, followed by a graduate degree in electrical engineering and computer architecture at Delft University of Technology. Those were the days of the first Macs and the fall of the Berlin Wall. When he joined the team at GovCERT in 2007, it was a rather stuffy organisation tasked with drafting security recommendations for Dutch government ministries. Aart Jochem was a serious, level-headed professional. Colleagues liked his affability, innovative drive and terrific knowledge of information security.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

For most of the past millennium, the Korean Peninsula largely formed a single social entity, whose inhabitants shared a common language and culture. However, the partition of Korea after World War II into Soviet and American spheres of influence brought about divergent political and economic institutions. North Korea’s poverty and technological underdevelopment – like that of East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall – originates in political and economic institutions that restricted personal and economic freedoms. Insufficient constraints on government power, limited rule of law, insecure property rights, along with inherently inefficient central planning, have hindered entrepreneurship and innovation, while encouraging corruption and fostering stagnation and poverty.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Instead, it put forward a very simple, yet radical plan: private vehicles would be banned from the city center entirely. Even though the vehicle ownership rate was less than 12 percent in the proposed car-free zone, the response of conservatives and motorists was swift. One right-wing politician branded the plan “a Berlin Wall against motorists” and drivers claimed they felt bullied by the new city government. After a year of negotiation and attacks in the press, the left-wing coalition relented: instead of banning private vehicles, it would remove all 650 on-street parking spaces. As the parking spaces were taken out of central Oslo, they were replaced with cycle lanes, bike parking, seating areas, places for children to play, and more social spaces.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

When Wilson was elected Party leader after Gaitskell’s sudden death in January 1963, the Daily Worker was distinctly unenthusiastic. Since becoming shadow foreign secretary, it complained, ‘Mr Harold Wilson has moved steadily to the right.’ It was particularly outraged by the fact that he had visited West Berlin and, standing at the Berlin Wall, had denounced the (East) German Democratic Republic.121 The KGB was equally outraged. So far from regarding Wilson as a potential recruit, as it had done in 1956, and probably for several years afterwards, once Wilson became prime minister in 1964 it inspired a number of press articles attacking his policies.122 * Most co-optees were Soviet Bloc officials who agreed to combine work on behalf of their intelligence service with their declared jobs.

The Thatcher government, however, was not yet ready to follow the example of its intelligence allies.57 Section F After the Cold War 1 The Transformation of the Security Service What made the greatest impression on many, perhaps most, MI5 staff in the final months of 1989 was not the secret intelligence to which they had access but the images on television news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid, unexpectedly peaceful collapse of the Communist one-party regimes of Eastern and Central Europe. The Security Service, like all Western governments and intelligence agencies, was caught off guard. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the disintegration of the Soviet Union transformed the priorities of the Security Service.

By the end of the decade, however, MI5 had come to terms with its new role; the Belfast station was wholly funded and mainly staffed by the Security Service. The IJS was wound up in 1984.27 At the beginning of 1989 Security Service staff had no more idea than the rest of the British people that before the end of the year they would see on their television screens the fall of the Berlin Wall and other unforgettable images of the collapse of Communist rule. The end of the Soviet era (finally concluded with the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later) was almost as unexpected as its beginning almost three-quarters of a century before. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it transformed MI5 objectives in ways no one had foreseen.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In Germany at the end of World War II, the two major victors had each taken a portion of the country. East Germany had allegiances to and was modeled on the Soviet state. West Germany had an American military base, free elections, and free markets. Again, the evidence of capitalism’s superiority was clear. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, unifying Germany, and the Soviet Union soon after, freeing Eastern Europe’s communist bloc to align with the West, few suspected that the rising economic power of the 2000s would be a country firmly controlled by the Communist Party. In 1989, when student protesters took to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, it was seen in the West as one more step in the world’s inevitable movement toward democracy.

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.


pages: 773 words: 220,140

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, invisible hand, Kickstarter, moral panic, nuclear winter, Own Your Own Home, Socratic dialogue

No directions were necessary, though; a real cavalcade of vehicles and bodies was surging through the streets in one direction: police cars, ambulances, fire engines, army Jeeps, media trucks, ice cream vans, spectators, gardeners, rabbis, anyone in Sydney who owned a radio and wanted to take part in a historical event. Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who'd turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy's head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in '63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK's cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia's biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.


pages: 760 words: 218,087

The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, Works Progress Administration

Cooke moved forward on a ten-year, $1 billion renovation plan. The timing turned out to be exceedingly poor. As the plans were finalized, the Cold War suddenly and inconveniently ended, and with it much of the raison d’être for an enormous American military establishment. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the threat that the Warsaw Pact posed to Western Europe evaporated. Iraq had been forcibly ejected from Kuwait in February 1991, and the Gulf War was now seen as an aberration, perhaps the last American conventional war. A painful drawdown of the military began, with dozens of bases to close and the size of the force to shrink 25 percent by 1995.

His coverage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was part of a package of Washington Post stories selected as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Vogel covered the September 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and subsequently reported in depth on the victims of the attack and the building’s reconstruction. Based overseas from 1989 through 1994 and reporting for the Post and Army Times, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War, as well as military operations in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. His reporting has won journalism awards and resulted in many memorable stories, including Washington Post Magazine cover stories on military test pilots, police 911 operators, and emergency workers in a Washington, D.C., hospital.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

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

* * * — In the midst of all these explanations, one—a near clone of an Adam Smith dictum—arose with a lot of strength in the eighties: If there were still hundreds of millions of hungry people, it was due to state interference in the economies of those countries that did not allow the market to do its job, to shower the people with its blessings. The idea was part of the offensive against any regulation of capitalism, which began in those years. In the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed end of history, there was no longer anything standing in its way. The story is well-known: taking advantage of the debts the poor countries had contracted with the large international banks in the seventies—when the big banks had too much liquidity and convinced the poor countries to accept loans—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed neoliberal policies on them.

Not that the hungry receive charity but that no one has so much that they can give, while others have so little that they need. That everybody has the same, more or less. Sounds so old fashioned, and it is; at the same time, it is the only goal that seems worth fighting for at all. A much too simple idea, they’ll tell me. Some simple, direct, basic discourses fell away along with the Berlin Wall. Let’s think for a moment about the word basic. It should be praise, but it is an insult. Something similar happens with the idea of a society of equals: the most ambitious aspiration of humanity seems like old-fashioned nonsense, an archaism. Hence, so many political harangues—so many so-called answers—condensed into that idiotic formula about how we’re looking for “a better world,” “a better society,” as if someone—a politician, an intellectual, my Aunt Beany—would ever announce that they wanted a worse one.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

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

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

‘If he succeeded, “the West” would no longer mean what it has meant for the last 40 years’; while the DDR in East Germany, its economy ‘long the best in the region’, its Politburo (whose members, implicitly, refused to talk to him) most in tune with its leader, Erich Honecker, ‘looks as if it could go on forever’.139 Less than six months off, he never imagined the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even after it crumbled, a sense of disorientation pervaded his articles. Rejecting the idea that history was at an end, as Francis Fukuyama first opined in 1989, Beedham pointed to real threats – from terrorism to Iraq to Russia – but without his trademark enthusiasm. ‘Perhaps history got its timing wrong’, he mused in 1990.

With so much at stake, the ‘choice is not hard’, a point it drove home, declaring, ‘We would sooner have endorsed Richard Nixon – even had we known how he would later come to grief.’7 (In fact, it did support Nixon.) Chastened by the result, a week later the Economist wondered aloud if it had misunderstood the whole arc of history since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘The election of Mr Trump is a rebuff to all liberals, including this newspaper.’8 Despite this moment of introspection, however, the shocks continued for the Economist, which was no more far-seeing after Brexit and Trump than before. In Britain, it welcomed the 2017 snap election called by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to ‘strengthen her hand’ as savvy – freeing her to pursue a softer Brexit, and to annihilate Labour, which opinion polls showed her trouncing by over 20 points in April.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In Germany at the end of World War II, the two major victors had each taken a portion of the country. East Germany had allegiances to and was modeled on the Soviet state. West Germany had an American military base, free elections, and free markets. Again, the evidence of capitalism’s superiority was clear. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, unifying Germany, and the Soviet Union soon after, freeing Eastern Europe’s communist bloc to align with the West, few suspected that the rising economic power of the 2000s would be a country firmly controlled by the Communist Party. In 1989, when student protesters took to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, it was seen in the West as one more step in the world’s inevitable movement toward democracy.

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

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

The world as a whole has more or less embraced freedom. Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others. Socialism today has only come to mean government extraction of income from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. It is about the transfer of income, not ownership. That is still around.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

For the other I6 countries, the growth experience has been more varied. Some, like Korea, have been on an upward path since the beginning (Korea was one of the group known as the newly industrializing countries). For others, such as Indonesia and Thailand, the uptick started in the 1980s. Poland joined the rapid share growth only after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. India, which started far ahead of Korea, has seen steady progress with some hint of an acceleration around 1990. As one would expect, the rapid industrialization of the I6 boosted their growth. Considering that almost half of all humans live in these nations, this growth explosion had momentous ripple effects.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

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

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

It is an explicit admission that the West (for, in this respect, Britain is no different to most other developed nations) is in lockdown, in order to protect itself from the massive global underclass it has helped create through colonialism and neo-liberal globalization. During the Cold War, one of the central criticisms of the Eastern Bloc was that it denied the basic right to freedom of movement. But as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, we just built another obstacle to replace it. Politics once kept people in; now economics keeps them out. Poor people—and that is most of the world—are simply not supposed to travel to the West any more. This, the report illustrated, has repercussions in terms of race and gender. To appear wealthy, women had to perform their femininity in a certain way.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

The past is less an archived library of what really happened, and more a fluid director’s commentary we’re constantly updating. Future forecasts aren’t much better. When we try to predict what’s around the bend, we rarely get it right. We tend to assume the near future will look much like the recent past. That’s why events like the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the 2008 financial collapse caught so many analysts flatfooted. What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight. But when non-ordinary states trigger timelessness, they deliver us to the perpetual present—where we have undistracted access to the most reliable data. We find ourselves at full strength.


pages: 315 words: 93,522

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Throughout 1989, listening tests continued in parallel in Erlangen and Murray Hill, but the American test subjects proved less patient than the Germans. After listening to the same rat-eaten, four-second sample of “Tom’s Diner” several hundred times, the volunteers at Bell Labs revolted, and Brandenburg was forced to finish the experiment on his own. He was there in New Jersey, listening to Suzanne Vega, when the Berlin Wall came down. Johnston was impressed by Brandenburg. He’d spent his life around academic researchers and was accustomed to brilliance, but he’d never seen anybody work so hard. Their collaboration spurred several breakthroughs, and soon the scratching rats were banished. In early 1990, Brandenburg returned to Germany with a nearly finished product in hand.


pages: 278 words: 93,540

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos

bank run, Berlin Wall, centre right, death of newspapers, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, income inequality, moral hazard, plutocrats, urban planning

The German foreign secretary sent a letter to the Greek ambassador saying the language of the agreement meant that Greece would in the future make no further claims with regard to questions of Nazi persecution during the occupation. The Greek ambassador disagreed, however, and in his response said that Greece reserved the right to request reparations based on a future “final settlement” mentioned in the London Debt Agreement of the previous decade. The time for that final settlement ostensibly came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Germany’s reunification. In Greece, there were renewed demands for reparations and repayment of the forced loan. During the ’90s, Greek victims’ groups filed class-action lawsuits against Germany for atrocities carried out during the occupation. Greek courts ruled in favor of the claimants, and ordered Germany to pay damages.


pages: 329 words: 93,655

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

EP has lost both types of memory in equal measure, but curiously his forgetfulness extends back only for the last sixty or so years. His memories have faded along a gradient. One of the many mysteries of memory is why an amnesic like EP should be able to remember when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima but not the much more recent fall of the Berlin Wall. For some unknown reason, it’s the most recent memories that blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity. This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted it, and it’s a pattern found also in Alzheimer’s patients.


pages: 340 words: 96,149

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Obama administration began to take a harsher tone with China, starting with a major address Clinton gave about her Internet Freedom initiative nine days later. She called on China to stop censoring Internet searches and blocking access to websites that printed criticism about the country’s leaders. Clinton likened such virtual barriers to the Berlin Wall. For its part, Google said it would stop filtering search results for words and subjects banned by government censors. And if Beijing objected, Google was prepared to pull up stakes and leave the Chinese market entirely, losing out on billions of dollars in potential revenues. That put other US technology companies in the hot seat.


words: 49,604

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

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

The economy emerged from this with more energy-efficient industry, somewhat higher unemployment and low inflation. Other Western economies had made less adjustment to the higher cost of energy, had much higher unemployment and much higher inflation too. Germany took a different path after its decision, following the fall of the The Weightless World 58 Berlin Wall in November 1989, to reunite the western with the eastern provinces at an exchange rate between the Ostmark and the Deutschmark of one for one. East German industry was so profoundly less productive than West German industry that economists had recommended a rate closer to five Ostmarks to the Deutschmark.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Emergent Leadership People need something to aspire to, to believe in. Every company has a story, and the best stories are stories that inspire and motivate. There are times in the life of a business that the story has gone stale, when the business is at risk, when the bureaucratic barriers are weak and breakthroughs near. Think about the Berlin Wall in 1989, a time when stifling Soviet controls had been weakened and the energy on both sides of the wall was eager for connection. At such moments, the story wants to change, and these are the times when new leaders can emerge by telling a powerful new story. As a manager, these are the times to listen for emerging leaders and find ways to amplify their stories.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

It’s very common for us to express love for an object or thing, but except for the case of paraphilias like shoe fetishes, we normally mean something quite different when we say to a friend, “I love that dress!” than when we declare eternal love for our romantic partner. Yet there are those who maintain a romantic relationship with built structures. Eija Riita-Eklaaf, a resident of northern Sweden, has declared her love for the Berlin Wall (or what’s left of it), and has actually carried out a marriage ceremony of sorts, renaming herself “Wall Walther.” Erika Eiffel (née Erika LeBrie) famously married the Eiffel Tower in 2007, declaring her infatuation with its long sinuous curves. U.S. native Amy Wolfe married a thrill ride at Pennsylvania’s Knoebels Amusement Resort.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

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

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

Far from being disconnected, they’re all parts of the same organic whole. But before we can piece those successive changes together, we first have to break them down. No single phrase or book defined the last quarter century more famously than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. As the New York Times columnist has long argued, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new global architecture has emerged, more interdependent and interconnected than anything before.11 And the statistics bear that out. Since roughly 1990, the global marketplace has more than doubled in size, growing to encompass roughly two billion people. International trade grew by a factor of two, and then expanded again by a third.12 And the share of American GDP driven by exports has more than doubled.13 But globalization hasn’t been confined to the economic realm: it has also driven the spread of ideas.


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

Many socialist regimes abolished private property, weakened the family, and demanded that people be altruistic to mankind in general rather than to a narrower circle of friends and family. But evolution did not shape human beings in this fashion. Individuals in socialist societies resisted the new institutions at every turn, and when socialism collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, older, more familiar patterns of behavior reasserted themselves everywhere. Political institutions cannot abolish either nature or nurture altogether and succeed. The history of the twentieth century was defined by two opposite horrors, the Nazi regime, which said biology was everything, and communism, which maintained that it counted for next to nothing.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

For its victims, the collapse of Soviet tyranny was a remarkable triumph and liberation, though the victory was soon tainted by new horrors. For others, the consequences were more complex. The basic character of the post-Cold War era was revealed very quickly: more of the same, with revised pretexts and tactics. A few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. invaded Panama, killing hundreds or even thousands of people, vetoing two Security Council resolutions, and kidnapping a thug who was jailed in the U.S. for crimes that he had mostly committed while on the CIA payroll before committing the only one that mattered: disobedience. The pattern of events was familiar enough, but there were some differences.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

A small industry in Mont Blanc memorabilia quickly sprouted; miniature scale models of the mountain were sold to tourists. De Saussure donated bits of granite he collected from the summit to prominent institutions for display and study. For a while, owning a fragment of Mont Blanc was like owning a piece of NASA-certified moon rock or a pebble from the Berlin Wall. De Saussure’s explorations—and his travelogues—helped transform the general public’s relationship to nature. By the end of the century, the rhetoric describing mountain landscapes had been entirely reversed. No longer warts and boils, alpine summits became “palaces of nature” and a “terrestrial paradise.”


pages: 250 words: 88,762

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

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

The young, inexperienced President Kennedy was being tested. He had turned to Schelling’s strategic analysis of the situation (“We should plan for a war of nerve, of demonstration, and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction”) before deciding—correctly—that Khrushchev was bluffing. Instead of invading, the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall in August, sat behind it, and glowered. Thomas Schelling was just one of many cold war intellectuals at RAND, the air force’s research arm, using von Neumann’s game theory to dissect the possibilities of an event nobody had yet experienced: thermonuclear war. Applying a theory of poker to try to understand the project of mutual annihilation may seem unhinged, but that is exactly what von Neumann and his disciples did.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It’s the relationship between small and big that is evolving. If we end up with more independent agents able to do what they do best—making jewelry or providing computer advice or writing—I hope we will start to see a reversal of the malling of the world that big manufacturing and retail have brought: the sameness of scale. Before the Berlin Wall fell, I was amazed to find a Benetton store even in communist East Berlin. They were everywhere. Starbucks cafés and Pret A Manger sandwich shops (which are one-third owned by McDonald’s) have replaced pubs all around London. Hip Soho in New York is filled no longer with artists and boutiques making singular merchandise but with Banana Republics.


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The Soviet Union oppressed its own citizens and ruled half of Europe. Blacks in South Africa were treated like serfs. In 1959, if you’d predicted that Nelson Mandela would one day be elected president of a free, multiracial South Africa, people would have said you were out of your mind. In my lifetime, I’ve seen segregation, the Berlin Wall, and apartheid vanish from the Earth. So I refuse to believe that the way we feed ourselves today must endure forever. Our current system won’t last because it can’t last. It is not sustainable. This centralized, industrialized agricultural system has been in place for just a few decades — and look at the destruction it has already caused.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Here are some stories about a few of the countries I have visited and what each visit led to. China. My father was the Administrator of UNDP, and he took me to Beijing, China and Ulan Bator, Mongolia, where he would attempt to raise money from China so that UNDP could use it to save Mongolians from starving in the coming winter. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and the former USSR was disbanded so support that had previously gone to Mongolia was no longer available, and people were going to starve if UNDP didn’t come through with some aid money. Mongolia was fascinating. We saw people living as nomads moving their yurts by yak from place to place as they hunted and gathered food for winter.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

At a time when the Catholic Church preferred monarchies over democracies, and communists were vying for their own absolutist schemes, in northern Italy both opted to back bottom-up businesses. Today, the two organizations have come to regard their ideological differences as negligible. They have initiated a merger. “The Berlin Wall doesn’t exist anymore, but we in Italy realized it only recently,” says Gianluca Laurini, a Legacoop official in Bologna. “Ideology aside, a co-op is a co-op.” Cooperative formation, it seems, can outlast its original rationales. It works by a distinct logic and imparts its own lessons, assembling a commonwealth among people and places with little else in common.


pages: 333 words: 86,662

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

Makoto had put his manifold charity plaques on display: his involvement in African river worm blindness campaigns, Caribbean AIDS testing, free flak jackets for UNICEF workers. Outside the sliding Perspex doors lurked a pebbled Zen garden, with a raked sea of symbolic pebbles washing against six large concrete chunks of the demolished Berlin Wall. “Tabako?” offered Makoto. “I quit again.” “Me too,” Makoto lied. With feigned indifference he tossed aside a pack of imported Seven Stars. Then he opened a mahogany box and lit a tightly rolled reefer. He dropped the match in a massive onyx tray. “One of these days the Big Boom will return to Nippon,” he offered tangentially.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

She oversaw the systematic collection of local market statistics, and applied structured market research to property development, notably at Stockley Park near Heathrow and Canary Wharf in East London. Subsequently she advised Daimler Benz on the redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz after the fall of the Berlin Wall and played a significant role in the regeneration of Cardiff Bay in Wales. In 1996 Chapman became a Crown Commissioner and in 1997 was appointed CBE for services to the property industry. After the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 and publication of the London World City report in 1990, Chapman turned her attention to London.


pages: 287 words: 93,908

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Gail Steketee, Randy Frost

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dumpster diving, Ford Model T, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, impulse control, McMansion

Perhaps she was trying to get connected to the world through her things—and to her, each one of those things was just like Jerry Seinfeld's shirt. They connected her to something bigger than herself. They gave her an expanded identity, a more meaningful life. It wasn't the objects themselves that she valued, but the connections they symbolized. And it's the same whether we collect celebrities' clothing, a piece of the Berlin Wall, a deck chair off the Titanic, or five tons of old newspapers. We can't help but imagine that some essence of the person or the event symbolized by the objects will magically rub off and become part of us. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Scottish anthropologist named Sir James Frazer wrote an influential treatise on "magical thinking" and religion called The Golden Bough that shed some light on the lure of possessions.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

By the time the government realized its bluff was being called, no one in the army was willing to turn on so many citizens, and without a credible threat of deadly force to back it up, the East German government simply collapsed. The day after that first November protest the entire East German government resigned. Two days later the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began. The GDR had vanished. The lesson for protesters after Leipzig was that they should protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with, and to distribute evidence of their actions widely. If the state didn’t react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Today, one popular world university ranking puts Humboldt at 126th worldwide, only the seventh-best in Germany. Thirty-seven American universities rank higher. The reason is obvious once you get there. To stand in front of Humboldt University, you have to walk east along the wide boulevard of the Unter den Linden, a few hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall used to be. Humboldt was split in half by the Cold War, with the historic campus on the wrong side of the line. By then it was already badly damaged. On May 10, 1933, students and professors from the university participated in a mass book burning. Many academics fled and Jewish students and professors were forcibly expelled, or worse.


pages: 313 words: 95,361

The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn

Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Great Leap Forward, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

The facility would enhance the scientific prestige of the United States in Asia, he stressed, and “prove dramatically this country’s intent to use atomic energy for the economic and social well-being of mankind.” He offered to meet with the president or a senior member of the staff. His timing could not have been worse. The Soviets had just demanded that Allied forces be removed from West Berlin, and they had coerced East Germany into erecting a concrete barrier separating West and East Germany: the Berlin Wall. Dyhrenfurth received an apologetic phone call from a White House staffperson. His proposal warranted careful consideration, he was told, but the president had just ordered 148,000 guardsmen and reservists back to active duty, and was swamped with conferences. Only three weeks earlier, on August 6, 1961, the Soviets had launched Vostok 2, which had orbited the earth seventeen times with a cosmonaut on board.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

Tollgates were crumbling, and many areas were so broken that smugglers could just walk in. Lavoisier decided to build another wall, a massive one, where everyone could be stopped, searched, and forced to pay tax. It cost the equivalent, in today’s currency, of several hundred million dollars; it was the Berlin Wall of its time. It was six feet high, of heavy masonry, with dozens of solid tollgates and patrol roads for armed guards. Parisians hated it, and when the Revolution began, it was the first large structure they attacked, two days before the storming of the Bastille: they tore at it with firebrands and axes and bare hands till it was almost entirely gone.


pages: 262 words: 93,987

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess by Turney Duff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, proprietary trading, urban sprawl, white picket fence

For a moment, standing completely naked, enveloped by steam, Gary stood stunned, glaring at Slaine. “Twenty years of friendship,” he said. “Down the drain.” Then he turned and stormed out of the steam room. All that day I sit between them and not a word from one to the other crosses my space. I begin to feel like the Berlin Wall. At one point, Raj pulls Dave aside (but within earshot) and tells him he has to figure out a way to work with Gary. “It didn’t happen on campus,” Raj says. “It’s not my problem.” The next day is the same, then a whole week of absolute silence between them. But the rest of the office buzzes behind their backs.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”5 The greatest sin of the liberal class, throughout the twentieth century and into the early part of this century, has been its enthusiastic collusion with the power elite to silence, ban, and blacklist rebels, iconoclasts, communists, socialists, anarchists, radical union leaders, and pacifists who once could have given Ernest Logan Bell, as well as others in the working class, the words and ideas with which to battle back against the abuses of the corporate state. The repeated “anti-Red” purges of the twentieth-century United States, during and after both World Wars, and continuously from the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were carried out in the name of anticommunism, but in reality proved to be devastating blows to popular social movements. The old communists in the American labor movement spoke in the language of class struggle. They understood that Wall Street, along with corporations such as BP, is the enemy.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Intellectual property law will be brought to its knees. A printed full-scale bench in stone-like material Image courtesy of Andrea Morgante and Enrico Dini, D-Shape Some people remember exactly where they were when they watched the first moon landing. Others remember the confusing first weeks when the Berlin wall came tumbling down. I remember the first time I heard about 3D printing. The time was the late 1980s. The place, a tedious engineering seminar on manufacturing engineering. The classroom was warm. The professor had the misfortune to have a droning, unintentionally soothing voice that lulled my classmates and me into a sort of group stupor.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

The real problem is that because these places are not for everyone, spending too much time in them means people become unaccustomed to – and eventually very frightened of – difference. 3 ‘Clean and Safe’ WHY NEW LABOUR FELL IN LOVE WITH MANCHESTER Every time I’ve been to Manchester, the city has been different. The first time was in 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall came down and long before the property-fuelled expansion trialled in Docklands took hold in Britain’s industrial cities. This was the Manchester of Tony Wilson and the Hacienda, Joy Division and New Order, clubs and music venues spilling out of empty industrial buildings. ‘Madchester’, the trendy university of choice, was grimy with Victorian soot and slightly dangerous.


I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

Ray treated me more like a son than a subordinate: he and his wife, Dot, lived in Floral Park, just a few miles away from us in Brookville; they used to take Elaine and me out to dinner sometimes at a little Italian restaurant near their house. In August 1961, I went to army summer camp, at Camp Drum, upstate. And on August 13, Khrushchev closed the border between East and West Berlin and started building the Berlin Wall. It’s a national crisis, a clear provocation by the Soviet Union, and President Kennedy activates 100,000 reserves. And lo and behold, I’m one of the 100,000. “Get your affairs in order,” we were told. “You’re going to active duty September 15.” I’m doing well at the Equitable now; I’m really feeling my oats.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

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

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

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. Increase in Real Income, 1988–2008: Ibid. “The people who gained the least were almost entirely from the ‘mature economies’ ”: Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution since 1988,” CEPR Policy Portal, accessed March 25, 2019, https://voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

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

I believe that systemic change is possible, indeed inevitable. Over almost five decades, I have worked to understand the thinking behind capitalism and to nudge it in new, more sustainable directions. An early book of mine, published in 1987, was called The Green Capitalists. 36 This was a couple of years before the Berlin Wall fell, and the message was that while capitalism was our future, it was unfit for purpose—so we needed to reinvent and transform it. The beat goes on. Along the way I have been hugely privileged to operate at the leading edge of a growing array of social movements, helping bring the relevant agendas—along with the relevant rebels, troublemakers, and apparently crazy ones—into the business world and, crucially, into boardrooms and C-suites.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

The Canadian government should “make a wise decision on this issue.”47 CHAPTER 19 The Great Rupture China will always remain the builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and upholder of international order. —XI JINPING The “technology cold war” between the United States and China was nothing like the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The emerging trade war was more intricate and complicated. No Iron Curtain and no Berlin Wall separated the communist from the capitalist world. Markets were open and trade was flowing, and elite communist cadres sent their children to Ivy League schools. Silicon Valley and China didn’t exist in separate bubbles. They relied on each other for components, hardware, software—even talent, since incredible numbers of Chinese software developers were trained at Stanford and MIT.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

The F-117A, in short, was a technological celebrity. The editors concluded, “There’s no such thing as a lovely war, but at least Desert Storm wasn’t Vietnam.”6 As the Vietnam analogy made clear, Stealth helped restore confidence in the American military. Surrounding events at the time reinforced the message of American dominance: the Berlin Wall had fallen, a wave of democracy was sweeping through Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself was tottering and would eventually collapse, with remarkably little bloodshed, at the end of the year. Stealth merged the one-sided American victory in the Gulf War with Cold War triumphalism: as the American public saw it, here was a vivid demonstration of the value of the national investment in Cold War technology, which not only deterred and defeated the Soviet empire but also trounced Iraq.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

Politics is a rational business, and to the extent that people are organised into nations, they would all come to share the democratic model, with markets to allocate most resources. Political dialogue would determine the success of this paradigm as it swept all other competing options away. Except it hasn’t. At the time, with the tearing-down of the Berlin Wall, and the resulting extension of freedom and democracy across Eastern Europe, the nightmare of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation gave way to a universalism which left less room for nation states. There would be diversity, but all within a rational framework. As people got richer, because liberal markets worked, they would lend their support to the liberal model.


pages: 334 words: 91,722

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union there had been a brief period when the idea of the ‘end of history’ gained ground. Western capitalism and liberal democracy had ‘won’ and were now the only game in town. That analysis was bound up with the idea of economic globalisation, but it also implied a unipolar geopolitics and a trend to ideological homogeneity. Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, that analysis has turned out to be naïve in almost every respect. The world is not unipolar (nor is it any longer bipolar in the way it arguably was during the Cold War) but multipolar. One aspect of that, in part because of the impact of ‘end of history’ type thinking on reshaping the post-Soviet space, is that Russian nationalism is resurgent and notably hostile to both the UK and the EU.


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

The horror of the present is realizing that many adults had no sense of what was really going on during my 1980s childhood either—and that those who did know, and lived to tell the tale, are the ones who stole the future. 3 The 1990s: Elite Exploits of the New World Order The early 1990s ushered in an anomalous period of accountability. This was the era after the Iran-Contra criminals were sentenced but before future Trump attorney general William Barr helped pardon them; when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union soon followed; when dissidents like Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Václav Havel went from prisons to presidencies; when America had a war and a recession and both of them came to a seemingly definitive end. This was an actual era of hope and change, and it did not last long.


pages: 270 words: 87,864

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Nelson Mandela, white flight

I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” That was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think. — The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. It wasn’t like the Berlin Wall where one day it just came down. Apartheid’s walls cracked and crumbled over many years. Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively. It was then that my mother decided we needed to move.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

During the Third Wave itself, as well as during the more recent Arab Spring, ideas clearly propagated rapidly across international borders via radio, television, the Internet, and flows of activists bringing news of political upheavals elsewhere. The wave of democratic transitions occurring in sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1990s was clearly inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dramatic developments taking place in Eastern Europe shortly before. In terms of the framework built around the six dimensions of development laid out in chapter 2, theories focusing on ideas or cultural values would posit a causal relationship looking something like Figure 19. FIGURE 19.

Liberalism, Marxism, fascism, Islamism, and democracy all readily crossed borders in the twentieth century due to electronic technologies from radio and television to the Internet and social media. It is hard to envision the democratic transitions that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s absent the power of the images of the crumbling Berlin Wall that echoed around the world. Similarly, the timing of protests against autocratic regimes during the Arab Spring was driven by television stations like Al Jazeera and by Twitter and Facebook as much as by domestic causes. By the early twenty-first century, democracy has become truly globalized.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

The nationalists, while they did not gain union with Ireland, achieved recognition of the reality of connection with Ireland, a government in which they were recognized and had authority, and a change in the ethos of the state and its machinery. A cross-community government was formed in Belfast between Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, and the more radical of the two unionist parties, the DUP. In 1989 the Berlin Wall, and the whole Iron Curtain, came down, and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. The USSR itself began to disintegrate and, following an attempted 1991 coup to retain it, came to an end; the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved. This was a world-historic victory for capitalism, and John Major’s government cashed in a peace dividend.

New Labour kicked the proposal into the long grass – the old system was working only too well for them. TO WAR Another area in which New Labour was a dogged follower of the Conservatives was in matters concerning the warfare state. In its 1987 manifesto Labour promised to get rid of the Trident programme and to use the money to increase conventional defence spending. In 1989 the Berlin wall came down; in 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved. In 1992, and 1997, Labour and New Labour nonetheless backed Trident. The first deployment was in December 1994. The last of the four submarines went into service in 2001. New Labour went to extreme lengths to keep up defence expenditure (which had been falling under the Tories).


pages: 829 words: 229,566

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

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

Venkataraman argued that the global environmental crisis was the result of developed countries’ “excessive consumption of all materials and through large-scale industrialization intended to support their styles of life.”26 If wealthy countries consumed less, then everyone would be safer. But if that was the way 1989 began, it would end very differently. In the months that followed, popular uprisings would spread across the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc, from Poland to Hungary and finally to East Germany where, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. Under the banner “the End of History,” right-wing ideologues in Washington seized on this moment of global flux to crush all political competition, whether socialism, Keynesianism, or deep ecology. They waged a frontal attack on political experimentation, on the idea that there might be viable ways of organizing societies other than deregulated capitalism.

It’s a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin’s project an abomination of core social justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the developed world has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mao Zedong, for his part, openly declared that “man must conquer nature,” setting loose a devastating onslaught on the natural world that transitioned seamlessly from clear-cuts under communism to mega-dams under capitalism.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

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

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

Figures 1. The shifts in labour relations outlined in this book. 2. Modern humans as hunter-gatherers until 10,000 years ago. 3. The evolution of different labour relations, 5000–500 BCE. PREFACE The idea for this book emerged in the 1990s, in that optimistic period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. State socialism had failed, and with it, apparently, the idea that the exploited worker could only find liberation in a totally ‘classless’ society. Instead, a new utopian dream began to emerge. This started in the West but was quickly embraced globally, with the same enthusiasm with which Coca-Cola had been welcomed worldwide.

From 1920 to 1935, induced abortion was legal, and then again from 1955 to 1968 – after a hiatus due to the massive losses in population as a result of collectivization, famines and the ‘Great Patriotic War’. The fact that many women resorted to abortion was, of course, also fostered by the want of practically everything that mother and baby needed. The same pattern existed in Eastern Europe in the Russian sphere of influence between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1979, China attempted to limit its population with the one-child policy as one of the main instruments of social engineering. This measure, implemented by means of a contraceptive intrauterine device, surgically inserted after having a first child, and sterilization after having a second child, also significantly increased the productive engagement of women.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

A number of secondary school students, like those at New York's P.S. 125, are discovering how the long-distance access afforded by computer networks can help them learn from students from other cultures, and participate in discussions all over the world. Many classrooms, in different states and countries, are already linking up in what are sometimes called "learning circles." The purpose of most learning circles is to let students study a specific topic, in collaboration with faraway counterparts. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was falling, West German students were able to discuss the event with their contemporaries in other countries. One learning circle that was studying the whaling industry included Alaskan Inuit students, whose Eskimo villages still depend on whales for food. Students outside the village got so interested, they invited an Inuit tribal elder to their class for a learning circle discussion.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

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

David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2016, http://www.nber.org/papers/w21906. 28. “Excess Reserves of Depository Institutions,” FRED Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed February 29, 2016, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS. 29. Christoph Lakner and Milanovic Branko, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank, December 2013, http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Global%20Income%20Distribution%20Lakner%20Milanovic.pdf. Chapter 3: The Myth That Incentives Don’t Matter 1. Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 4 (2011): 165–90, http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/diamond-saezJEP11opttax.pdf. 2.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Object sexuality or objectophilia (not to be confused with objectification), is a recognized condition in which people fall in love with things.17 Objectophilia is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) under paraphilias—sexual interests that are atypical. One of the more famous objectophiles is a woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower. Erika Eiffel even changed her surname from Erika LaBrie following her 2007 “marriage” to the famed landmark. Nearly thirty years earlier, Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer “married” the Berlin Wall. Recognizing this was something other people actually experienced, the two went on to found Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale, an organization to support those who have strong personal relationships with objects and to promote understanding about this form of attraction.18 While we may not know for sure whether objectophilia is driven by the same hormones and neurotransmitters as traditional person-to-person love, it seems more likely than not that the process is similar.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

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

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

It’s the same recipe everywhere, regardless of context, history, or the hopes and dreams of the people who live there. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist of the World Bank in 1991, summed up the ethos: “Spread the truth—the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” (Which is why I sometimes call neoliberalism “McGovernment.”) The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall was interpreted as the signal to take the campaign global. With socialism in decline, there was seemingly no longer any need to soften capitalism’s edges anywhere. As Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative.” (Another way of thinking about this is that neoliberalism is simply capitalism without competition, or capitalism lying on the couch in its undershirt saying, “What are you going to do, leave me?”)


pages: 287 words: 99,131

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

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

They care for children when parents are unavailable and give their time to the community. Our ancestors planted trees and vines to bear fruit long after their deaths. We will find new ways to work for the future today. “The world shifts and surprises from day to day. The Twin Towers are gone, and so is the Berlin Wall. Those who have lived with history have the habits of learning and adaptation, but we don’t want to see the costs passed on to the next generation. We worry about the long-term cost of pollution or a destabilized climate that might last centuries. We mourn the disruption of institutions and international friendships based on decades of careful building.


The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

For many people, this is why the promise of a renaissance in U.S. oil looks so exciting. Before 1973, the United States didn’t depend on imports from abroad, let alone from a shaky Middle East. (It imported some oil, but by choice, not necessity; its goal was to conserve U.S. resources for the future.) After 1973, everything changed. “This is the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down,” says Robin West, an authority on oil markets who served in the Ford and Reagan administrations. “Just as the trauma of the Cold War ended in Berlin, so the trauma of the 1973 oil embargo is ending now.”35 It’s a common sentiment. Critics, though, take umbrage with claims that domestic oil production will slash prices, insulate the economy, or transform U.S. national security.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

“Hawala: The Hawala Alternative Remittance System and Its Role in Money Laundering.” Prepared by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the United States Department of Treasury in cooperation with INTERPOL/FOPAC. Judson, Ruth. 2012. “Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, International Finance Discussion Paper 2012-1058 (November). Washington, DC. Judson, Ruth, and Richard Porter. 2012. “Estimating the Volume of Counterfeit U.S. Currency in Circulation Worldwide: Data and Extrapolation.” Journal of Art Crime 2012 (8): 13–29.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

As we know, under free trade, both Chinese and American workers can quit work earlier than they could under restricted trade, having produced the same amount as before. The commonsense answer based on practical experience is also no: compare North Korea with South Korea, or Austria with Hungary. To take a very rough guide to how much better it is to have an open, liberal economy than a closed one, simply note that in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin wall, the average Austrian was between two and six times richer than the average Hungarian (depending on how you measure it). The average South Korean is wealthy while the average North Korean is starving. North Korea is so isolated that it’s hard to get any measurement of quite how poor the country is.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

“The big companies like Nestlé were supportive of the quota system because they knew in October of each year exactly how much coffee would be available and what the price would be,” Osorio told me. “The administrators loved it. They could just go off and play tennis at three in the afternoon. It was a well-organized world.” In 1989, this world came crashing down along with the Berlin Wall. Suddenly, the cold war was over — the threat of Communism had passed. With no fledgling Castros to worry about, the United States abruptly pulled out of the ICA. By 1992, coffee prices had plunged 50 percent. Three years later, a Brazilian frost tripled prices. The free market was restored. As if things weren’t bad enough already, the ghost of the cold war had one last trick to play on coffee farmers.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

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

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

Financial warfare is one form of unrestricted warfare, the preferred method of those with inferior weapons but greater cunning. Globalization Globalization has been emerging since the 1960s but did not gain its name and widespread recognition until the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Multinational corporations had existed for decades, but the new global corporation was different. A multinational corporation had its roots and principal operations in one country but operated extensively abroad through branches and affiliates. It might have a presence in many countries, but it tended to keep the distinct national identity of its home country wherever it operated.


pages: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, fixed income, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, hiring and firing, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, law of one price, linked data, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stochastic volatility, technology bubble, the new new thing, transaction costs, volatility smile, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As we grew into a large public company, the flow of information inside the firm became more constricted and the hierarchy more stratified. None of this was necessarily bad; it simply went with the territory. I still liked Goldman better than any other place I considered. Appearances were changing, too. In late 1999 the Nasdaq was heading towards its precipitous peak, and each day there were new cracks in the Berlin wall of Will Street's formal business attire. Each new day another firm announced that casual clothing was henceforth de rigueur. Each new morning saw formerly navy-suited partners come to work in manifestly casual trousers and sports jackets over open-necked shirts. At Goldman, the first to crumble was the historically more plebeian currency and commodities division.


pages: 337 words: 100,765

At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel by William C. Rempel

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall

“As you know, I came here to help you, to protect you and your families from Pablo Escobar. And I continue to work for your well-being and that of your families. But I am very concerned. I see pressure building but not much progress with the government. And international pressure is only getting worse. That should be a concern.” Jorge shared his opinion that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union the United States was alone as a world power, that since it had successfully taken down Noriega and pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, it had a lot of military resources with little to do. Jorge said he feared one day American forces might even land in Cali to take the cartel leaders.


pages: 292 words: 99,273

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman

Berlin Wall, Downton Abbey, lateral thinking, Mason jar, telemarketer, wage slave, Wall-E

This fact was dangled as an incentive when I was meeting the directors of the company, but I said, “Hey, I’m a man of the theatre”—real theatre folk (nerds) spell it with the old-school -re—“so I’m not that crazy about working with a TV lady, but I’m going to audition despite the fact that you’re planning to include her.” Regardless of that jackassery, I got the job. And it, and indeed she, saved my life. The show was The Berlin Circle by Chuck Mee. He takes Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and sets it at the Berlin Wall coming down. During the first read-through, the cast of twenty-four people was sitting in a large circle of chairs in this empty warehouse when Megan came walking in, all turned out and wearing very cute clothing and what I used to call her “fashion shoes.” She was beautiful, okay, sure, and I thought, “All right, let’s see what you got, hotshot.”


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Dream to leave Syria http://syria.mil.ru/syria/livecam.htm Help get out of Syria. I live in Aleppo. I am 14 years old. I do not cheat. Community help!!!!!! With that turn, the graffiti scroll started to feel a bit haunting. It also reminded us of another time and place when an oppressed community longed to communicate with the outside world: during the Cold War, at the Berlin Wall. There, too, the graffiti—all on the West German side—was a mix of pleas to respect people’s rights, of love notes, of messages of peace and hope, and of straightforward statements that so and so had visited that place—the classic “I Was Here” proof of existence, proof of humanity. Yet if a Cold War graffito is read as a statement of defiance against a wall that sought to constrain and restrict human connections, the messages here in this strange digital accounting system are powerful because it is not a wall.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

In a book published in 2003 the commentator Nicolas Baverez wrote of the ‘atomisation of French society’, the ‘spread of social nihilism’, and the ‘anaemia’ of French democracy.13 In foreign policy, he argued trenchantly, the French had concealed the deterioration of their military capacity, misread the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and clung to a sense of global importance long diminished. ‘There is effectively something metaphysical in the sentiment of decline which is engulfing the old world in general, and France in particular,’ commented the writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert.14 It was a time of disorientation for much of the West, faced with the rise of China and other emerging powers, the transformations brought by the digital economy and the revival of identity politics.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

* * * — In his book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t yet become preoccupations of contemporary fiction, why we don’t seem able to adequately imagine real-world climate catastrophe, why fiction hasn’t yet made the dangers of warming sufficiently “real” to us, and why we haven’t had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” Others call it “cli-fi”: genre fiction sounding environmental alarm, didactic adventure stories, often preachy in their politics. Ghosh has something else in mind: the great climate novel. “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in conventional novels, which tend to end with uplift and hope and to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

However, technological and societal developments have meant that in the last few decades, roughly since the end of the Second World War, people in the developing world have increasingly been able to compete for jobs and capital with those in the West. This has increased the real cost of things. With China’s decision to pursue economic development in the late 1970s, and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, this process has accelerated. This is a key part of the paradigm shift I referred to earlier in the book. Like it or not, those of us in “rich” countries are losing our relative and absolute economic power to billions of hungry, aspirational and hard-working people elsewhere. With the increased promotion of free trade after the end of the Second World War, international trade and the global shipping industry exploded.


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

Renditions of “Amazing Grace” comfort us in times of trouble; “The Star-Spangled Banner” binds our nation together; and “We Will Rock You” rallies arena or stadium sports fans. Erik Kirschbaum makes a credible case that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s concert before 300,000 people in East Berlin in 1988 helped topple the Berlin Wall.33 Although not all external benefits of music are positive—I still resent the student in the dorm room next to mine blasting music all hours of the day and night—and music can be (and has been) enlisted for evil causes as well as good ones, the positive effect of music on our psyches and in support of social causes is what extends its impact far beyond its monetary contribution to the economy.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

Although arguments were fierce over whether poorer countries should also have to eliminate CFC production, they were resolved by giving developing countries an extra decade to comply with the new regulations and setting up a properly funded financial mechanism to help them do so. The issue was not dealt with at the initial Montreal meeting in 1987 but in subsequent negotiations that tightened up the ozone-regulation regime and brought in new players as confidence grew that the system would work. In contrast, the Kyoto Protocol set up a permanent “Berlin Wall” between rich countries with emissions targets and poor countries without them—a deal that now looks rather anachronistic given the rapid rise of China, India, Brazil, and other large new emitters in recent years. This arrangement has maintained a bitter ideological divide, where poor countries accuse rich ones of betraying their commitments, while rich countries worry that any emissions cuts they make will be overwhelmed by the growth of the poor.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

Some may have been motivated by a desire to return to their ancestral homeland. Most, though, left because until the mid-1980s North Korea was a more prosperous place than China. Propped up by China, the old Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe, North Korea had access to both cheap imports and markets for its goods. The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the demise of the USSR in 1991 brought that support to an abrupt end, just as China was opening up to the world. Around the same time, the DPRK started investing huge amounts of money in developing nuclear weapons, a further drain on its dwindling resources. Unable to pay for oil imports, North Korea’s economy collapsed and people started to go hungry.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

MacKinnon 1943–1999 PREFACE One night in Beijing in 1998, I went to dinner with a few Chinese friends—all artsy intellectuals, journalists, and hip liberal types. As we dug into a mound of spicy Szechuan chicken and washed it down with lukewarm local beer, I described a book I had just finished reading: The File by Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash. It tells the story of how after the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain crumbled, East Germans suddenly had access to the files the Stasi had been keeping on them. People found out who had been ratting on whom—in some cases neighbors and coworkers, but also lovers, spouses, and even sometimes their own children. After I finished talking, one friend put down his chopsticks, looked around the table, and proclaimed, “Someday the same thing will happen in China.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

I asked former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell ifhe thought New Labour adapted to Thatcherism just as, decades ago, the Tories were forced to capitulate to the post-war welfare state settlement left by Clement Attlee's Labour government. 'Yeah, I do. The combination of 1979 (Thatcher's first election victory] and 1989 [the collapse of the Berlin Wall] meant that a little bit of the left's optimism and confidence about itself died ... Somehow, post 1989, a whole bunch of things were defined as, if not insane, then at least as slightly far-fetched, and therefore people on the left had to argue very, very hard to win arguments about overcoming market outcomes or reducing inequality ... ' In such an ideological atmosphere, itis no wonder that New Labour got away with abandoning the party's role as the political voice of working-class people.


pages: 306 words: 97,211

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin, Michael van Biema

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, business logic, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, new economy, place-making, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, Telecommunications Act of 1996, time value of money, tulip mania, Y2K, zero-sum game

Environmental catalysts are disruptive shifts in the world in which businesses operate. We refer not only to global warming, which is obviously an environmental catalyst however one uses the term, but to changes in the political, social, and economic climates as well. For example, the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the symbolic representation of a major catalyst for change in the years ahead. With the end of the Cold War, firms in the west such as Boeing, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Siemens, and a host of others would be able to sell their wares in the former Soviet Union and its previous allies.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I wasn’t laughing, because I understood the power of psychological warfare at scale. The Germans have an expression called Mauer im Kopf, which translates roughly as “the wall in the mind.” After the East and the West reunified in 1990, the legal border between the two Germanys was dissolved. The checkpoints disappeared, the barbed wire was ripped away, and the Berlin Wall was finally taken down. But even fifteen years after reunification, many Germans still overestimated the distances between cities in the East and the West. There was, it seems, a lingering psychological distance that betrayed the nation’s geography, creating a virtual border in people’s minds. Although that wall of concrete and steel had long since crumbled, its shadow lived on, etched into the psyches of the German people.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

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

Today, for example, we take private property for granted in the world. Communism defined itself in opposition to private property. Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Communism collapsed and was widely discredited as a miserable failure. The battle for private property had been won. The harder part of the definition follows: capitalism is “characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions.”


pages: 415 words: 103,801

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

They weren’t Chinese. I knew, in fact, that they were Jewish. The Kadoories had helped fund programs at the synagogue I had gone to in Hong Kong while I lived there as a reporter. I didn’t have a chance to learn more about the Kadoories then. My reporting took me to Berlin, where I covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. I didn’t return to China for almost fifteen years, even as it reemerged and twitched back to life. In 2002, I found myself back in Shanghai to cover China’s rise as a global economic power for The Wall Street Journal. My reporting took me to a neighborhood away from the waterfront and away from the hustle and bustle of the business districts.


pages: 318 words: 99,881

Rolling Nowhere by Ted Conover

bank run, Berlin Wall, intermodal, traveling salesman, young professional

How hard for them to know that it was not theirs, that they had no chance of owning a piece of it. That they would be arrested and deported if they were found, perceived of as having somehow robbed us—even though they worked harder for American employers than almost anybody, and for lower wages. Somehow, we celebrated the escape of East Germans over the Berlin Wall, but deplored the escape of Mexicans. For the first time, I really wished that I had a camera. The picture of these three young Mexican hoboes, gazing out over that Valhalla ... it would explain so much. Late at night, we pulled into Pocatello. I would have stayed with the group, but they were uninterested in leaving the yard.


pages: 307 words: 102,477

The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep by Dr. Guy Leschziner

23andMe, Berlin Wall, British Empire, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

But occasionally I see my narcolepsy patients sitting in my clinic, one minute chatting about their condition, the next minute fast asleep. And when I put my younger daughter to bed, it is like a light switch suddenly turned off. Looking at her and my patients, it is obvious why we think of wake and sleep as entirely different states of existence, with clear borders: a reinforced concrete barrier, the Berlin Wall separating the East of sleep from the West of wake. But this seemingly stark divide belies the incredibly complex choreographed dance of brain nuclei, neurones and circuits, working synergistically and antagonistically to mediate our levels of engagement with our external and internal world that define our states of consciousness.


Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

G Growing green manures which act as suppressants; keep the earth used (to stop weeds growing there), prevent soil erosion over winter, and can then be dug in to provide goodness for the next crop (see Green manures). G Mulching Covering the earth in various substances which exclude light and therefore suppress weeds (in theory). My experience is that the practice is somewhat less than perfect. G Membranes which exclude light and suppress weeds. G Berlin walls built around plots to exclude sneaking roots and creepers. They go into the ground and extend above it. Never rotovate – it just chops up perennials into lots of pieces, all of which will grow. 29 • Dealing with Pests, Diseases and Weeds 297 And of course there is always good old hand-weeding – which is a never ending task.


pages: 479 words: 102,876

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

I had come to know him over the previous few months—monosyllabic, yet outspoken; charming, yet cunning; highly focused despite his seventy-four years of age. Perhaps most astonishing, the man who thinks as highly of publicity and journalists as a vegetarian does of a pork sausage, a man who gave his last previous interview of significant length while the Berlin Wall was still standing—this man answered nearly every question I had for him, even the most delicate ones. Marc Rich’s story is both typically American and typically Jewish. Parts of the saga can be seen as the embodiment of the American dream, a classic dishwasher-to-millionaire fantasy. Marcell Reich, the Jewish boy-refugee from Antwerp, barely escaped certain death in the Holocaust.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Too much focus on economic freedom leads to the destruction of the social and natural world and to the steady degradation of the institutions that hold the market in balance. Russia’s experience illustrates this dynamic. The Soviet economy under communism grew much more slowly than the Western economies, while also greatly restricting personal and political freedoms. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia moved aggressively to embrace a completely unconstrained market—Chicago economics in its purest form. For a golden moment it seemed as though Russia would become a developed market economy. But no one stopped to price externalities, build the institutions that would enforce the rule of law, provide decent education and health care, or ensure that firms couldn’t set their own rules.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Ultimately this claim is rooted in a version of adverse possession and justified by the long passage of time. This is true not just in North Carolina but for virtually every plot of land in the world. The significance of physical possession was one of the most contested issues after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Communist countries reintroduced market economies. Working in the region in the early 1990s, Heller advised many postsocialist governments on how to create the legal framework for private property. Government leaders had to decide between pre-Communist owners (and their heirs) demanding return of confiscated property and current occupants trying to stay in their homes.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

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

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

The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a club to police people who weren’t socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean was asked a dozen times a day if he was “too left” to be a viable candidate). But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind out of the anti-communist religion. Chomsky and Herman addressed this in their 2002 update of Manufacturing Consent, in which they wrote: The force of anti-communist ideology has possibly weakened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe, but this is easily offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the “miracle of the market…” The collapse of the Soviets, and the weakening of anti-communism as an organizing principle, led to other changes in the media.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

Though many countries had been persuaded to drop their opposition, a number of countries pledged to fight. That number was steadily reduced during the first two years of the talks. By 1989, it had been whittled down to a core Group of Ten, led by the generic drug powers India and Brazil. That year, the Cold War ended, dooming the India–Brazil axis. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall liberated the United States from the need to practice international restraint, and it entered a historically unique period of global dominance. Inside the GATT negotiating process, the U.S. negotiators invited resistant counterparts into side rooms for chats that became known as Black Room consultations.43 U.S. officials ratcheted up the application of Special 301, opening investigations into five of the ten “hard-liners” opposing the draft document known as Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

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

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

A voice says, ‘Be you Protestant or be you Catholic?’ Your man sighs in relief. ‘Neither,’ he says. ‘I’m a Jew.’ And the voice answers, ‘Ah, right! Then I’m the luckiest Palestinian in all of Ireland.’” . . . Meanwhile, as the intifada raged on in Israel and the occupied territories, the world outside was changing fast. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union began to teeter. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded its smaller, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. Led by the United States, a global coalition, including Arab countries, drove the Iraqis out in the First Gulf War. Hussein tried to shatter the Western-Arab alliance arrayed against him by firing Scud missiles at Israel, hoping to prompt an Israeli response.


pages: 335 words: 100,154

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

As with other childhood obsessions, my interest fizzled, and, in time, I grew up. Little did I know that, later on, law enforcement would become a central part of my life. – 3 – John Moscow 1989–2008 Fourteen years later, I graduated from Stanford Business School. It was 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down. Three years after that, I joined the East European desk of the US investment bank Salomon Brothers in London. The opportunities were so great in that part of the world that, in 1996, I moved to Moscow to set up a hedge fund called the Hermitage Fund. I named it after the Hermitage Museum in St.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

Were we going to get caught in a nuclear exchange? The danger was so close. And we saw the effect that Communism had on the Czechs, the Polish, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the Yugoslavs, the East Germans—everywhere there was Communism around us. I remember going to West Berlin for a bodybuilding exhibition. I’d looked across the Berlin Wall, across the border, and seen how dismal life was on the other side. It was literally like two different weathers. It felt like I was in sunshine and when you looked across the wall at East Berlin, there was rain. It was horrible. Horrible. So I felt very good that America was fighting Communism big-time.

See also specific beer hall Belafonte, Harry, 208 Belshé, Kim, 563 Belushi, Jim, 340, 341 Belushi, John, 210 Bennett, Dianne, 59, 60, 145–46 Bennett, Wag, 59, 60, 64, 72 Bening, Annette, 532 Benny, Jack, 359 Berenson, Berry, 207 Bergen, Candice, 198 Bergman, Ingmar, 263 Bergman, Sandahl, 262–63, 266, 270, 315 Berle, Milton, 356–60, 361, 363, 604 Berle, Ruth, 356–57 Berlin, Germany; Arnold’s visit to, 90 Berlin Wall, 22, 90 Bernstein, Army, 459–60 Best Built Man in Europe competition, 48 Bettenhausen, Matt, 564, 565–66 Beverely Hills Cop II (movie), 336 Biden, Joseph, 593 Biehn, Michael, 312 Big Wednesday (movie), 230, 236, 262 bin Talal, Prince Alwaleed, 443 blame; Arnold’s principles of success and, 615–16 Bloom, Jake, 401, 404 Bloomberg, Michael, 561 body: analysis of, 93–94, 122 Austrian views about, 26 taking care of mind and, 27, 617–18 uniqueness of, 122–23.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

After railing at Halpern for an entire morning, she would spend the afternoon trying to sweet-talk Florida State officials into giving him a permanent position in the physics department.38 She behaved no more consistently towards her brother Eugene, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease: in public, she adored him but in private she described him witheringly as ‘a third-rate physicist’.39 On the telephone, she argued with him for hours about family matters, haranguing him for his politics and for associating with ‘the Moonies’. On New Year’s Day 1995, she called Leon and Ellen Lederman hours after Wigner’s death, and said to each of them in turn: ‘Thank God the monster is dead.’40 Even in her ninth and tenth decades, Manci kept abreast of the news. In late 1989, she was jubilant when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet-backed Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party abdicated its monopoly power and agreed to free elections. Soon afterwards, during the presidency of George Bush Senior, she considered applying for American citizenship so that she could vote against him if he stood for re-election. Delighted when Bill Clinton first won the presidency, in late 1995 she wrote supportively to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sent a courteous reply on White House notepaper (‘Dear Ms Dirac […]’).41 No letter ever gave Manci more pleasure.

J. 1 Baker, Henry 1, 2 his tea parties 1, 2, 3 appearance 1 personality 1 and the Greeks’ love of beauty 1 Balázs, Nandor 1n18, 2n45 Balázs, Richard 1, 2n33 Baldwin, Stanley 1 Balmer, Johannes: formula for hydrogen spectrum 1, 2, 3 Baltimore Dairy Lunch, Princeton (the Balt) 1, 2 bare electron 1, 2 bare energy 1 Barnes, Julian: Flaubert’s Parrot 1 Baron-Cohen, Simon 1 Batchelor, George 1, 2, 3, 4, 5n3 Battle of Britain 1, 2 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation (later Company)) 1, 2, 3, 4 Home Service 1 PD declines numerous interviews 1, 2n10 Start the Week (Radio 1 programme) 2 Beatles, The 1, 2, 3 Beaufort, Lady Margaret 1, 2, 3 beauty Baker’s fascination with the Greeks’ love of beauty 1 concept of 1, 2n41, 3n42 discussion between PD and Heisenberg 1 of a fundamental theory in physics 1 Kant and 1, 2n54 in mathematics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moore on 1 PD’s first recorded mention of 1 in vogue as a concept at Cambridge 1, 2 Beeston Hall School, West Runton, Norfolk 1, 2n2 Belgium, Queen of (Elisabeth of Bavaria) 1 Bell, James 1, 2, 3n16, 4n54 Bell Laboratories, New Jersey 1 Bendall, John 1 Beria, Lavrentiy 1, 2 Berlin global capital of theoretical physics 1 Oppenheimer in 1 Einstein in 1, 2 anti-Semitism 1 nuclear fission discovered in 1 Debye in 1 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989) 1 Bernal, Desmond 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Berne, Switzerland 1 Bethe, Hans 1n26 Bhabha, Homi 1, 2, 3n36 Bialobrzeski, Czeslaw 1n22 Big Bang 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Birge, Raymond 1 Birmingham 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bishop Road Junior School, Bristol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9n31, 10n1 Bishopston, Bristol 1, 2, 3 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 1 black holes 1 blackbody radiation 1, 2, 3, 4 Blackett, Patrick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 serves in World War I 1 personality 1 influences PD 1 appearance 1 resents Kapitza 1 experimental physics 1 attempted poisoning by Oppenheimer 1 and cosmic rays 1, 2, 3 anger at Rutherford’s despotic style 1 discovery of the anti-electron 1, 2 revelations at the Royal Society 1 supports the Labour Party 1 family 1 and nuclear fission 1 a wartime Government scientific adviser 1 and manufacture of a nuclear weapon 1 and the Manhattan Project 1 refused a visa for the Soviet Union (spring 1945) 1 Nobel Prize 1, 2n36 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire 1 Bloomsbury Group 1 Blumenfeld, Helaine 1, 2, 3, 4n16, 5n35 Blumenfeld, Yorrick 1, 2 Blunt, Anthony 1 Boer War 1, 2 Bohr, Margrethe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Bohr, Niels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14n1 theory of atomic structure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 PD’s mastery of his atomic theory 1 Nobel Prize for physics 1 visits Cambridge 1 appearance 1, 2 personality 1, 2, 3, 4 and Rutherford 5 gloomy about the state of quantum physics 1 and Heisenberg’s theory of 1925 1, 2 PD’s visit to the Institute 1, 2, 3 concern with words 1, 2 PD on 1, 2 on PD 1 complementarity principle 1 coat of arms 1 defends Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle 1 and a relativistic equation of the electron 1, 2 response to PD’s hole theory 1, 2, 3 and PD’s Bristol lecture 1, 2 at the 1930 Solvay Conference 1 and the neutrino 1 represented in a special version of Faust 1 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor 1 and philosophy 1 and the positron 1 and the bas-relief of Rutherford 1 his mansion 1, 2, 3n47 congratulates PD on his Nobel Prize 1 party to honour the Nobel Prize winners 1 and Shankland’s results 1 death of his eldest son 1 at Rutherford’s memorial service 1 and nuclear fission 1, 2 meeting with Heisenberg (1941) 1 escapes from occupied Denmark 1n53 and genetics 1 death 1 Bohr orbits 1 Bollobas, Gabriella 1 Bolshevik Party 1 Bolshevik Revolution (1917) 1, 2, 3 Bolshevism 1, 2, 3, 4 Bolshevo, near Moscow 1, 2 Bombay (Mumbai) 1, 2 Bordeaux, France 1, 2 Born, Gustav 1 Born, Max 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7n10 quantum mechanics named by 1 and PD’s first paper on quantum mechanics 1 works with Heisenberg and Jordan at Göttingen 1, 2 and Heisenberg’s quantum theory 1 and Jordan’s work on Fermi-Dirac statistics 1 interpretation of Schrödinger’s waves 1 quantum probabilities 1 appearance 1 personality 1 and Oppenheimer’s behaviour 1 surprised at PD’s knowledgeability 1 and field theory 2 and the rise of anti-Semitism in Göttingen 1, 2 and the Dirac equation 1 nervous breakdown 1 considers emigration 1 appointment at Cambridge 1 resents PD’s Nobel Prize 1 message from the Nazi Government 1 professorship in Edinburgh 1 in the Lake District with PD 1 PD asks him to support Heisenberg 1 Nobel Prize 1 death 1 Bose, Satyendra 1, 2n20 bosons 1 Boston, Massachusetts 1 Boston University: PD’s lecture (1972) 1 Boulton, Edmund 1 Boys Smith, John 1 bra 1 Bradman, Sir Donald 1, 2 Bragg, Sir Lawrence 1, 2n63 Bragg, William 1 Bridges, Robert: A Testament of Beauty 1, 2 Brighton, PD’s honeymoon in 1, 2 Bristol Charles Dirac settles in 1, 2 described 1, 2, 3 and Catholicism 1 aviation industry 1, 2, 3, 4 First World War 1, 2 protestors baton-charged by police (1932) 1 Second World War 1, 2, 3 Bristol Aeroplane Company 1, 2n56 Bristol Central Library 1 Bristol Citizens’ Recruiting Committee 1 Bristol Downs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bristol Evening News 1 Bristol Records Office 1 Bristol Shiplovers’ Society 1 British Aeroplane Company 1 British Aerospace 1n1 British Aircraft Corporation 1n56 British and Colonial Aeroplane Company 1 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting (Bristol, 1930) 1, 2, 3 meeting (Leicester, 1933) 1, 2 British Thomson-Houston Company, Rugby 1, 2 Broad, Charlie 1, 2, 3 Professor of Philosophy at Bristol 1 as a lecturer 1, 2, 3n40 treatment of relativity 1 and PD’s interest in philosophy 1 moves to Cambridge 1 Brookhaven National Laboratory 1 Brown, Dan: Angels and Demons 1 Brown, Miss Josephine 1, 2n5, 3n6 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 1, 2, 3, 4 Budapest 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 Bukharin, Nikolai 1 Bulletin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences 1 Bullock, W.H. 1n19 Bunin, Ivan 1 Bush, George, Snr. 1 Butler, Samuel: The Way of all Flesh 1 Byron, Lord 1, 2, 3n32 Cadet Corps 1 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Cambodia, US invasion of 1 Cambridge described 1, 2, 3, 4 Manci’s dislike of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Socialist Society march (1933) 1 wartime 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7n32 VE-Day celebrations 1 celebration of Japan’s surrender 1 Cambridge Borough Cemetery (now Cambridge City Cemetery), Bristol 1n59 Cambridge Review 1, 2, 3, 4 Cambridge Union 1, 2 Cambridge University mathematics as its largest department 1 social life 1, 2 opposition to the General Strike 1 Marxist scientists’ efforts to establish radical politics 1 applications from refugee scientists 1 in the Second World War 1 women in 1, 2n28 offers a professorship to Oppenheimer 1 Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics 1 PD moves to Florida State 1, 2 Canadian Rockies 1 Canford Cemetery, Westbury on Trym, Bristol 1 canonically conjugate variables 1n27 Cardoza Kindersley workshop, Cambridge 1n27 Cario family 1, 2, 3 Carpenter, Edward, Dean of Westminster 1, 2 Carroll, Lewis: Alice through the Looking Glass 1 Carter, Jimmy 1 Carus, Paul: Reflections on Magic Squares 1 Casimir, Hendrik 1 Caucasus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Cavendish Avenue, Cambridge (No.7) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Rutherford succeeds J.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Inside, the Winter Garden, a ten-storey, glass-ceilinged public plaza, brings light and life into a mall full of shops and two enticing food halls: French-themed Le District and Hudson Eats upstairs. Decorated by sixteen 45ft-high Washingtonia palms from Florida, the plaza is a veritable oasis, and connects with the North Cove yacht harbour on the Hudson River side. Don’t miss the small chunk of the Berlin Wall tucked away on the south side of the cove, donated by the German Consulate in 2004. The Irish Hunger Memorial 290 Vesey St • Daily: May–Oct 8am–9pm; Nov–April 8am–6.45pm • Free • Subway A, C, #1, #2, #3 to Chambers St; E to World Trade Center Just north of Brookfield Place, facing the Hudson at the end of Vesey Street, the Irish Hunger Memorial is a sobering monument to the more than one million Irish people who starved to death during the Great Famine of 1845–52.

Madison’s most interesting sight comes in a four-block strip above 53rd Street. The tiny, vest-pocket-sized Paley Park is on the north side of East 53rd between Madison and Fifth avenues, and has a soothing mini-waterfall and transparent water tunnel. Previously, a nearby plaza displayed a haunting five-panel section of the former Berlin Wall, though that curious relic was removed for its own protection from water damage and graffiti and placed in the lobby at 520 Madison Ave. Around the corner, the Continental Illinois Center looks like a cross between a space rocket and a grain silo. A few streets up at East 57th Street, at no. 41–45, is the eye-catching Fuller Building.


Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration by Unknown

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, trade route

He found, however, that Mexican musicians didn’t dare move from the center of the country where they had careers—from Mexico City and Guadalajara—to the musical wasteland of Baja California for an orchestra that didn’t yet exist. No matter. Echevarría had really been looking east all along. The socialist bloc had been in its death throes since the fall of the Berlin Wall in . During the summer of , a coup by Communist hardliners in Moscow attempted to knock Mikhael Gorbachev from power. An uprising of Muscovite citizenry foiled the coup, and with that the Soviet Union stumbled to its final days, leaving Russia in shambles and the world to ponder what the cataclysm meant for the future.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

He took a train to Boston to sit down with Richard Stallman to “ask him where this stuff was coming from.” Young was astounded by what he found. “[Stallman] was using lines [like] ‘from engineers according to their skill to engineers according to their need.’ ” “I’m a capitalist,” Young recalls thinking, “and the Berlin wall had just fallen. I thought, I’m not sure this model is going to keep going.” Young decided to forget about free software. “Given there was no economic support [for this] free software stuff,” Young believed it all “was a blip.” He reasoned, “It was only going to get worse over time as the communist system only ever got worse over time.”


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

The Western Allies had poured Marshall Plan money and development into building a vibrant West Germany, which became a world leader in innovation and growth. But in that same time, East Germany’s postwar fate was dictated by the Soviet Union. And East Germany’s hallmark was stagnation. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East Germany was reunited with West Germany. Instantly, the entire nation was forced to wonder: can you teach an entire people how to compete, when they’ve never competed before? For the previous 40 years, every aspect of Eastern life had been dictated by the Soviet “planned economy.” The Soviet government determined the needs of the entire Communist bloc, and it then allocated responsibility for fulfilling those needs throughout the Soviet states.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

We stood on stage with Margaret Thatcher at the opening ceremony and gave interviews in English, if usually under the watchful eye of our KGB minders. The fourth “K-K” match, in 1987, took place entirely in Seville, Spain, and I barely held on to my title by winning the last game. By the time of our fifth and final match, in 1990, it was split between New York City and Lyon, France. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR wasn’t far behind, and a whole new world of challenges and opportunities was opening up for me and for chess. Machines would become an exciting part of this new era. Right around when Deep Thought became the first chess machine to become a real threat to Grandmasters at the end of the 1980s, artificial intelligence was experiencing a broad resurgence in the scientific and business worlds.


pages: 438 words: 109,306

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World by Adam Lebor

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute cuisine, IBM and the Holocaust, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, special drawing rights

The Basel meetings were also valuable tutorials in how to turn a socialist state bank into a traditional central bank, responsible for controlling the money supply and controlling interest rates. By the late 1980s, even the old guard realized that the one-party state did not work. The Hungarian leader Kádár resigned, and negotiations began for a peaceful transition to democracy. The Iron Curtain was first opened in Hungary, three months before the Berlin Wall was breached. One day in August 1989 tens of thousands of East German refugees gathered on the Hungarian-Austrian frontier. By then it was clear that Communism was dying. As they surged forward, the border guards stood by and let them through. By the end of the year the entire Soviet bloc had collapsed.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

And there were innumerable objects, too, attesting in aggregate to the extraordinary range of his travels and fascinations. There were clay models of masks from the Beijing opera. Chinese chess pieces brought back by Dorothy’s aunt Ethel. A small abacus. A bag from a sake brewery in Kyoto. A piece of the Berlin Wall. A model of a nineteenth-century beam engine. A baby’s urinal “collected by Rewi Alley in Xinjiang.” Seeds from a Chinese tea plant from Meijiawu. A Han dynasty bronze whistling arrowhead. An ivory box for keeping fighting crickets. A crossbow trigger, probably a Ming copy. A set of Chinese scales and a single slipper.


pages: 311 words: 17,232

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

It was all the US had to work with, and it was with this supply that the atomic bomb was developed. 26 The war saw America emerge as a military power in its own right and the looming Cold War with the Soviet Union prompted the US to set up its stockpile of strategic materials (Heivilin, 1992).27 Much of this was metals; the US imported its entire needs for platinum, tin, chromium and tungsten, and the materials were used for military and space research purposes. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US government started selling down its stockpile, raising billions of dollars.28 The post-war reconstruction in Europe and Japan and the economic boom in the United States led to a huge boost in copper demand, and by the 1960s a wave of independence was spreading throughout colonial Africa.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Then it was off to another press conference and a champagne reception to sign hundreds of autographs and greet directors from Antequera, Glavkosmos, and even Mars Confectionery. The warm glow of British-Soviet cooperation came against the backdrop of the dramatic changes unfolding in the Soviet Union and throughout the communist world. Sharman and Mace arrived in Star City to begin cosmonaut training on 3o November 1989, the same month the Berlin Wall fell. If this symbolic reconnecting of the West and East gave heart to the team at Antequera, that new vision was not shared by the corporations they solicited for project support. All of the foreign citizens who trained at Star City, be they NASA astronauts, Intercosmos participants, or private individuals, faced difficult periods of adjustment.


pages: 361 words: 110,905

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

In 1989, he left that company to become vice chairman of General Dynamics, a major supplier of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to the United States Department of Defense. By agreement, he would become the company’s CEO a year later. On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

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

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

They did not get all of it right by any means, but the overall effect, accepted broadly now, was of much improved service. Tellingly, not a single one of the industries privatized in that era has been brought back into public ownership, nor has any government seriously considered doing so. By luck more than judgement, the British became world leaders in privatization just before the Berlin Wall came down and Communism across central and eastern Europe, followed by the former Soviet Union, imploded. Privatization marched boldly across the former Communist bloc, learning more lessons as it went. In Russia it became obvious that if you privatize in a hurry before you have some basic functions of a market economy – accountancy standards or robust banking – you risk replacing monopoly with kleptocracy, which is what happened there.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Issues of fiscal probity also seemed to be forgotten. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, remarked: ‘When the banks said they needed hundreds of billions of dollars, all worries about the size of the deficit were shunted aside.’1 Stiglitz even sees the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a moment to rival the fall of the Berlin Wall;2 in this case, it was the free market capitalist model that was undermined. To critics like Stiglitz, the US could no longer claim that its financial system was the best allocator of capital. The rival Chinese approach, with governments controlling the banks and restricting the flow of international capital, looked much more appealing to developing countries.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Technological advance, combined with the threat of outsourcing and downsizing, has neutered unions and given employers unbeatable leverage in almost every job sector. Caterpillar, the quintessentially American maker of tractors and earthmoving equipment, offers a stark illustration. Based in Peoria, Illinois, the company once set a gold standard for wages and benefits. Its machines helped build the Hoover Dam and topple the Berlin Wall. In 1982, Caterpillar was featured among the “excellent” companies, in business guru Tom Peters’s best-selling In Search of Excellence. But after losing more than $1 billion thanks to competition from Japan in the 1980s, the company decided to change course. First it farmed out work to nonunion shops.


pages: 350 words: 109,220

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

With the help of Washington’s superagent (and lawyer) Robert Barnett, Greenspan landed a reported $8.5 million advance for his memoirs. The book, The Age of Turbulence, hit the bookstores in the fall of 2007, a year and a half after he retired, just as the Great Panic was getting under way. The title was apt for a book that looked back to the 1987 crash, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, two U.S. wars with Iraq, the September 11 attacks, and the emergence of China and India as economic powers. But Greenspan had no idea how much more turbulence lurked just over the horizon, nor how his then sterling reputation would suffer — fairly and unfairly — in the aftermath. WHAT DID HE KNOW?


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

And in the next scene, the two who seem to be deaf-mute are about to be shot. So you tell me: is this Brechtian Berlin, or is it all just an act? Still, in 1997, it seemed eerie. Once at a party in Chicago, I met a British bon vivant. He touted to us a new, magic elixir. It was a juice that was an extract of what’s left of the Berlin Wall. “It’s an extract of all that evil,” he said. “You drink it, and it’s supposed to flush all the evil out of you.” Yes, people come to Berlin because they want to drink the Kool-Aid. And it does have a noir side, even in the way it hands out public goods. On the U-Bahn or the S-Bahn, while one is supposed to buy a ticket at the machine, there is nothing to stop you or me or anyone who does not know the system from just walking on.


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

For readers of the more specialist economics and business press, rejecting proposals on the grounds that they are ‘suboptimal’, ‘time-inconsistent’, or lack ‘incentive-compatibility’, has also become fashionable. And as a last resort there is always the plain but vacuous condemnation ‘uneconomic’. Veto economics serves to protect the economic orthodoxy. In some ways the orthodoxy has served us, in rich economies, quite well. For a brief period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some even talked of ‘The End of History’. Our economic problems were solved, and something called ‘The New Economy’ had arrived, promising endless prosperity - or at least an endlessly rising stock market. Although these fantasies are now largely forgotten, a more humble but still confidently optimistic orthodoxy prevails.


pages: 398 words: 108,026

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

But you see, as I say in the opening chapter of this new book, the world has profoundly changed since The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was published in 1989. The challenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relationships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989--the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall--as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance ... truly a new era. Being highly effective as individuals and organizations is no longer optional in today's world--it's the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thriving, innovating, excelling and leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond effectiveness.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Instagram users play with filters to “hack” their photos, to make them different and more interesting (and to share them as well). There are even “bio-hackers” who buy machines to copy DNA and attempt to hack them into new life-forms. A major driving force of the new maker culture is demographic. To boomers who grew up during the Cold War, with half the world closed off to them behind the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe and China held so much promise. Globalization was exciting for consumers eager for a taste of the wider world, and for corporations who saw an expanding global marketplace as a strategy for growth. Generation Y, on the other hand, has seen the negative effects of globalization—the uncertainty of throwing in your lot with a big corporation that has no loyalty to you, the way outsourcing has made it harder for them to get jobs and advance careers, the inequality of the haves and have-nots—and they have begun to innovate a different path.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online.


file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

Even if all the NYSE's limit-order customers took advantage of this new feature, it would represent only 8 percent of total volume. The NYSE is innovating, but keeping a lid on it, so as not to undermine the specialists. Still, some of its protectionist barriers have come tumbling down like the Berlin Wall. The most controversial was the NYSE's Rule 390, which kept its member firms from trading stocks of companies that listed before April 1979 anywhere but at the exchange. I had hinted several times to Dick Grasso that Rule 390 was anticompetitive, but he clung to it— under pressure from his seat holders.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Koolhaas’s work was depicted in its pages as a series of raw cut-and-paste collages and screen grabs, rather than in airbrushed perfection. Maybe there wasn’t much else to show. Alongside the buildings portrayed in a multilayered collage were many other distractingly engaging images and narratives – a fantastic history of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Japanese pornography, the Berlin Wall – as well as diagrams recording the time that Koolhaas himself had spent in the hotel rooms of the world. Clearly the intention was to signal that Koolhaas’s career was about something more important than mere architecture. The book did as much as or more than his architecture to make Koolhaas’s name inevitably linked with every new project involving the requisite high-octane mix of fashion and celebrity.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

These economists and their supporters from outside economics (there are many) point to the founding father of economics, Adam Smith, who built his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776) on the rock of humans as essentially selfish creatures. Modern economics has returned to this classical tradition, they conclude, after the aberration which began with Karl Marx and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the best efforts of John Maynard Keynes to postpone the inevitable. Unfortunately, this version of history goes wrong from the beginning. Adam Smith’s ideas reflected the eighteenth-century intellectual society he lived in and don’t easily translate to our world. The cornerstone of his Enlightenment thinking was the idea of enlightened self-interest, which is not at all the same as selfishness.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize laureate who pioneered providing microloans to poor people in Bangladesh, appeared on the screen. “If we imagine today what kind of world we want, then that’s the world we create,” he said. “If we do not imagine, it will not be done.” Martin Luther King marches, a man hacks at the Berlin Wall, Mahatma Gandhi prays, an Egyptian girl cheers the Arab Spring, African boys smile on a dusty road. “It’s neither pragmatism nor inspiration that drives me,” the Scottish singer Annie Lennox said in the film. “It’s more the passion.” A moment of silence. Then a word flashed in red in ten different languages: AMBITION.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

I had a great time with my brother, but the tail end, in Atlantic City, was depressing to me. This was once a world-famous seaside mecca, but it had been sliding into decay for decades. The hope, peddled in the 1970s, of new wealth and jobs for locals from legalized casinos fell far short of what was promised, even in the brightest of the early years. Casino developers built a Berlin Wall–like battery of monolithic, windowless buildings that basically cut off the Atlantic from its namesake city. Most of them did OK, for a time, but later went bust. By the time of our 2015 visit, most of the boardwalk casinos were closed and empty, with a former Trump casino standing out as one of the most garish, hulking failures.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

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

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

Hundreds of thousands of people had crowded before the Lincoln Memorial, on the Washington Mall, to hear King and other leaders rally the country to support civil rights legislation. Millions of others watched on television, where the speech was carried live by all three networks. President John F. Kennedy had just returned from Germany; against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, he had called for freedom for those living behind the Iron Curtain. On his return, Kennedy asked King to call off the demonstration. “We want success in Congress,” the president said, “not just a big show at the Capitol.”1 Kennedy’s comment tipped King into a dark mood. The worst manifestations of human nature were on display in the South—bigotry, beatings, cowardice, murder—and King was intent on making sure that white America, Kennedy included, faced up to them.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

While the established Western political consensus slowly crumbled, huge spaces opened up through which the old right-wing press and the new social media attack vehicles were able to advance. These huge political shifts have coincided with a revolution in digital communication. A handful of corporations, most of which did not even exist when the Berlin Wall fell, have amassed unparalleled influence over politicians and the economy. Almost 90 per cent of all Internet searches go through Google.10 Between them, Facebook, Google and Amazon account for nearly 70 per cent of all digital ad spending.11 The scions of Big Tech are plugged into the highest levels of power.


The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, interchangeable parts, plutocrats, rent control, rent stabilization, Socratic dialogue, traveling salesman, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

He had been attentive to Campbell, spending upward of forty-five minutes with her one evening, which was unusual, although he would have been surprised and offended if anybody had ever pointed that out. He had rewired a floor lamp in the library without any undue fuming and sighing. After three days of his model performance, Judy had given up the daybed in the dressing room and come back to the bedroom. True, the Berlin Wall now ran down the center of the bed, and she wouldn’t give him an inch of small talk. But she was always civil to him when Campbell was around. That was the most important thing. Two hours ago when he had called Judy to say he would be working late, she had taken it in stride. Well—he deserved it!

He heard an automobile, a lone automobile, starting off from a stoplight. Then he heard an airplane. It was not a jet but an airplane with a propeller. The motor stopped. It was going to crash! Then he heard it again, droning and groaning over New York City. How very odd… …in the dead of the night. His wife slept, fifteen inches away, on the other side of the Berlin Wall, breathing regularly…oblivious…She was turned away from him, on her side, her knees bent. How nice it would be to roll toward her and tuck his knees in behind hers and press his chest upon her back. Once they were able…once, when they were so close…they could do that without waking each other up…in the dead of the night.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Immigrants from Eastern Europe put into question the ‘‘southern’’ European model developed in Portugal, much more than historical immigrants from Africa or Brazil, and also more than Western European immigrants in search of sun (such as Britons and Germans) or belonging to the same cultural model (such as Spaniards). In sum, the immigration situation in Portugal highlights a serious identity crisis. It is also part of a wider crisis—that of European identity after the fall of the Berlin wall. Notes 1. The Authorization of Stay (Autorização de Permanência, or AP) was created under Law No. 27/2000 of September 8, 2000, and entered into force in 2001. It could be granted for one year (renewable until a maximum of five years) to foreign nationals with or without visas, but with at least a formal offer of employment in Portugal.

As can be seen from the foregoing section, some EU countries, while often benefiting from their labor, have also felt under heavy pressure from immigrants from poorer neighboring states over the past decade or so. While wars and poverty in African countries have for several decades led to immigration mainly to former colonial countries, two particular events on the European continent itself led to greater movement from the former Eastern Bloc countries, namely, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the break up of Yugoslavia in the early nineties. Thus, by the 1990s the European Union was taking a more active role in the regulation of immigration, and individual countries have since also enacted more restrictive and even repressive legislation. One of the issues facing the EU and member states concerns the conflation of debates and policy formation in relation to immigration with those related to a specific group of immigrants, that is, asylum-seekers.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Thousands of East Germans “vacationing” in Hungary abandoned their cars and walked across the border to freedom. And still Gorbachev did nothing. When he visited Berlin in October, crowds again cheered him and begged him to stay. Over the next few weeks East Germans started dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and chipping at it with hammers and chisels. When no one shot them, thousands crossed into West Berlin. Confused and incompetent, the East German regime disintegrated. Over the next few months Communist dictators all across eastern Europe went the same way and the nations bundled together within the Soviet Union started declaring independence.

., 537, 539, 618 War College, 615 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 507, 511 Arzawa, 198 Ashoka, 263 Ashur-dan II, King, 235–37 Ashurnasirpal II, King, 236–37 Asian Tigers, 543, 546 Asimov, Isaac, 92–93, 577, 580–81, 614 Assad, Lake (Syria), 90, 94, 96, 101 Assassins, 367 Assaye, battle of, 489 Assyria, 219, 239, 243, 249, 262, 276–79, 369, 445, 528, 610 collapse of, 220 Hittites and, 197–99 language of, 138, 214 revival as gangster state of, 235–37 Tigllath-Pileser III’s rule of, 245–48, 303, 316, 335, 567 Astounding Science Fiction (magazine), 93 Atahualpa, King, 460 Atapuerca (Spain), 54–56 Atenism, 261–62 Athens, 240, 241, 250, 256, 260, 268, 296, 524 atomic bomb, see nuclear weapons Attila, 315–16 Auel, Jean, 57, 69 Augustus, Emperor, 283–85, 313, 320 Austen, Jane, 572 Australia, 16, 68, 70, 75, 77, 159, 410, 519, 520, 602 Austria, 446, 448, 526, 528 Avars, 349 Avignon (France), 398, 401 Axial thought, 285, 322 first-wave, 254–56, 259–63, 329, 562, 569 Renaissance compared to, 420, 476 second-wave, 324, 325–27, 330, 351, 353, 463 social development and, 271 Aztecs, 139, 433, 515 Ba’ath Party, 90 Babylon, 138, 197–200, 214, 215, 219–21, 247–51, 278, 349 Back to the Future (film), 572 backwardness, advantages of, 34, 36, 179, 195, 196, 217, 241, 332, 404, 552, 564, 584, 619 for Arab migrants, 351 in China, 207, 264, 334, 562, 585, 587, 615 Habsburgs and, 466 in Japan, 584 for Mongols, 389 for Muslim world, 571 for Macedonians, 268 in Mesopotamia, 499, 561 for Romans, 264 in Soviet Union, 530 in United States, 510 Bacon, Francis, 468–69, 473 Bactria, 271, 292 Baghdad, 357–59, 362, 364, 366, 370, 391, 401 Bai Juyi, 355–56 Balkans, 310, 313–15, 348, 401, 431, 526, 605 “Ballad of East and West, The” (Kipling), 620–21 Baltic region, 112–14, 127–29, 310, 466 Bamboo Annals, 232 Bank of England, 530 Bao Si, 242–43, 355 Barbegal (France), 287 Barker, Graeme, 107 Basiliskos, 316, 317 Battle of the Red Cliffs, The (film), 304 Beijing, 201, 265n, 441, 432, 465, 478, 482, 483, 523, 588–90, 605 Boxer Rebellion in, 211 Britain and, 506, 515, 517, 518 culture in, 436 fall of, 453, 454 Forbidden City in, 205, 528 Gorbachev in, 549 Imperial Academy in, 210 Mongol burning of, 389 Nixon in, 546–47 population of, 152, 482n wages in, 438, 501, 502 Belgium, 160, 446, 510 Belgrade, bombing of Chinese embassy in, 605 Belisarius, 345, 346 Belize, 121 Bell, Alexander Graham, 567 Belloc, Hilaire, 12 Benedict XIII, Pope, 401 Bentley, Edmund, 29 Benz, Karl, 510 Berlin Wall, 550 Bible, 81n New Testament, 14, 255, 325 Old Testament, see Hebrew Bible Bierce, Ambrose, 26 Bin Wong, 18 Birmingham University, 22 Black Death, see bubonic plague Black Hand, 526, 605 Blombos Cave (Africa), 64 Blue Gene supercomputers, 596 Bodhisattvas, 322, 329 Bohemia, 368 Bolivia, 460 Bolsheviks, 528 Bombay–Calcutta railroad, 507 Bonesetter’s Daughter, The (Tan), 51 Boniface VIII, Pope, 398 Boniface IX, Pope, 401 Book of Changes, 479 Book of Lord Shang, 257 Book of Martyrs (Fox), 436 Borneo, 127 Boswell, James, 490–91, 495 Botox, 594 Boulton, Matthew, 491–93, 495–97, 502, 504, 567, 568, 573 Bourbons, 551 Boxer Rebellion, 211, 525 Boyne, battle of, 20 Brain Interface Project, 595 Brando, Marlon, 520n Brazil, 430, 520 Brezhnev, Leonid, 542 Britain, 33, 35, 39–40, 158, 347, 398, 404, 451, 466–70, 472, 521, 525, 534–37, 553, 608, 610, 611, 615 American colonies of, 463–64 China and, 7–15, 25, 40, 143, 145, 147–48, 211, 484, 506, 515–18, 520, 524, 572–73 Christianity in, 353 civil service of, 339n; Civil War in, 452–53 emigration to North America from, 509 Enlightenment thought in, 468–73 exploration and, 416 farming in, 290, 368–69 French wars against, 486–89, 500 Habsburgs and, 461 India and, 7, 273–75, 339n, 495 industrial revolution in, 13, 19–21, 25, 40, 379, 382, 494–98, 500, 501–507, 510–12, 572, 597, 620 Ireland and, 450, 451, 505 medieval, 194 plague in, 397 prehistoric, 80, 189 privateers from, 462–63 Renaissance in, 419 Roman, 274, 290, 307, 311, 314, 320 Royal Navy of, 148, 511, 517 social development of, 147–49, 157, 159–60, 163, 168 trade of, 466–67, 485 Victorian, 136, 506, 513 Vikings in, 371 and World Wars, 528–29 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 475 British East India Company, 7, 484, 515 bronze, 208–10, 212–14, 221, 231–34, 410 for coins, 251, 377–78 for ritual vessels, 208, 210, 212, 221, 231–33, 243 for tools, 181, 234 for weapons, 128, 181, 191, 200, 208, 234, 396 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 438 bubonic plague (Black Death), 396–401, 420, 437, 505, 520, 574, 603 in Byzantium, 346–48 in China, 355, 397, 401, 405 in Europe, 397–99, 427, 438, 446, 447, 455, 466, 467, 506 in Islamic nations, 397, 398 Buddha, 255, 256, 262, 274, 322, 324, 375–76, 398, 404–405, 440 Buddhism, 255, 256, 263, 351, 357, 393, 395, 420, 437, 525, 563 in Bactria, 271 in China, 321–23, 326, 328–29, 334, 339–42, 375–76, 378, 419, 423–24, 478, 543, 546 Christianity compared with, 324–28 in Japan, 440 Mahayana, 322, 324, 325 Bulgaria, 313 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 608 Bush, George W., 588 Business Week, 553 Byzantine Empire, 317, 343–49, 363, 373, 457, 566, 616 Arabs and, 352, 356–57 religious conflicts in, 352, 361–62 Turkic attacks on, 366, 372, 401, 403 Caboto, Giovanni (John Cabot), 416, 417, 430 Caesar, Julius, 228, 283, 419 Caffa (Crimea), 397 Cairo (Egypt), 359n, 364, 371, 392 Calicut (India), 429, 431 California, University of; Davis, 19 Irvine, 18, 20 Los Angeles, 18n California Institute of Technology, 18n “California School” of history, 19–20 Caligula, Emperor, 307 Calvinism, 448 Cambodia, 360 Cambridge University, 23, 107, 365, 475–76, 581 Cambyses, King, 249 Canada, 601 Candide (Voltaire), 280 Cann, Rebecca, 71 Cao Cao, 303–304 Cao Xueqin, 503 Carlson, Robert, 596n Carlson’s Curve, 596 Carlyle, Thomas, 472 Carpenter’s Gap (Australia), 77 Carthage, 242, 250, 268, 270, 315–17, 345 Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 540 Çatalhöyük (Turkey), 100, 102, 105, 123, 124 Catholicism, 20, 362, 372, 398–99, 401, 404, 448, 453, 477–78 Cavalli-Sforza, Luca, 110–12 Çayönü (Turkey), 102–103, 105, 125 Chang, Kwang-chih, 124, 125, 204, 205, 208 Chang’an (China), 153, 289, 293n, 298–99, 305, 306, 321, 337–38, 340, 342, 355, 359, 377 Chariots of the Gods?


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists purchased by the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists presented to the TUC. David Storey, This Sporting Life. Coronation Street begins. Building of Berlin Wall. Cuban missile crisis. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook. John F. Kennedy assassinated. Civil Rights legislation in USA. Harold Wilson leads Labour government which holds office until 1970. USA sends troops to Vietnam. BBC2 ‘Theatre 625’ adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Paris demonstrations; youth and worker unrest through the West.

Television play, Give Us This Day: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell, directed by Phil Mulloy, broadcast. Falklands War. Alan Bleasdale, The Boys from the Blackstuff. Stephen Lowe’s stage adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Famine in Ethiopia. Gorbachev calls for glasnost and perestroika. Anglo-Irish Agreement. Berlin Wall falls; collapse of Communist Eastern Europe begins. Nelson Mandela freed. Collapse of Soviet Union. South Africa repeals Apartheid laws. Gulf War. Manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, now held at London Metropolitan University, professionally conserved and microfilmed. Mandela elected president of South Africa.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

A great accumulation of evidence points to the correlation between chronic diseases and affluence, from grand-scale comparisons of the gross national product of entire countries, to contrasts between socio-economic groups living in the same local area. In 1990, the population of Germany provided an elegant natural experiment into the impact of prosperity on allergies. After four decades apart, East and West Germany were reunifying following the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. These two states had much in common; they shared a location, a climate, and populations composed of the same racial groups. But whilst those living in West Germany had prospered, eventually catching up and keeping pace with the economic developments of the Western world, East Germans had existed in a state of suspended animation since the Second World War and were significantly poorer than their West German neighbours.


pages: 379 words: 113,656

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

But sudden social change can happen even when the individual stakes are much higher, as the citizens of Leipzig demonstrated over thirteen sensational weeks in 1989, when they took to the streets each Monday—at first in thousands, then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands—to protest their oppression under the communist regime of what was then East Germany. Although they are little remembered now, the Leipzig parades probably qualify as a true turning point in history. Not only did they succeed in toppling the East German Socialist Party, but also they led to the fall, only three weeks later, of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the reunification of Germany. Along with so many everyday revolutionaries before them, the Leipzig marchers demonstrated that cooperative unselfish behavior can emerge spontaneously among ordinary people, even when the potential costs—imprisonment, physical harm, and possibly death—are extraordinary.


pages: 350 words: 112,234

Korea by Simon Winchester

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, life extension, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, union organizing

I spent much of my remaining time with the Swedish Ambassador, a comfortable-looking man with little to do and few people to speak to, but a man who was not nearly as lonely as his diplomatic colleague from Ethiopia, who had been in the country for nine years, had had no contact with his Ministry in Addis Ababa for the previous four and had no idea if he was still employed as Ambassador or not and was fast running out of money. He had a bicycle, but the week I was there it was stolen, adding to his woes. He did, however, take me to the former East German embassy—the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the place was empty—and we speculated together on what unlovely happenings had marked the history of this grey bunker of concrete, where two of the world’s nastiest regimes were wont to commune on how they might best wreak havoc on the unsuspecting in the outside world. The third time I went it was in the company of a BBC man who was shooting a film, surreptitiously.


pages: 423 words: 115,336

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Had they known the President and the military were drafting a detailed contingency plan for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, their fears would probably have deepened. As it happened, the Soviets added to the crisis by ordering East Germany to seal off their sector of Berlin on August 13; construction of der Mauer, the Berlin Wall, began within days. Requests for shelter information inundated Washington. Concerned citizens filed into church basements to listen to civil defense speakers, and manufacturers such as the Peace-O-Mind Shelter Co. of Stephenville, Tex., rushed to offer affordable kits.9 Shelter fever finally caught up with Congress, which appropriated $207.6 million for Kennedy’s shelter program.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

.* The U.S. military, Barnett was basically saying, wanted bellum: a straightforward fight against an enemy whose soldiers wore uniforms and had regular military formations. What it was engaged in, however, was guerra, the thankless, ambivalent task of playing globo-cop. And it was not equipped to handle the latter. Had the Berlin Wall never come down, Barnett probably would probably have made a career as a Kremlinologist, counting ICBM payloads in advance of arms control talks with the Soviets. But his timing was off: He graduated from Harvard University’s Soviet area studies program in 1986, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began accidentally dismantling the Soviet system through perestroika and glasnost.


pages: 361 words: 111,500

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, indoor plumbing, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, tech worker, Transnistria, union organizing

This is offset, slightly, by the housecoat she is wearing, an unfortunate collage of bright colors and floral prints. Russian by birth, Luba came to Moldova decades ago, one of the millions of Russians who fanned out throughout the Soviet Union, determined to spread Russian good cheer. Life was sweet. Until the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and so did Luba’s life. Now she is reduced to scrimping for food and renting out her spare bedroom to a neurotic American on some crazy search for happiness. The wheels of history can be cruel. Luba’s English consists entirely of the words “no” and “feevty-feevty,” the latter of which she invariably accompanies with a seesawing of her palm.


pages: 382 words: 116,351

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Tagboard now became the most classified project at the Skunk Works, even more secret than the Blackbird airplanes being assembled. So Kelly decided to wall off a section of the huge assembly building housing Blackbird, which already was as guarded as Fort Knox, to accommodate the new drone project. To get inside that walled-off section required special access passes and the shop workers immediately dubbed it Berlin Wall West. Unfortunately, I found myself spending more time inside that walled section than I had ever anticipated. But the technical problems were formidable, especially the attempt to launch a piggybacked drone from a mothership launch platform flying at three times the speed of sound. The drone would be sitting toward the top rear of the fuselage on a pylon.


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

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

Finally, after an interim of United Front coalitions (1996–8), the Hindu Nationalist BJP regime (from 1998 to 2004) represented new strategies of managing coalitions based on regional and other interests within, as well as a newly assertive presence, economic, cultural, and military, in the world outside. Democratic India in the nineties 273 i n t e n s i fi c at i o n o f c o n fl i c t, 1 9 8 9 – 1 9 9 2 The year 1989, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, was one of momentous change worldwide. In India too it inaugurated a new era. Though the Congress, battered and bruised, could and did win elections in subsequent years, its defeat in 1989 put an end not only to the direct rule of India by the Nehru family, but as well to the assumption that that party, with its long nationalist history, could appropriately claim to somehow represent India in itself, and so alone possessed a legitimate right to rule the country.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

The national accounts - which provide a statistical picture of the size, composition and direction of an economy - began to include the financial sector in their calculations of GDP, the total value of the goods and services produced by the economy in question.6 This change in accounting coincided with the deregulation of the financial sector which, among other things, relaxed controls on how much banks could lend, the interest rates they could charge and the products they could sell. Together, these changes fundamentally altered how the financial sector behaved, and increased its influence on the ‘real' economy. No longer was finance seen as a staid career. Instead, it became a fast track for smart people to make a great deal of money. Indeed, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, some of the cleverest scientists in Eastern Europe ended up going to work for Wall Street. The industry expanded, grew more confident. It openly lobbied to advance its interests, claiming that finance was critical for wealth creation. Today the issue is not just the size of the financial sector, and how it has outpaced the growth of the non-financial economy (e.g. industry), but its effect on the behaviour of the rest of the economy, large parts of which have been ‘financialized'.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

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

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

The Czechs had the opposite experience, enduring the strictest Communist government outside that of East Germany—thoroughly corrupt and incompetent—and saw their standard of living fall from one of the highest in the world in the 1920s to a state of gray stagnation. The Poles, meanwhile, were somewhere in between. When the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989, the Czechs drove the Communists out of politics or any position of real responsibility, and along with the Poles leaped to embrace Europe and the West, becoming star pupils not only of the European Union but also of the IMF and the World Bank, which preached much the same mix of market freedom and budget discipline.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

Constructive ones, Bob." Harriet shakes her head disapprovingly. Boris just sits there, being Boris. (Boris is one of Angleton's sinister gofers; I think in a previous incarnation he used to ice enemies of the state for the Okhrana, or maybe served coffee for Beria. Now he just imitates the Berlin Wall during internal enquiries.) Andy taps his fingers on the desk. "Why don't we make him a job offer?" I ask. Harriet looks away: she's my line manager--nominally--and she wants to make it clear that this suggestion does not come with her approval. "It's like--" I shrug, trying to figure out a pitch.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” Sociology 47, no. 2 (2013), 219–50. 4 Michael Hout, “Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), 379–400, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102503. 5 Michael Hout, private correspondence. 6 Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (2016), 203–232. 7 David Bailey, Caroline Chapain, and Alex de Ruyter, “Employment Outcomes and Plant Closures in a Post-Industrial City: An Analysis of the Labour Market Status of MG Rover Workers Three Years On,” Urban Studies 49, no. 7 (2011), 1595–1612. 8 Tara Tiger Brown, “The Death of Shop Class and America’s Skilled Workforce,” Forbes, May 30, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/05/30/the-death-of-shop-class-and-americas-high-skilled-workforce/#7ba6e3a0541f. 9 Conversation with the author. 10 See, for example, Office for National Statistics, Construction Statistics, Great Britain: 2017. 11 “Self-Employment Jobs by Industry,” Office for National Statistics. 12 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-apprenticeships. 13 https://www.citb.co.uk/documents/research/tns-2016-2017_final%2020-10-17.pdf. 14 “Migrant Labour Force Within the Construction Industry,” Office for National Statistics, June 2018. 15 “Employer Skills Survey 2017: UK Finding,” Department for Education, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employer-skills-survey-2017-uk-report. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Educating for the Modern World, CBI/Pearson, 2018, 16–17. 19 Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The US Is Experiencing a Widespread Worker Shortage.


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

China is the most obvious example of how, over the next century, big ideas will disperse around the world, no longer concentrated but rather drawing on the deep well of humanity everywhere. Several events have been key to this Sino-oriented transition. The Green Revolution fed the world and, after the Great Famine, Chinese peasants among them. Deng Xiaoping's reforms (which were in truth often bottom up) turned the axis of history. The Berlin Wall fell and the world was brought into one economic system just as the Internet stitched it together in a single information-rich communications superstructure. The results are readily apparent. In 1990, 60 per cent of global trade was between rich countries, while that between developing countries was just 6 per cent.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

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

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

“Doctors actually told my mom that she should abort me because of how old she was,” he said. His father was an alcoholic who drank copious amounts of beer every day. “It wasn’t like that cheap and weak U.S. beer,” Fabian said. “It was proper German beer.” The Communist regime guaranteed jobs for everyone, and Fabian’s father worked as a poultry trader. When the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunified, he lost his job. Fabian’s mother cleaned public toilets until she got cancer and received a pension. They lived in a working-class suburb of Rostock, a port city on the Baltic Sea notorious for anti-immigrant riots; as a child, Fabian saw neo-Nazi youth groups roaming the streets at night.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

They revolved almost entirely around the decades-long power struggle between Washington, D.C., and the Kremlin in Moscow. Around the time I graduated from college, the entire edifice of the Cold War abruptly dissolved into nothingness. In late 1989 Soviet-aligned officials1 in East Germany announced that the Berlin Wall—an eighty-seven-mile-long wall encircling West Berlin and one of the most potent symbols of the Cold War—would be torn down. We watched on television, the night the news came out, as thousands of ecstatic young people stormed the wall en masse for an impromptu, all-night dance party atop it. A few months later there was dancing in the streets again when the president of South Africa released the revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela from a twenty-seven-year imprisonment, ushering in the end of the harsh system of racial segregation known as apartheid.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

On the day when two Russian sergeants from Zhukov’s army planted a red banner atop the nearby Reichstag, its ruins received a red-and-white pennant from soldiers of the 1st Polish Army fighting under Koniev. In 1953, it towered over the fatal protest march of East German workers. From August 1961 until November 1989, it formed the captive centrepiece of The Berlin Wall. Across the centuries, the Auriga has been seen as an unwitting weathercock of the political climate. In 1807 it was carried off to Paris. Restored in 1814, it was re-erected with the Chariot facing west. In 1945 it was destroyed only to be replaced in 1953 with new sculptures cast from the original moulds.

Its rigid ideological conformism and excessive pro-Sovietism were fostered by the Stasi, a security apparatus of fearful reputation. It was blighted by the continuing division of Berlin, by the presence of nearly 40 divisions of Soviet occupation troops, above all by the steady exodus of its citizens. On 13 August 1961 all the crossings between East and West Berlin were sealed. For the next 28 years the Berlin Wall turned the DDR into a cage, the most visible symbol of communist oppression in Europe. All thoughts of a united Germany were dropped in favour of a theory that East Germany was inhabited by a separate nation with separate traditions. Great efforts were made to force the pace of heavy industrialization, and to win international recognition through massive state sponsorship of Olympic sport.

In East Berlin, his overtures could not be resisted. Within three years, he had forged a German-Soviet Treaty of Co-operation (1970), a German-Polish Treaty (1970) which drew the sting of Germany’s lost territories, and in 1973 a treaty of mutual recognition with the DDR. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were not breached; indeed, they were given a new lease of life. The German problem had not been solved; but it had been fixed in a stable framework of minimal intercourse. Brandt’s conservative opponents accused him of giving away Germany’s birthright. ‘One cannot give away something which has already been gambled away,’ was his reply.


pages: 392 words: 122,282

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Columbine, friendly fire, oil shale / tar sands, time dilation, working poor

Yet if the dominant mythology that war turns on a generation’s loss of innocence—young men reared on Davy Crockett waking up to their government’s deceits while fighting in Southeast Asian jungles; the nation falling from the grace of Camelot to the shame of Watergate—these young men entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation. This is, after all, the generation that first learned of the significance of the presidency not through an inspiring speech at the Berlin Wall but through a national obsession with semen stains and a White House blow job. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover that they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

These efforts by public intellectuals to make sense of the digital revolution, more than anything else, define how Americans—including scholars, concerned citizens, activists, journalists, and policy makers—view the Internet and lay out what many of the relevant issues are. It is a discussion I wish to join. Robin Mansell has analyzed this Internet literature as falling into two broad camps, the “celebrants” and the “skeptics.” Both camps continue to thrive, though the context and issues have changed. Some observers have been in both camps; there is no Berlin Wall dividing the two sides. It is a schema that captures two distinct frames of mind as much as two distinct sets of individuals, although there are some individuals who fall squarely, even defiantly, in one of the two camps. I have been influenced by both celebrants and skeptics but believe each position is ultimately unsatisfactory and puts us on a dead-end street.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

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

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

By the end of the next quarter-century, it was slated to be twice the size of the U.S. economy. But ideologies are often more influential than evidence. Free-market economists seldom looked at the success of the managed-market economies of East Asia. They preferred to talk about the failures of the Soviet Union, which eschewed the use of the market altogether. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, it seemed that free markets had triumphed. Though this was the wrong lesson to be drawn, the United States used its sway as the sole remaining superpower to advance its economic interests—or, more accurately, to advance the interests of its large and powerful corporations.


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

The insurance companies receive a fixed return on their investment but do not share in profits or management and have no voting rights (O, C). The firm also creates a holding company, Goldman Sachs Group (technically not subject to NYSE capital requirements), and spins off several subsidiaries (R, C). The Berlin wall falls, igniting global expansion for American businesses (C, O). 1990: Bob Rubin and Steve Friedman take charge as co-senior partners and co-chairs of the management committee, expanding global operations and seeking other opportunities for growth, including proprietary trading (O, C). They make partners’ compensation more dependent on performance than on tenure, and they initiate the firm’s first lateral hiring initiatives (O, C).


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

These simple words outlined the concept of “collective defense,” which created the most successful alliance in history. This “All for one, one for all” approach to sharing risk and response allowed the United States and its allies to stand together, taking them from the start of the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond, including their collective response to the 9/11 attacks on the United States and subsequent deployment half a world away to Afghanistan. But in April 2007, NATO and its collective defense ideals faced a twenty-first-century test. A new alliance member, Estonia, was one of Europe’s most wired states.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

Founded by the German hacker luminary Wau Holland in 1981, the Hamburg – and Berlin-based nonprofit had been demonstrating the insecurity of public computer systems as early as 1984, when its hackers used the home terminal system created by the German postal system to transfer the equivalent of $50,000 from a bank to the CCC’s accounts. (The money was given back in a public ceremony the next day.) With a true surveillance state looming just over the Berlin Wall, privacy, antiauthoritarianism, and the need for strong crypto had been steeped into the group’s core. Almost exactly a year after his father’s death, Appelbaum flew to Berlin to attend the CCC’s annual Chaos Communication Congress. The topic of his talk was the same problem that had troubled Julian Assange years earlier, one central to any activist who believes in the power of cryptography: how to keep encrypted data encrypted, even when authorities are standing over the user, rubber hose in hand, demanding the key.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. When I was 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge).


pages: 755 words: 121,290

Statistics hacks by Bruce Frey

Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, G4S, game design, Hacker Ethic, index card, Linda problem, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, p-value, place-making, reshoring, RFID, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes

Predict the Length of a Lifetime Many of us instinctively trust that things that have been around a long time are likely to be around a lot longer, and things that haven't, aren't. The formalization of this heuristic is known as Gott's Principle, and the math is easy to do. Physicist J. Richard Gott III has so far correctly predicted when the Berlin Wall would fall and calculated the duration of 44 Broadway shows.1 Controversially, he has predicted that the human race will probably exist between 5,100 and 7.8 million more years, but no longer. He argues that this is a good reason to create self-sustaining space colonies: if the human race puts some eggs in other nests, we might extend the life span of our species in case of an asteroid strike or nuclear war on the home planet.2 Gott believes that his simple calculations can be extended to almost anything at all, within certain parameters.


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Doing so “will enable us to continue to engage honestly with the most progressive Arabs and Muslims on a reform agenda.”31 Friedman’s wall ignores the reality of the integrated global energy market—a market in which even the Saudis and Iranians are energy importers. Further, Friedman, a jet-setting journalist who prides himself on his worldly travels and Rolodex of famous friends, appears remarkably uninformed about the lousy history of walls. The Berlin Wall stood for almost 30 years as a symbol of the Cold War until it was undermined by the crumbling Soviet economy and a mass movement of freedom-minded Poles and Germans. During the early months of World War II, the Maginot Line was supposed to protect France from Germany. But the French forgot to tell the Nazis that they weren’t allowed to drive their tanks around the wall and through the Ardennes.


pages: 366 words: 119,981

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, Great Leap Forward, Kitchen Debate, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

Years later, Soviet space experts revealed that Nikita Khrushchev himself set the date for Titov’s flight, August 6, 1961. He was now using space as a full-strength political and propaganda weapon. Just as the international acclaim for Titov reached its peak, Khrushchev gave the nod to East Germany. That day they began building the Berlin Wall. In the face of the Soviet Union’s demonstrated mastery of space, and its vaunted (though now quietly questioned) lead in military missiles, the West did nothing but lodge complaints. It was the third blow in international relations to Jack Kennedy in just seven months in office—first Gagarin, then the Bay of Pigs, and now the Wall.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

All of this was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and worldwide market reforms in the nineties. If the joke under the Soviet Union was “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us,” the new neoliberal age was supposed to be all about efficiency. But if patterns of employment are anything to go by, this seems to be exactly the opposite of what actually happened after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. So part of the reason no one has noticed is that people simply refused to believe that capitalism could produce such results—even if that meant writing off their own experiences or those of their friends and family as somehow anomalous. Another reason the phenomenon has been able to sail past people’s heads is that we have developed a way of talking about changes in the nature of employment that seems to explain a lot of what we see and hear happening around us in this regard, but is, in fact, profoundly deceptive.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

In the hallways and on the street outside Nuriye’s apartment, people who had scuttled past each other for years stopped and looked at each other. They had a good reason to understand where Nuriye was coming from. All over Berlin, rents were rising—but people in this neighborhood were facing especially steep increases because of a historical accident. When the Berlin Wall was built in a rush in 1961, cutting the city in half, the route of the wall was drawn pretty arbitrarily, with some strange zigzags—and this area, Kotti, ended up as the part of West Berlin that jutted into East Berlin like a tooth. That meant it was the front line: if the Soviets invaded, it would be taken first.


pages: 400 words: 121,378

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor by Clinton Romesha

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, Skype, WikiLeaks

The revolt they kicked off inspired other parts of the country to join the rebellion, which bled the Russians for the better part of a decade until the last Red Army units finally limped back across the northern border in the winter of 1989. Within a few months a series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, triggered in part by the disaster that the Russians had endured in Afghanistan, would culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. If you’re not from this part of the world, you should think very carefully before you decide to fuck with the people of Nuristan. When the US government decided to fling itself into Afghanistan following the attacks of 9/11, it encountered a problem in the eastern part of the country that would have made every Russian commander who had served time in the region back in the 1970s nod in recognition.


pages: 416 words: 121,024

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

My mother had diabetes, so we always had a live-in nanny. “My blood sugar is low,” my mom would say when my sister and I had one of our knock-down fights. Then she’d go back down the very long, skinny hall to her bedroom and shut the door. When I was in nursery school, the nannies were named things like Anka, Margaret, and Anna. Then the Berlin Wall came down, and I guess all the Eastern European girls went home. After that, our nannies were from Iowa: Ruth, Debbie, Karen, and Amy. They got us ready for school while my mom sat with her coffee and her insulin, watching Katie Couric and her gleamy crisscrossed legs on the Today show. My mom never flinched when she pricked her finger.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

This was the backdrop to the swell of immigrants trying to get into Germany in 2015, many but far from all fleeing from the Syrian civil war. Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted ‘wir schaffen es’–‘we can cope’, ‘we can get it done’–but the backlash from a large number of her citizens suggests that there is far from a consensus on this matter. In addition to arrivals from the south, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and expansion of the EU there has been a mass movement of people within Europe, from east to west. As in the US, these shifts have not only changed the ethnic composition but have been a major component in fuelling new political forces in reaction, whether UKIP and the Brexit vote in the UK, the Front National in France or Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Telling the life story of 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, who had voted for him that day in Atlanta, Obama maintained that "unyielding hope" had triumphed over long odds again and again in the past. When Ms. Cooper was born in 1902, Obama said, someone like her could not vote because of both her sex and her skin color. But she lived to see many supposedly impossible things come to pass: women and African Americans winning the right to vote, a man walking on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Yes we can," Obama had said during his campaign, urging Americans to believe in their ability to come together and change their country. Now unyielding hope had made a man of mixed race and humble origins the nation's forty-fourth president, and he hoped it would continue to guide America through the undoubted difficulties ahead.


pages: 1,203 words: 124,556

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

MyCiTi bus routes converge at Adderley and Civic Centre. AShared taxi Plenty of these stop on Strand and Long Sts. ATrain Cape Metro Rail trains and long-distance buses terminate at Cape Town Train Station. Lonely Planet’s Top Tip At the south end of St George’s Mall near a slab of the Berlin Wall, the EarthFair Food Market (www.earthfairmarket.co.za; h11am-3pm Thu) is a good place to buy artisan food products or grab a healthy lunch; if it’s raining the market moves inside Mandela Rhodes Place. Best Places to Eat A Chef's Warehouse & Canteen A Bombay Brasserie A Hemelhuijs A Africa Café A Plant Best Places to Drink A Publik A Weinhaus + Biergarten A Honest Chocolate Cafe A Beerhouse A Orphanage Best Places to Shop A Africa Nova A Streetwires A Monkeybiz A South African Market A Luvey 'n Rose TOP SIGHT Castle of Good Hope Less than a century ago, the sea lapped up to the bluestone walls of the Castle of Good Hope.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

When civil war broke out following independence from Portugal in 1975, oil revenues sustained the Communist government of the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA) against the Western-backed rebels of Unita. Vast new oil finds off the coast in the 1990s raised the stakes both for the warring factions and their foreign allies. Although the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, peace came to Angola only in 2002, with the death of Jonas Savimbi, Unita’s leader. By then some five hundred thousand people had died. The MPLA found that the oil-fired machine it had built to power its war effort could be put to other uses. ‘When the MPLA dropped its Marxist garb at the beginning of the 1990s,’ writes Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an authority on Angola, ‘the ruling elite enthusiastically converted to crony capitalism.’2 The court of the president – a few hundred families known as the Futungo, after Futungo de Belas, the old presidential palace – embarked on ‘the privatization of power’.


pages: 448 words: 124,391

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, housing justice, Seymour Hersh

“Yeah, Haldeman, John Haldeman,” he said. Bernstein ended the conversation and gave a thumbs-up signal to Woodward. Then it came to him that the agent had said John, not Bob, Haldeman. At times, it seemed that everyone in Washington mixed up Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—“the German shepherds,” “the Prussians,” “the Berlin Wall,” as they were called. The reporters could not let the confusion persist, however. Bernstein called the agent back. “Yeah, Haldeman, Bob Haldeman,” he replied. “I can never remember first names.” Deep Throat, Sloan, the FBI agent. The reporters concluded they had the story firmly in hand, finally.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Meanwhile, neoconservative pundits like Niall Ferguson and Charles Krauthammer were encouraging him to do precisely that: to “make the transition from informal to formal empire” by acknowledging America’s actual role in the world and accepting the reality that “political globalization is a fancy word for imperialism.”1 Had the post-postwar world—the new order emerging since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989—turned full circle to a new Age of Empire? The victory of the Allies in 1945, confirming the right of peoples to self-determination in their Atlantic Charter declaration, seemed to signal the end for the world’s colonial empires. Colonized peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East had seen the armies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands defeated in 1940-41, and knew that the European imperial powers now had neither the military nor the financial resources to enforce their rule for long.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Mills saw these entities in rough equipoise in their Cold War setting, each with its own independent base of power (that is, the capacity to force others to do what they would not be inclined to do otherwise). Mills’s division has been more and less relevant over 216 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY the course of the twentieth century; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, the military’s domestic power waned, while 9/11 brought with it the resurgence of a defense/intelligence/ policing complex. But his concept continues to capture attention and interest.96 Some social theorists have adjusted Mills’s typology to take into account the rise of other important actors, such as the media.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Soviet scientists were masters at the business of collecting obscure Central Asian crop varieties. But many of their collections have languished since the Russians went home after 1989. And, like your grandfather’s stamp collection, the fate of the plant collections is in doubt because nobody realizes their value. The loss of these plants could prove another casualty of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The future of the apple, for instance, may now hang in the balance. Britain, famously, has more than 2,000 apple varieties, but few are now grown commercially and most of the rest survive only on one site, in the national fruit collection at Brogdale in Kent. But the greatest genetic resource of the apple is far away in the Tien Shen mountains of Kazakhstan, where wild apple woods still grow.


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

In Pickering in the Yorkshire Dales, a community-led project based on the same principles of naturalistic flood management has proved just as effective. Stuck at the bottom of a steep gorge draining much of the North Yorks Moors, Pickering was flooded four times between 1999 and 2007, with the last disaster causing £7 million in damage. The solution, the local authorities insisted, was to build a £20 million concrete wall – a Berlin Wall of sorts – right through the lovely old town centre to keep the water in the river. None of the inhabitants, understandably, were enamoured of the idea so, instead, they researched a plan to slow the flow of the water from the hills and persuaded the Environment Agency, Forestry Commission and DEFRA to support them.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

But even ten times is not enough to get inside the head of the director, the chairman explained. And that should be the ultimate goal of the viewer who wants to truly understand the film. “Whenever [Lee] said something, he had a message,” said Hwang. In 1991 the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And Lee realized, in the isolation of his home, that Samsung was failing to keep up with the emerging global boom. “Even in such a situation, there was no sense of urgency at Samsung,” Lee II wrote. The company was floundering under the mistaken belief that Samsung was number one in its field.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

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

‘The people have spoken. Bastards.’ Another suggested they should have bet on Labour’s surge because then ‘at least you’d get something good from the disappointment’. One colleague had an unkind metaphor for the Southsiders: it must have been like accidentally finding yourself in Stasi HQ when the Berlin Wall fell. ‘They were like, everything I thought about the world turned out to be horribly wrong.’ The initial outburst of joy soon subsided to a nervous caution. James Mills, John McDonnell’s fast-talking press aide, told the shadow chancellor to wait until 1 a.m. before he accepted the exit poll was right, pointing out it had been wrong two years earlier.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

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

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

Friedman’s best-selling books had been declared subversive under the fierce communist assault upon freedom of thought, but being forbidden only made their free-enterprise message more attractive. Readership behind the Iron Curtain had boomed. Friedman had Lenin on the run. When the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the last gasp of the oppressive Marxist-Leninist experiment in purging markets, Friedman found himself a hero of the capitalist-loving counterrevolutionaries who took charge. When he had toured Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in the mid-eighties, while exploring whether to update the Free to Choose series, he was warmly welcomed as a seer.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

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

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

“This is another type of warfare,” Kennedy said, “new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression.” But for all of Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric, for all the talent he gathered around him, the first months of his administration went badly: the president failed to call off a CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba that ended in disaster; he was unable to keep Khrushchev from building the Berlin Wall; and he was harshly criticized when, rather than commit U.S. forces to fight communist guerrillas in the jungles of Laos, as ex-President Eisenhower had urged him to do, he had instead agreed to enter negotiations aimed at “neutralizing” that kingdom. “There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year and survive politically,” he told a friend in the spring of 1961.

., 8.1 Bay of Pigs invasion, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1 BBC, 7.1, 9.1 Beatles Beaupré, Lester, 8.1, 8.2 Beckwith, Charles “Chargin’ Charlie,” 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1 Bedworth, Gifford Beech, Keyes Beijing Beilke, Oax Bellow, Saul Ben Cat Ben Hai River Ben Suc, 4.1, 4.2 Ben Tre, 6.1, 6.2 Ben Tuong Berlin, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Berlin Wall Bernstein, Carl Biberman, Nancy Bidault, Georges Biden, Joseph Bien Hoa, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1, 10.1 Bien Hoa Air Base, 1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1 Bien Hoa prison camp Bien Hoa Province Bigart, Homer, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Binh Dinh, 4.1, 9.1 Operation Masher/White Wing in, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 Binh Duong Province Binh Gia, battle of, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 4.1, 6.1, 10.1 Binh Long Province, 9.1, 9.2 Binh Xuyen, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1 Black Horse Base Camp Black Panthers, 8.1, 8.2 Black Power movement, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 Blackstone Rangers Blankenship, Okey Blue Ridge, USS boat people, 10.1, 10.2, epl.1 bodies, identification of, 5.1, 5.2 body counts, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2 emphasis on, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1 inflation of, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 Bolshevik revolution, 1.1, 9.1 Bong Son, 4.1, 4.2 Bong Son Plain “Border Battles,” 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 Borrelli, John, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 Boston, Mass., 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1 Boston Globe, 7.1, 9.1 Bouncing Betty mine Bower, Kevin Bradley, Omar, 3.1, 6.1 Brady, Philip, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2 Brennan, Peter J., 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 Breslin, Jimmy, 3.1, 3.2, 9.1 Brewster, Kingman Brezhnev, Leonid Briggs Field Brinkley, David, 5.1, 8.1 Brinks Hotel bombing, 3.1, 3.2 British Indian Army Broder, David Bronze Star, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2 Brookings Institution Brooklyn College Browne, Malcolm, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 4.1 Brown, Sam, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 Brown University “Brown Water Navy,” Bryant, James Buchanan, Pat Buc Pho Buddha, 2.1, 2.2 Buddhism, Buddhists, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1, 10.1 Catholic clashes with, 3.1, 3.2 Diem regime and, 2.1, 2.2, 2.6, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1 Ky regime and, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 self-immolation by, 2.1, 2.2, 4.1 “Struggle Movement” of, 4.1, 4.2 Bu Gia Mop Bui Diem, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 3.1, 4.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2 Bui Dinh Dam, 2.1, 2.2 Bui Hong Ha Buis, Dale Bui Tin, 10.1, 10.2 Bulge, Battle of the, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2 Bunche, Ralph Bundy, McGeorge, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 Bundy, William, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 Bunker, Ellsworth, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 7.10, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 Burke, Edmund Burma, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 3.1 Busby, Horace Bush, George W.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The Gorbachev Doctrine, permitting Eastern bloc nations control over their internal affairs, ruled out further Soviet military intervention to preserve the Soviet empire. During 1989, the “Year of Miracles,” one after another of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact allies broke with Moscow, replacing their ruling communist parties with pro-Western regimes. The November 9, 1989, opening of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and dramatically confirmed the demise of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Two months later, the Warsaw Pact was dismantled. East Germany folded into West Germany. Anticommunist shockwaves rippled eastward, gradually seeping into the Soviet Union itself. American diplomatic and intelligence reports on Afghanistan, copied to me in our Beijing embassy, bristled with optimistic projections about a Mujahidin victory after the Soviet withdrawal.

Baba, Qari Baba, Rahman Babar, Bashir Babar, Nasrullah Bacha Seqao (Habibullah Kalakani) Badakhshi, Tahir Badeeb, Ahmed Baheer, Ghariat Baker, James A. Baluch tribes(map) Bamian Buddhas, destruction of the Bandar al-Sultan, Prince Bangladesh War Barakzai tribe (chart) Baryalai, Mahmoud Bashir, Mohammed Bauguess, Larry Bearden, Milton Beg, Mirza Aslam Beilenson, Anthony Bellew, H. W. Bergen, Peter Berlev, Nikolai Berlin Wall, opening of the Bessmertnykh, Alexander Bhutto, Benazir (table) (fig.) Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali Biden, Joseph “Bill,” bin Baz, Chief Mufti bin Laden, Osama and the assassination of Masood coordinating with the ISI (fig.) escape of death of focus on apprehending/killing foothold established by (map) main goals of as a major fundraiser for the anti-Soviet jihad and nuclear weapons Obama’s renewed focus on Pakistan holding back evidence on post-9/11 focus on religious justification used by retreat of return of and the Saudi government and the unholy alliance U.S. intelligence shortfalls involving used as a bargaining chip by Pakistan See also al-Qaeda Bipartisan unity, maintaining, on Pakistani policy Black, Cofer Blair, Denis “Blind Sheikh.”


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

“No more frontiers in your America, David, my friend! Today it’s all lawyers and bureaucrats and ‘social impact statements’.…” Andrei sneered and slapped his fork on the tabletop. “Huge prison walls of paperwork to crush the life and hope from modern pioneers! Just as ugly, just such a crime, as the old Berlin Wall, David. Only more clever, with better public relations.” He glanced at Laura, sidelong. “Scientists and engineers, and architects, too, yes—we brothers, David, who do the world’s true work—where is our freedom? Where, eh?” Andrei paused, tossing his head to flick back a loose wing of blond hair.


pages: 589 words: 128,484

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve by Roger Lowenstein

bank run, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, corporate governance, fiat currency, financial independence, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Ida Tarbell, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, off-the-grid, old-boy network, quantitative easing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair, walking around money

.* And owing to the lack of confidence in American markets, short-term interest rates were higher and more volatile than they were in the United Kingdom (this amounted to a penalty paid by American businesses and other borrowers). Nor was the dollar used in settling international balances. To the mortification of financiers such as Vanderlip and Schiff, merchants in Philadelphia buying goods in China or South America had to settle their transactions in Paris, London, or Berlin. Wall Street was tired of paying tribute. And as long as the United States was visited by periodic panics and money stringencies, there was little chance that the dollar would overtake the pound as an international currency. Vanderlip, who was forty-one when he set to writing the chamber of commerce report, quietly handsome with narrow eyes behind thin spectacles, had no doubt that this state of affairs could be rectified if the government were to assume a more active role.


pages: 453 words: 142,717

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

The Mercury spacecraft sank and Gus almost drowned. Naturally, the Soviets trumped us again, and Cosmonaut Gherman Titov orbited the Earth seventeen times in a day-long mission. Our answer was to send up another chimp, Enos, who made it into orbit. As I settled into schoolwork, the Cold War whirlwind intensified. The Communists built the Berlin Wall to divide Germany and American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie. In Asia, where the Hanna-Maru was heading, General Maxwell Taylor asked that America send a task force of 8,000 men to Vietnam. I felt a tug of guilt. I was still a Navy attack pilot, and things were really heating up.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

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

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

Five days before the thwarted invasion, the Soviets had sent the first human into orbit, pulling the rug out from under Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric about besting them in the space race. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was testing him in every way he could, keeping him on the ropes, a pattern that would continue all year long and include the building of both the Berlin Wall and the nuclear missile sites that resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Back on his heels, his credibility on the line, Kennedy looked weak and outclassed. He needed a way to turn the political boxing match around and assert his leadership. He turned to the Moon—not for science’s sake, but to use science to beat Khrushchev.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Punk generated eccentric hairstyles, tattoos, boots and leather outfits, drug habits, and hard-core music that oozed being against stuff. Yet fashion trumped direct action. Punk was aesthetic anarchy. When computers and networks were added to the mix, cyberpunk was born. The 1990s were a time of extraordinary hope. The decade came barging right through Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall crashing down in the background. The end of the Cold War and the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union released an intoxicating sense of optimism, at least in the West. Washington debated the “end of history,” with liberal market economies coming out triumphant. In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, perhaps America’s shortest and most successful ground war operation to date, the Pentagon overcame the mighty Iraqi army—and with it the lingering Vietnam hangover.


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

By the time I was working in a bookshop there eight years later, that style had fallen so out of favour that the entire structure had been clad in creamy, fibreglass Neo-Victoriana. Frumpy, functional Rosa Klebb had been given a makeover and emerged as flouncy, fairytale Princess Di. It was fascinating to watch the whole edifice regenerate around me, the future being tarted up as the past. The Whitgift Centre in 1971. © Ian Steel By 1993 the Berlin Wall had tumbled, and Croydon’s office centre in the east was looking decidedly frail too. Thatcherism’s great architectural legacy had been the Docklands, a vast new London business district of giant silver skyscrapers. It was built for the age of PCs, privatisation and the space shuttle, as East Croydon had been built for the Trimphone, devaluation and the Austin Maxi.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

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

Now consider the fate of England, “the peaceful experiment in socialism,” the example of a country that committed suicide by vote: there was no violence, no bloodshed, no terror, merely the throttling process of “democratically” imposed government controls—but observe the present cries about England’s “brain drain,” about the fact that the best and ablest men, particularly the scientists and engineers, are deserting England and running to whatever small remnant of freedom they can find anywhere in today’s world. Remember that the Berlin wall was erected to stop a similar “brain drain” from East Germany; remember that after forty-five years of a totally controlled economy, Soviet Russia, who possesses some of the best agricultural land in the world, is unable to feed her population and has to import wheat from semi-capitalist America; read East Minus West = Zero by Werner Keller, 51 for a graphic (and unrefuted) picture of the Soviet economy’s impotence—and then, judge the issue of freedom versus controls.


pages: 446 words: 138,827

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

The past seemed so dramatic. The wild course of history seemed to have tamed and leveled off in time for me to miss out on the action. My generation would enjoy a mild-mannered era, with little hubbub to record. Then the space shuttle blew up. Friends of mine made millions in a few years on Wall Street. The Berlin Wall was torn down and the Cold War ended. Crack destroyed many urban neighborhoods. South Africa ended apartheid. Friends went to fight in the Persian Gulf. An earthquake interrupted the World Series. Riots raged on the streets of L.A. The disabled were given protection from discrimination. Friends died of cancer and respiratory failure and suicide.


pages: 487 words: 139,297

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

Berlin Wall, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, technology bubble, transfer pricing, unemployed young men, working-age population, éminence grise

“That was misguided socialism.” Lastly, we have to understand the time warp that Kabila was in. For decades, he had set his compass to the cold war divide, preaching against the neocolonial domination of Africa by the United States. To people who met him in the early days of his presidency, it was as if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union had passed him by; he gave the impression of a revolutionary fossilized in the 1960s. He had come of age during the anti-western socialist rebellions that swept through Africa just after independence. The writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tsetung, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon lined his bookshelf; after he took power he continued to call his associates “comrade” (although, apparently none of them was allowed to reciprocate).22 To make matters worse, Kabila was saddled with questions about the massacre of Rwandan refugees.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Defectors steal in a society that has declared that stealing is wrong, but they also help slaves escape in a society where tolerating slavery is the norm. Defectors change as society changes; defection is in the eye of the beholder. Or, more specifically, it is in the eyes of everyone else. Someone who was a defector under the former East German government was no longer in that group after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But those who followed the societal norms of East Germany, like the Stasi, were—all of a sudden—viewed as defectors within the new united Germany. Figure 1: The Terms Used in the Book, and Their Relationships Criminals are defectors, obviously, but that answer is too facile. Everyone defects at least some of the time.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

He is also the rightful successor to Gandhi, Lincoln, de Gaulle, and Martin Luther King. His writings—The Third Stage of Imperialism, “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” and Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism—are landmarks in the history of ideas. His thinking inspired the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “In only a few decades in the late twentieth century,” said Warren Hamerman, in a speech at a 1990 Labor Committees conference, “the ideas generated by Lyndon LaRouche and our association, enriched by co-thinkers in every conceivable area of human knowledge and activity—from politics and physical economy to philosophy, natural law, the arts and sciences—have swept across the globe like seeds in a strong wind, and blossomed forth afresh from individuals on every continent on Earth.”


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

The result has been deep social anger and frustration at the results of the market economy, so much so as to call into question its very status and legitimacy. And that anger and frustration have come amid times of economic growth and booming markets; think what they might be in a serious recession. To make matters still worse, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 there was remarkable complacency across the political spectrum about the status of capitalism, especially in the UK and USA. History had supposedly ended. Since then, the centre-right has not found it necessary to make the case for the market economy in any serious way, let alone to develop the kind of systematic account of its strengths and weaknesses that might enable it to combat the spread of crony capitalism.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

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

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

Reagan had not effected a Republican realignment.54 The congressional races even demonstrated voter preference for shifting resources from defense to domestic social programs.55 FALTERING RECOVERY During the Bush years foreign policy successes initially overwhelmed a faltering economy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the rapid ending of the Cold War, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 satisfied. The first Gulf war, repelling Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991, demonstrated that high-tech American weapons were potent, but the glow of victory dimmed quickly. A desert triumph could not compete with industrial decline, Japanese competition, rising unemployment, and growing inequality.


pages: 306 words: 36,032

John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology) by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Ted Sorensen

Thus, “they would have learned its limitations, and from a military standpoint, it did have serious limitations. In short, by showing the Americans our Semyorka, we would have been giving away both our strength and revealing our weakness.”33 There the discussion on space cooperation ended. During the remainder of 1961, Cold War tensions were high and the Berlin Wall was erected; the outlook for any significant space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was correspondingly bleak. President Kennedy’s proposal to the Congress and the nation that the United States embark on an extremely ambitious space effort, with Project Apollo as its centerpiece, received widespread political support.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

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

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

There are many Marxists who condemn the brutality of Soviet Russia, claiming that Moscow has abandoned the teachings of Karl Marx. Does this mean that Marxism itself is absolved of responsibility for such standard communist horrors as the machine-gunning of young children who try to escape across the Berlin wall? Obviously, all that this suggests is that many Nazis and Marxists are blind to the essential nature of their own philosophies. Just as blind are those who claim that Libertarianism is compatible with laissez-faire capitalism, with morality, with reason, and with the requirements of human life.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

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

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

As “King of London,” Livingstone’s nascent environmentalism appeared in some areas but not others. Livingstone argued loud and long that low public-transit fares would keep people out of cars and reduce both congestion and pollution. He fought for more housing, but he opposed skyscrapers, especially Richard Rogers’s plans for a “Berlin Wall” of high-rise buildings on the south side of the Thames. At the same time, Prince Charles began to establish his public persona as a patron of sustainable agriculture and a foe of modernism. The Prince of Wales is also Duke of Cornwall, and his Cornish estates provided an opportunity to push for organic farming and reject the high yields of genetically modified food.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

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

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

They not only hold the future of Russia in their hands, but they tell us something important about democracy versus prosperity, which, in the West, we often assume go hand in hand. The late 1980s were heady days for Eastern Bloc democrats. The Polish Solidarity movement was having real, bilateral talks with its communist government; Hungary was instituting multiparty elections; and the East Germans were marching in the streets for the right to travel. Then the Berlin Wall came down, and the Communist Party ceded power in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. In 1990, East and West Germany rejoined, and finally the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Russians were hopeful. After seventy-five years of communist rule—and centuries of autocratic czars before that—a majority of Russians told the 1991 Pulse of Europe Survey that they thought their country should rely on a democratic government rather than a strong leader to solve the country’s problems.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

A few months later, he, along with some other Eastern bloc trade bait sitting in American jails, was exchanged for Anatoly Sharansky, who headed for Israel where he was received as a hero and commenced a new life as Natan (his Hebrew name) Sharansky. In contrast, when Zehe returned to East Germany, he found himself out of favor with the regime. When the GDR government fell and the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Zehe left Germany and resumed his academic career in Puebla. The unified Germany was no kinder to him than either the East Germans or the Americans had been. The precedent set by the Department of Justice, however, had legs. As tension between the West and Islamic radicalism began to grow in the increasingly contentious world that emerged after the collapse of Soviet Communism, the feds’ Zehe escapade proved a worrisome harbinger of things to come.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

In many cases enlistment was accomplished without the aid of conscription: in Australia, for example, conscription was enacted only in 1942. After the war, a baby boom was followed by yet more in-migration, mainly from Great Britain but also from China and a shattered Europe. After the baby booms faded away, the peak of acceleration was reached in 1989. Far away in Europe, the Berlin Wall was taken down and the Iron Curtain disappeared. In 2008, Kevin Rudd (the Australian prime minister) announced the closure of the controversial immigration detention facilities on Manus Island and in the tiny Pacific country of Nauru, as well as the processing of all future refugees on Christmas Island.28 But that is not the reason the acceleration ended that year; the numbers of refugees were simply too small to have made an impact.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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

The new Alabama bill sent to the governor that day made it illegal to remove any monument that had been in place for twenty years or more, which in effect meant that nobody could lay a hand on a single Confederate statue in Alabama. * * * —— An ocean away, in the former capital of the Third Reich, Nigel Dunkley, a former British officer and now a historian of Nazi Germany, drove along a curve of what is left of the Berlin Wall. He pointed to the neoclassical buildings of the old Weimar Republic that were for a time run by the Nazis and have been reclaimed since the reunification of Germany. We drew near the Brandenburg Gate, which survived the Allied bombing in the Second World War, and then reached a wide-open space in the very center of downtown.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

Mind you, with Father Jos aboard, nobody would even think fresh, much less get fresh. Spool forward: in September 1958 Ewan asked me to go to East Berlin to pick up a Leica camera for him. His play The Travellers was a hit there but the royalties had to be spent in East Germany. This was only a little more than a decade after the end of World War II. There was no Berlin Wall back then – you could go from forgetting to remembering by just getting on a train. West Berlin: a German Times Square. East Berlin: still war-torn but honest – huge photos of the concentration camps postered on and in public buildings. They carried one message: WE DID THIS. NEVER AGAIN. In 1957, I would turn down the opportunity of visiting the Kraków-Płaszów camp when I was in Poland, repulsed by the idea of viewing the loot from the millions who had been murdered there.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

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

The wall, East German authorities declared, would protect their citizens from the dangerous infection of decadent capitalist culture. For the next 28 years, East Germans worked, cooked dinner, and spent time with family and friends just like West Germans did. Some later claimed they were grateful to their leaders for keeping them safe. But they were also spied on by the Stasi and kept from leaving by the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, armed border guards, and a tightly controlled administration to ensure their civil obedience and economic servitude. On November 9th, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Europe’s largest nature reserve, and one of the longest wildlife corridors in the world, is the European Green Belt, a 7,000-kilometre network of parks and protected lands following the line of the Iron Curtain, which once separated Western Europe and the Soviet bloc. The Green Belt was first proposed by German conservationists in December 1989, just a month after the Berlin Wall fell; today, it stretches all the way from Finland to Greece. In places, old minefields still keep visitors on the paths, but the former ‘death strip’ is now a flourishing habitat and migration path for more than 600 species of rare and endangered birds, mammals, plants and insects. One day, the same might be true of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea, a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide strip of land that has been virtually untouched by humans for more than six decades and is now home to millions of migratory birds and flourishing plant species, as well as endangered animals such as Siberian musk deer, cranes, vultures, Asiatic black bears and a unique species of goat, the long-tailed goral.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

A Commentary on Ulrich Beck,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003): 35–48. 14. H. A. Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” Daedalus 97, no. 3 (1968): 888–924. 15. D. H. Chollet and J. Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11; The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (Public Affairs, 2008), 318. 16. Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference, March 25, 2021; www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/03/25/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference/. 17. “Fact Sheet: The American Jobs Plan, March 31, 2021,” www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/. 18.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Bernanke had argued in his 2004 speech that Japan was the exception, not the norm. But was it? In fact, a financial crisis engulfed Norway in the late 1980s and persisted into the early 1990s, when much of the banking system in both Finland and Sweden collapsed, a casualty of the collapse in Russian demand for Scandinavian goods after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, savings and loan associations saw their loans go bad as the real estate bubble popped. Upwards of 1,600 banks eventually went under, and although this banking crisis was not as severe as the recent global financial meltdown, it nonetheless led to a credit crunch, a painful recession in 1990-91, and significant fiscal costs of nearly $200 billion (in 2009 dollars).


pages: 373 words: 132,377

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

All I knew was that names like “pooftah” “poojabber,” “faggot,” “AIDS merchant” and “grim rapers” were what the cool kids were calling the not-cool kids. And I was desperate to be a cool kid in the same way that liquid gets into chalk. 1989 The world had a lot going on in 1989. My wife was born, spoiler alert. The year also saw the Berlin Wall torn down in jubilant scenes that sealed off a decade of Soviet collapse and thoroughly negated my project on East and West Germany.[*5] In local news, Australians watched Prime Minister Bob Hawke cry live on TV in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre and later offer asylum to 42,000 Chinese students.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

The center of Moh’s operation was still Taiwan, but wages were rapidly rising there, and Moh had had the chessboard savvy to quietly spread the work around East Asia, with plants now in ten countries. With annual sales of $500 million, Universal was now the industry’s fourth-largest company. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the red tiger would soon leap into capitalism’s fray. Over in Galax, John Bassett had left one enemy camp and had no idea he was about to be thrust into another. He was on his own now, charged with turning around a struggling and much smaller enterprise—and navigating a new minefield of family dynamics.


The Rough Guide to Cyprus (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Ford Model T, Google Earth, sustainable-tourism

< Back to The Troodos Mountains Alamy LEFKOSIA ROOFTOPS Lefkosia (South Nicosia) Ledra Street and around Pafos Gate and around East Lefkosia The suburbs Around Lefkosia Lefkosia (South Nicosia) The city of Lefkosia (still widely known as south Nicosia by locals) is by far the largest settlement on Cyprus, though by international standards it is still pretty small, with a total population, in the part controlled by the Government, of 246,400. Until 1974 Nicosia was the capital of the unified island; now the southern half, Lefkosia, forms the capital of the republic while the northern half, known as Lefkoşa, is the capital of the Turkish-occupied, self-styled TRNC – when the Berlin Wall fell, Nicosia became the last divided capital in the world. A political and financial centre, not just for the republic and the Eastern Mediterranean, but for the whole of the Middle East, Lefkosia is less dependent on tourism than anywhere else on the island. Yet there is still a great deal to see and do in the southern, republic-controlled half of the city, as well as in the Turkish-controlled northern half.


The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay

Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, haute couture, women in the workforce

In this sense, as a thirty-something KGB officer, Putin had a very much more pleasant life there than practically any of the citizens he passed on the streets. His one moment of serious alarm came in the autumn of 1989 with the breakdown of control across the German Democratic Republic that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Dresden, angry citizens were already turning their attentions to the Stasi main headquarters. Putin correctly divined that they would also be marching on the KGB villa, and it was he who went out alone to face the crowd, imploring them calmly, in German, not to proceed any further because there were snipers in position who would not hesitate to shoot them down.


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

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

From Bavaria he dispatched a goggle-eyed account of the bustling prosperity of the Munich Christmas Market, where “furs abound,” the cars were “spanking new,” and “the windows are chockfull of expensive goods”—“a sobering experience for the American visitor, whose instinct in Europe these days is to keep his dollars in his pocket for they buy so little.” He contrasted that to what he saw in West Berlin—especially the heartbreaking words he saw spray-painted on the Berlin Wall: “Those beyond this wall live in a concentration camp.” Several times, he related a conversation he had had with the American general at Checkpoint Charlie. Reagan had asked why they weren’t making it easier for Easterners to escape. “We don’t want people to try to escape,” the general responded.

In Belgrade, Volcker seemed to consider himself more accountable to the likes of the chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt—who lectured that unless the United States acted effectively to combat inflation, Germany wouldn’t repeat its action of a year earlier, when Schmidt had led international efforts to rescue the dollar. As the New York Times colorfully put it, “The Europeans all but backed him up against the Berlin Wall to tell him squarely that, although America may take some perverse pleasure from its perpetual inflation, its chief trading partners and allies do not.” Such international considerations were another way inflation policy was inherently political. Europe squeezing the U.S. in its own manufacturers’ interests.

Hazlitt quote in Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 31 former Federal Reserve economist Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 224. Manic financial speculation William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 83–86. “pact with the devil” Ibid., 105. “What I hoped” Ibid., 111. In Belgrade Ibid., 118. against the Berlin Wall Nicholas von Hoffman, “Can Volcker Stand Up to Inflation?” NYT Magazine, December 2, 1979. On October 4 Greider, Secrets of the Temple, 123–24. “pipe and cigar smoke” von Hoffman, “Can Volcker Stand Up to Inflation?” In a dispatch AP, October 7, 1979. “will not try to wring” “Annual Message to the Congress; The Economic Report of the President,” January 25, 1979, APP.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Acheson was still adamant about the proper course: On August 4, he wrote Anthony Eden, “I’m strongly convinced that we must be very tough and not let Mr. K set the pace. We must take great risks to avoid greater ones.” The next move, however, was Khrushchev’s. On August 13, a few minutes after midnight, the Berlin Wall began to rise up between the Eastern zone and the West. The East Germans laid barbed wire, imposed roadblocks, tore up streets. The world felt itself sliding to the brink. Kennedy himself privately put the odds on Armageddon at one in five. In Washington, worried bureaucrats began stocking their cellars with toilet paper and peanut butter; by late summer there were macabre discussions at Georgetown dinner parties of fallout patterns in metropolitan Washington.

.: appearance of, 85, 86, 697 articles by, 55–56, 368, 580, 673, 708 athletic abilities of, 86–87 Bohlen and, 493, 494, 499, 512–13, 529–30, 720–21 books by, 89, 590 childhood and heritage of, 50–54 death of, 719 early employment of, 56–57, 85 essays by, 55–56 Harriman and, 22, 40, 85–86, 135, 463–64, 500–11, 519–20, 532, 540–41, 546–48, 583–85, 598, 601, 606, 610–11, 634–35, 681–83, 692–93, 708–9, 715, 719 health problems of, 558, 649–50, 718 independence of, 53, 54–55, 131–32, 465 intelligence of, 87, 131, 132 journal of, 126 Kennan, and, 327–28, 471–72, 474, 477, 485, 487–91, 495–96, 499, 512, 529–30, 542–43, 551–53, 580–81, 599, 668–69, 724 Lovett and, 417–18, 465–66, 493–94, 509, 539, 542, 544–46, 549, 556, 581, 592–93, 594, 716–17 McCloy and, 186, 324–25, 334, 493, 513–15, 518, 592, 614 memoirs of, 22, 51, 54, 126, 136, 393, 530, 537–39, 548, 656, 679, 693, 716, 720–21, 724 mustache of, 132, 465, 547, 652, 697 pragmatism of, 126, 128, 136, 137–38, 323, 686, 697 press conferences of, 323, 372, 409–10, 412–13, 490 press coverage of, 368, 409, 494, 506, 545, 581, 646, 681 problem-solving technique of, 324 school years of, 22, 30, 39–40, 54–57, 80, 85–89 speeches of, 133, 135, 136, 185, 339–40, 360, 368, 394–95, 409–10, 428, 477–78, 488, 491, 506, 530, 547, 598, 610, 612 Acheson, Edward C, 50–53, 134 Acheson, Eleanor Gooderham, 51, 53, 55 Acheson, Jane, 418, 708 Acheson, Margot, 53, 86 Achilles, Thodore, 447 Adams, John Quincy, 29 Adams, Sherman, 577 Adenauer, Konrad, 201, 513, 514, 516, 517–18 Agee, James, 315–16 Aiken, George, 685 air power, Lovett’s commitment to, 18, 21, 91–92, 202–9 Allison, John, 528 Alsop, Joseph, 171, 409, 431–32, 453, 463, 545, 546, 581, 623, 643, 698 Alsop, Stewart, 546 “American Century, The” (Luce), 25 Americans for Democratic Action, 27 Amherst College, 68–70 Andropov, Yuri, 20, 728–29 Anglo–American coalition, Churchill’s iron curtain speech and, 362–64 “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks” (Kennan), 154 Arden (Harrimans’ estate), 43–45, 63, 106–7, 285 arms control, 435, 577, 737 Acheson on, 33, 324–26, 356–62 espionage and, 327–28, 357 Lilienthal proposal for, 358–59 McCloy on, 357–62, 599 Stimson on, 303, 318–21, 324, 325–26 Truman and, 325–26, 342–46 see also nuclear test ban arms race, 34, 435–36, 553, 722–23 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 385, 420 Arneson, Gordon, 487 Arnold, Henry (“Hap”), 194, 201, 206, 458 Astor, Vincent, 113, 193 Atlantic Conference (1941), 210–12, 237 atom bomb, 18–19 Berlin blockade and, 460 East–West cooperation on, 33, 302–5, 318–21, 324, 325–28, 343–45, 385 Harriman on, 379 Hiroshima attacked, 314–16, 485 Interim Committee on, 274–75, 293, 294–95, 297, 302, 304, 310–11 Kennan on use of, 375, 435–36, 553, 722–23 McCloy on use of, 293–97, 300, 301, 303, 310–12, 315 Soviet Union and, 327–28, 480–81, 486–87, 489, 496 Stimson and, 271, 273–74, 277–78, 280–81, 293–97, 300, 301, 303–4, 308–13, 315, 318–21, 324–26, 327 testing of, 297, 301–2, 304–5, 310, 630–33 see also arms control; nuclear weapons atomic arms control covenant, 319–20 Atomic Energy Commission, 486 Attlee, Clement, 543 Auchincloss, Louis, 30, 673 Auschwitz, proposed bombing of, 200–201, 235–36 Austin, Warren, 523 Baldwin, Hanson, 315, 420 Baldwin, Ray, 53 Balkans, postwar spheres of influence in, 241–43, 246, 262 Ball, George, 207–8, 429–30, 484, 606, 628 Acheson and, 648–49, 674, 697 Harriman and, 657 Johnson and, 643, 645–46, 648–49 Vietnam War and, 637–39, 643, 647–49, 680, 700, 711 Baltimore Sun, 134, 137 Barry, Philip and Ellen, 109 Bartlett, Charles, 639 Baruch, Bernard, 264n, 360–61 Battle, Lucius, 478–79, 491, 494, 532–33, 563, 612, 685, 697 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 574–75, 612, 622 Beale, Joseph, 71, 93 Bears in the Caviar (Thayer), 168 Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord, 212–14, 217, 234, 603 Belmont, August, 484 Benchley, Robert, 109–10 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 80–81 Berger, Sam, 711–12 Beria, Lavrenty, 576 Berlin: devastation of, 386 Kennan in, 147–48, 152, 177–78, 190 Lovett’s peace offensive in, 459–60 McCloy in, 305–6 Soviet blockade of, 455–61, 472–73 Berlin, Isaiah, 579 Berlin airlift, 458–61 Berlin crisis (1961), 600, 605 Acheson and, 606, 609–16 Bohlen and, 615 J. F. Kennedy and, 609–15 Kennan on, 614–15 Krushchev and, 609–10, 612–15 McCloy and, 613–14 Nitze and, 611, 613, 614 nuclear war as possibility in, 610 Rusk on, 612–13 Berlin Wall, 614–15 Berne negotiations, 249 Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam), 656, 715 Bethlehem Steel, 123–25 Bevin, Ernest, 402, 412–13, 460, 465 Biddle, Francis, 197–99 Biddle, George, 47, 54 Bigart, Homer, 491 Bilbo, Theodore, 409 Bingham, Jack, 603 Bismarck, Otto von, 734 Bissell, Richard, 442 Blatchford, Richard, 121–22 Boheman, Erik, 652 Bohlen, Avis Thayer, 167, 173, 177, 431, 511, 569, 577, 578, 601, 623, 672, 720–21 Bohlen, Celestine Eustis, 58–59, 162, 720–21 Bohlen, Charles (father), 58, 59 Bohlen, Charles, Jr., 720–21 Bohlen, Charles E.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

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

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

Scowcroft, who was typically wry and wise while questioning the recipients, turned to Greenspan first. The question probed into the impact of the Atlantic alliance on Greenspan’s work at the Fed, but Greenspan dove deeper, exploring the end of the cold war as a pivotal moment not only in a geopolitical sense but also in terms of the global economy. When the Berlin Wall came down to reveal the economic disaster and utter failure of central planning, he said, it was a moment of awakening not only for those directly engaged in the cold war. Greenspan saw the fall of the USSR and communism not only in terms of the opportunities it opened up within those countries directly affected, as in the case of the rise of the oligarchs, but also as a signal to the emerging world that there was now only one path: to accept the results of the seventy-five-year experiment in comparative political-economic philosophy and engage in global markets.


pages: 353 words: 148,895

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton

asset allocation, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, European colonialism, fixed income, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, purchasing power parity, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, yield curve

Who but the most rampant optimist would then have dreamt that over the next half-century, the annualized real return on equities would be 9 percent, with most other countries enjoying similarly high returns? Yet this is what happened. This was a period when most things turned out better than expected. There was no third world war, the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War ended. There was unprecedented growth in productivity and efficiency, improvements in management and corporate governance, and extensive technological change. Corporate cash flows grew faster than expected, and in all likelihood the equity risk premium fell, further boosting stock prices.


pages: 562 words: 146,544

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, call centre, digital map, disruptive innovation, double helix, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, high net worth, invisible hand, McMansion, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, RFID, satellite internet, SQL injection, Stewart Brand, tech worker, telemarketer, web application

“How is it you speak English so well? You sound like you’re from Ohio.” “My father worked with the Russian consulate here in D.C. during the Cold War.” Ross pointed toward the Potomac. “I grew up in Fairfax.” Merritt kept shaking his head—but then, he didn’t know what to believe. Ross grew somber. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were recalled to Russia. My father was murdered by Communist hard-liners in the 1992 coup attempt.” Merritt searched for signs of dissembling—rapid facial movements, fluttering of the eyes. Ross displayed only a wistful calm. A melancholy. In a few moments Ross brightened. “Well, that was a long time ago.”


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

Inevitably the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West. The West also bedeviled the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers. Eventually, this led to a severe labor and production crisis in the East, and in August 1961, to the building of the infamous Berlin Wall. While staging their commando attacks upon East Germany, American authorities and their German agents were apparently convinced that the Soviet Union had belligerent designs upon West Germany; perhaps a textbook case of projection. On 8 October 1952, the Minister-President of the West German state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, disclosed that the United States had created a secret civilian army in his state for the purpose of resisting a Russian invasion.


pages: 506 words: 146,607

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

We want you to be our global telecom leader, and we want you to be our main U.S. telecom analyst as well.” It seemed as if Merrill was offering me the chance to build my own team, see the world (first class, of course), and participate in the economic restructuring of the post–Cold War era. It had been four years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and capitalism was now the only game in town. As governments from Europe to Asia to Latin America privatized their largest companies, they could raise a huge amount of cash and inject capitalism into a large part of their economies. Telephone companies were perfect for privatization: they sold a necessity, demand was growing steadily in Europe and very rapidly in the developing world, and new services such as cellular were blossoming.


pages: 570 words: 151,609

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

The space station was to be named Freedom, and the Shuttle, as first laid out by Nixon’s 1969 Space Task Group, would be both the means of its construction and its connection with Earth on completion. Ultimately, plans to build Freedom were to falter before eventually evolving into the International Space Station following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Until then, the orbiter itself, the last great achievement of NASA’s Apollo generation, would serve as a means through which we learned to live and work in space. With each new mission, the growing Shuttle fleet—three-strong with the addition of Discovery in the summer of 1984, and joined by Atlantis the following year—grew into the role, expanding the range of jobs they could perform, from, with Spacelab on board, mini space station through satellite launch, repair and retrieval to early on-orbit construction.


pages: 511 words: 148,310

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

I was in Berlin as part of a group of peace-oriented academics from East and West, and we had toured by bus around East Germany, then come across Checkpoint Charlie to West Berlin. The famous checkpoint was rapidly becoming obsolete, however, because a couple of weeks earlier the East Germans had punched out several large gaps in the wall and allowed people to cross back and forth freely after decades of forced confinement. On December 14, we went to the Berlin Wall and saw young West Germans chipping away at it with sledgehammers. I reached down and scooped up two fragments with remnants of purple graffiti on them—one to keep and one for my colleague at the University of Southern California, Jim Rosenau, one of the few international relations professors to have foreseen transformational change in the international system.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

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

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

In order to save ourselves from both anarchic forms of globalization, such as war and terrorism, and monopolistic forms, such as multinational corporations, we need global democratic bodies that work, bodies capable of addressing the global challenges we confront in an ever more interdependent world. In the centuries of conflict that have defined the world from the Congress of Vienna to the defeat of the Axis Powers and the writing of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the Treaty of Versailles to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a bipolar world, nation-states have made little progress toward global governance. Too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion, they seem quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods. Moreover, democracy is locked in their tight embrace, and there seems little chance either for democratizing globalization or for globalizing democracy as long as its flourishing depends on rival sovereign nations.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Citizens, on the other hand, face each other across those same frontiers as rivals and enemies, representing competing national economies that share neither a private marketplace nor a global commonweal. They still imagine walls might protect them from the malevolent forces of interdependence and the predatory effects of unregulated markets. Just fifteen years after the Berlin Wall came down, bringing the Iron Curtain down with it, many of the democratic peoples who celebrated its fall are busy constructing new barriers, bulwarks meant to impede the progress of global anarchy and market injustice and to protect sovereignty, but that will be equally futile in the long term.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In fact, there is no sharp dividing line between the two sets of cases: the differences between them are just ones of degree. Germany did experience abrupt blows, in fact three of them rather than just a single blow. First, Germany’s devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry’s arrival in Japan and Pinochet’s coup in Chile actually weren’t unexpected isolated events of a single day. They were instead the culminations of developments that had extended over many previous decades, and whose (partial) resolution would take many subsequent decades: both of those statements also apply to post-war German history.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

References Acemoglu, Daron, Philippe Aghion, Claire Lelarge, John Van Reenen, and Fabrizio Zilibotti. 2007. “Technology, Information, and the Decentralization of the Firm.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(4): 1759–1799. Ahlfeldt, Gabriel, Stephen Redding, Daniel Sturm, and Nikolaus Wolf. 2015. “The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall.” Econometrics 83(6): 2127–2189. Albright, Richard. 2002. “What Can Past Technology Forecasts Tell Us about the Future?” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 69: 443–464. Alesina, Alberto, Silvia Ardagna, Giuseppe Nicoletti, and Fabio Schiantarelli. 2005. “Regulation and Investment.” Journal of the European Economic Association 3(4): 791–825.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

This combination became Berlin’s answer for the problems of an entire continent. If the Bundeskanzleramt looks more like a seat of learning than one of the foremost citadels of global power, that is perhaps because there’s a lot to take in, even in the immediate vicinity. The joyous destruction of the old Berlin Wall had led within two decades to an entire continent taking its economic cues from Germany. But Berlin’s actions in the Eurozone crisis risked a whole new divide across the continent. The white cube has become the architectural embodiment of Germany as Europe’s reluctant imperium. ‘The temptation is always to relax,’ says a senior German official.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

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

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

One central pillar of neoliberal policies is privatization, which, when not adopted by states of their own accord is often dictated by supranational economic organizations, such as the IMF. In certain periods of history privatization has become a kind of feeding frenzy, as it did after the long period of the French Revolution, between the reigns of Louis Philippe and Louis Bonaparte; or after the crisis of the welfare state in Europe in the 1970s; or again after the fall of the Berlin wall, when the old state apparatchiks of the Soviet bloc were reborn as capitalist oligarchs. Today, privatization often involves selling state-run businesses and industries to private hands, but it also involves expanding the realm of property itself. We saw earlier how traditional knowledges, seeds, and even genetic material have increasingly become objects of ownership.


pages: 608 words: 150,324

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

One symposium had to be cut short due to a press conference that was held for the second man to orbit the Earth, 25-year-old Gherman Titov, who had returned to Earth on 7 August, after spending more than a day in space. Later, delegates gathered in a sunlit Red Square to see a parade to celebrate Titov’s return.37 This was at the height of the Cold War, and Russian superiority in space was extremely significant. Furthermore, while the congress was taking place, the Cold War got a bit hotter as the Berlin Wall began to be constructed on 13 August. Like every other non-plenary speaker at the massive meeting, Nirenberg was given a brief ten-minute slot to present his findings, which concentrated on the material from the second PNAS paper and concluded, after a last-minute edit, with the phrase he and Matthaei had used in their article: ‘One or more uridylic acid residues therefore appear to be the code for phenylalanine’.38 The tiny lecture theatre was partly filled with a big old-fashioned slide projector, and there were only a couple of dozen people in the audience.39 Watson later said that he ‘heard rumours that there might be an unexpected bombshell talk by Marshall Nirenberg’ – this may have been chatter from Delbrück or others, but according to Nirenberg he introduced himself to Watson shortly before the talk and outlined his findings.40 Whatever the case, Watson was clearly not intrigued enough to go and listen.


Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

MUSEU D’ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA Map Macba; 93 412 08 10; www.macba.cat; Plaça dels Àngels 1; adult/concession €7.50/6; 11am-8pm Mon & Wed, 11am-midnight Thu & Fri, 10am-8pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun & holidays late Jun-late Sep, 11am-7.30pm Mon & Wed-Fri, 10am-8pm Sat, 10am-3pm Sun & holidays late Sep-late Jun; Universitat The ground and 1st floors of this great white bastion of contemporary art are generally given over to exhibitions from the gallery’s own collections (some 3000 pieces centred on three periods: post-WWII; around 1968; and the years since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, right up until the present day). You may see works by Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa, Paul Klee, Miquel Barceló and a whole raft of international talent, depending on the theme(s) of the ever-changing exposition. The gallery also presents temporary visiting exhibitions and has an extensive art bookshop.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

Per US household, the monthly costs amount to $138.49 In mid-2008, as oil prices spiked to unprecedented levels, and analysts talked seriously about price rises to $200 a barrel by 2010 – a tenfold increase within a single decade – some of the potential political fallout was beginning to become apparent.50 Leading oil commentator Michael Klare even predicted that when combined with other factors – the credit crunch; rising oil imports; the shift away from the dollar as the global currency standard; increasing reliance on foreign capital; catastrophic balance-of-payments deficits (exacerbated by those very same rising oil prices) – the exponential rise in the cost of oil might even usher in the end of the United States’ status as a superpower. ‘The fact is, America’s wealth and power have long rested on the abundance of cheap petroleum’, Klare observed. ‘As a result of our addiction to increasingly costly imported oil, we have become a different country, weaker and less prosperous. Whether we know it or not, the energy Berlin Wall has already fallen and the United States is an ex-superpower-in-the-making’.51 SUV CITIZEN The radical individualism and aggressive, militarized libertarianism that has domionated SUV culture has still wider urban implications, however. Worryingly, such cultural norms are being used as a model for the legal redrawing of concepts way beyond the roadscape.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

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

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

“But nowhere in sacred Scripture does it say that America will continue to be a dominant industrial force in the world,” he cautioned. “It will depend on how it is led and how it is managed, and that is where you come in.”128 In 1991, the reorientation became ofÂ�fiÂ�cial: “SIFE Goes Global,” proclaimed a headline in the year-Â�end review. The orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion explicitly linked this move to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and though it mentioned the Mexican and Asian contacts in passing, the focus was on the recent converts from communism. Rogers State College, the article reported, inaugurated the new era by contacting East German colleges to offer their help in the economic transition. The result was a two-Â�week sojourn in Oklahoma by three students of the Technische Hochschule-Â� Zwickau, who “quickly became believers in our free market system.”


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

British society may not yet be broken, as not only the BNP but the Conservative Party has claimed, in the hyperbole of the age. But it is certainly very wounded. The ache for a compelling, moral, national story Humans are moral and social beings. This should be self-evident. But for more than twenty years, since the Berlin Wall came down and communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Britain has been in the vanguard of building a civilisation consecrated to business and the ideals of a particular kind of capitalism – one in which financial values and the interests of big finance rule supreme. To prosper in the economic sphere, human beings must put aside their instincts for morality and living a meaningful life.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Yesteryear it was Peter Wright and his book Spycatcher; we were not allowed to read in this country though it was freely available across the globe. Now it is what our spooks get up to alongside the Americans in the ‘war on terror’. The US has changed. In these days of ‘homeland security’ my enthusiasm for the American way of life is no longer what it was when I lived there. The fall of the Berlin Wall – the greatest world-changing event since 1987 – proved not to be the end of history, but the beginning of a dolorous period of constant war. The enemy, ‘terror’, lurks in the shadows, while hundreds of thousands have died in the post 9/11 environment. Would Mrs Thatcher have ridden shotgun for George Bush as Tony Blair did?


pages: 618 words: 146,557

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, friendly fire, full employment, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route, V2 rocket

Large claims were made, not least by the mujahedin themselves, about the contribution that the war in Afghanistan made to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In spring 2002 Burhanuddin Rabbani said in Mazar-i Sharif, ‘We forced the Communists out of our country, we can force all invaders out of holy Afghanistan … Had it not been for the jihad, the whole world would still be in the Communist grip. The Berlin Wall fell because of the wounds which we inflicted on the Soviet Union, and the inspiration we gave all oppressed people. We broke the Soviet Union up into fifteen parts. We liberated people from Communism. Jihad led to a free world. We saved the world because Communism met its grave here in Afghanistan!’


pages: 438 words: 146,246

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky by Oleg Gordievsky

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing, urban sprawl, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, working poor

One day Slava Makarov, who was among the ablest students, went in to what should have been a formality for his questions on states law, only to emerge crimson and humiliated with an expression of shock on his face. The tutor, Sidorov, had political ambitions, and Slava’s second question had been about the legal status of the Berlin Wall. We all knew that subject backwards, but when Slava gave what he thought was a perfectly adequate answer, Sidorov merely asked if he had read issue no. 9 of the magazine States Law. Slava said, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t’, and was told he had failed. Indignant on his behalf, we all went round to the library, and at once everything was plain: there, in issue no. 9, was an article on the Wall by none other than Sidorov.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

When Peter asked whether she would be the founding chair of the life sciences department, her reaction was, “Are you out of your mind?” By the end of the conversation, though, she said yes. She had found the first ISU summer session to be the most mind-expanding time of her life, watching as a gaggle of students from the Soviet Union attended with KGB minders in tow. The Berlin Wall had not yet come down, and America’s communication with the other space-faring giant was closed off. She was awed, too, when Peter and crew managed to get the first Soviet physician cosmonaut, Oleg Atkov, to attend ISU, also with his KGB minder. At the end of the day—after the rush between space and medicine—after the hospital visits were done and the curriculum meeting was over, Peter sat alone in the Harvard Club.


The Rough Guide to Brussels 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides) by Dunford, Martin.; Lee, Phil; Summer, Suzy.; Dal Molin, Loik

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, low cost airline, Peace of Westphalia, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning

Métro Botanique or Rogier. Mini-Europe blvd du Centenaire 20 T02 478 05 50, Wwww.minieurope.com. Mini-Europe is pure tack, but children love it. All the historic European sights are reproduced in miniature – there are three hundred in all – and you can even re-enact the eruption of Vesuvius and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fireworks displays are held on Sat at 10.30pm during July and Aug. Adults €12.40, children €9.40; a combination ticket for Mini-Europe and Océade (see p.239) costs €23.50 for adults and €17.50 for children. Open mid-March– June & Sept daily 9.30am–6pm; July & Aug 9am–8pm; mid-July to mid-Aug Sat till midnight; Sept 9.30am–6pm; Oct–early Jan 10am–6pm.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

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

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

The experts also said that Donald Trump wasn’t going to win and that the British people would not vote for Brexit. My friend Sir Steve Smith, who is the excellent vice-chancellor of Exeter University, whose field is international relations, told me with economists failing to spot the Great Recession there were similarities in that experts in his field failed to spot the fall of the Berlin Wall! The experts did miss the big one though. Why did no one see this coming? They were working on something else. CHAPTER 7 Sniffing the Air and Spotting the Great Recession Today, the economist who wanders into a village to get a deeper sense of what the data reveals is a rare creature. —JOHN RAPLEY, Twilight of the Money Gods Economics isn’t magic.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”26 Having witnessed a few different sorts of revolutions during my life—from the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe to the rise of LGBTQ rights in the United States to the strengthening of national gun laws in Australia and New Zealand—I can vouch for these insights. People can change their minds about things. Compassion and common sense can move nations. And yes, the market of ideas has certainly had an impact on the way we vote when it comes to issues such as civil rights, animal rights, the ways we treat the sick and people with special needs, and death with dignity.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

So a space station was win-win. It would employ tens of thousands from countless congressional districts across the country, and it would prevent the defense-industrial base from withering away. That NASA would get something it had been asking for since the days of von Braun was a bonus. But by 1990, the Berlin Wall was sledgehammered and détente the new norm for foreign policy. The United States slouched into an economic recession, and deficits and the national debt were rising. As the plan for Freedom matured, meanwhile, the cost increased. Inflation didn’t help, and NASA was now finally factoring in the cost of the space shuttle as well, which was, itself, pricier per pound to launch than anyone liked.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

The world has seen speculative corporate debt binges before, but this one was launched in a period when interest rates had just begun a decline that would last 40 years. The heady mix of ever cheaper debt combined with ever more stock options incentivised corporate management to export financial capitalism to the world. A simple narrative developed that it would sweep all before it. The rise of financial capitalism occurred as the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed. It was widely assumed that the rest of the world would adapt to a capitalist system and the new financial capitalism found itself with a seeming myriad of opportunities for profit and, it was argued, only weak competition. The fact that many stock markets across the world, closed primarily by communist regimes, had reopened was one signal that the change to a more capitalist structure was underway.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Corcoran Gallery MUSEUM (www.corcoran.org; cnr 17th St & New York Ave NW; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5pm Wed-Sun, to 9pm Thu) DC’s oldest art museum, the Corcoran Gallery, has had a tough time standing up to the free, federal competition around the block, but this hasn’t stopped it from maintaining one of the most eclectic exhibitions in the country. Newseum MUSEUM (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $22/13) Although you’ll have to pay up, this massive, highly interactive news museum is well worth the admission price. You can delve inside the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage, perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs and reading moving works by journalists killed in the line of duty. WASHINGTON, DC IN… Two Days Start your DC adventure at the Mall’s much-loved Air & Space Museum and National Museum of Natural History.

Still today, this decision remains controversial and socially divisive, pitting ‘right to choose’ advocates against the ‘right to life’ anti-abortion lobby. 1980s New Deal-era financial institutions, deregulated under President Reagan, gamble with their customers’ savings and loans, and ultimately fail, leaving the government with the bill. 1989 The 1960s-era Berlin Wall is torn down, marking the end of the Cold War between the US and the USSR (now Russia). The USA becomes the world’s last remaining superpower. 1990s The world-wide-web debuts in 1991. Silicon Valley, CA, leads a high-tech internet revolution, remaking communications and media, and overvalued tech stocks drive the massive boom (and subsequent bust). 2001 On September 11, Al-Qaeda terrorists hijack four commercial airplanes, flying two into NYC’s twin towers, and one into the Pentagon (the fourth crashes in Pennsylvania); nearly 3000 people are killed. 2003 After citing evidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, President George W Bush launches a preemptive war that will cost over 4000 American lives and some $3 trillion. 2005 On August 29, Hurricane Katrina hits the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, rupturing poorly maintained levees and flooding New Orleans.


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

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

He was so focused on certain things, and what may be dramatic to you and I may not be dramatic to him because he was already past it. He’s already thinking ahead.” In reality, it was a small moment in Baghdad involving only a few hundred people. But the symbolic parallels to such iconic scenes as the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall dominated the media. CNN replayed the toppling of the statue that day on average every 7.5 minutes and Fox News every 4.4 minutes. Bush’s father sent him an e-mail praising his “conviction and determination.” It would be hard for a president not to feel a sense of satisfaction. Cheney watched in a hotel room in New Orleans, where he had flown to give a speech.

Bush and Vladimir Putin, news conference, Bratislava, Slovakia, July 24, 2005, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050224-9.html. 22 “It was fairly unpleasant”: Notes of call, provided to author. 23 “enemy forces”: Reeves, President Reagan, 164. 24 “It’s strange for me to say”: David Ignatius, “Beirut’s Berlin Wall,” Washington Post, February 23, 2005. 25 “This is the most difficult”: Peter Baker, “Mideast Strides Lift Bush, but Challenges Remain,” Washington Post, March 8, 2005. 26 “he may have had it right”: Daniel Schorr, “The Iraq Effect? Bush May Have Had It Right,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0304/p09s03-cods.html. 27 “Where Bush Was Right”: Newsweek, March 14, 2005, http://www.jadaliyya.com/content_images/fck_images/lebanon/2005-03-14_newsweek_cover.jpg.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

The castle is not open to the public, but the gardens are one of the most popular attractions in County Waterford. 1Sights & Activities oLismore Castle GardensCASTLE ( GOOGLE MAP ; %058-54061; www.lismorecastlegardens.com; gardens adult/child €8/6.50; h10.30am-5.30pm mid-Mar–mid-Oct, last entry 4.30pm; pc) Although Lismore Castle itself is not open to the public, the 3 hectares of ornate and manicured gardens are well worth a visit. Thought to be the oldest landscaped gardens in Ireland, they are divided into the walled Jacobean upper garden and the less formal lower garden, the latter dotted with modern sculpture including two chunks of the Berlin Wall. Highlights include a splendid yew walk where Edmund Spenser is said to have written The Faerie Queen. There's a contemporary art gallery beside the upper garden, and the castle stables and gardens are used as an opera venue during the annual Lismore Opera Festival (www.lismoreoperafestival.com) in June.

The longest section divides the Falls Road and the Shankill in West Belfast; its steel gates are generally open during daytime hours. In 2016 the first of Northern Ireland's 110 peace walls was demolished with the removal of the barrier on Belfast's Crumlin Rd. Begun in 1969 as a 'temporary measure', the 6m-high walls of corrugated steel, concrete and chain link have outlasted the Berlin Wall. Cultúrlann McAdam Ó FiaichCULTURAL CENTRE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.culturlann.ie; 216 Falls Rd; h9am-5.30pm Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm Sat, 1-4pm Sun; gBroadway)F Housed in a red-brick, former Presbyterian church, this Irish language and cultural centre is the focus for West Belfast's community activity.


pages: 1,330 words: 372,940

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, Great Grain Robbery, haute couture, Herman Kahn, index card, Khyber Pass, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, oil shock, out of africa, Plato's cave, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Socratic dialogue, Ted Sorensen, Yom Kippur War

As he explained to Bundy in an August 11 memo on Berlin: “One way of arriving at this choice might be to consider explicitly just what we are after in Central Europe. What would we envisage Europe to be like in, say, 1965?”12 Presidents rarely have the luxury to engage in such long-range thinking. Three days after Kissinger wrote this memo, the Berlin Wall suddenly went up overnight, changing the nature of the crisis. Kissinger considered Kennedy’s response too muted; he favored threatening a confrontation to test what risks the Soviets were willing to take and to reassure the Germans that the U.S. took their security seriously. The Wall, it turned out, served to defuse the crisis over Berlin: the U.S. and other Western nations retained free access to the sectors they controlled, and the refugee flood from the East was stanched.

., 560n Benny, Jack, 361 Bensheim, 53–54 Ben Suc, destruction of, 186 Bergen, Candice, 361, 362–63 Bergen, Polly, 363 Berger, Marilyn, 550, 574, 578 Bergman, Ingmar, 366 Berle, Milton, 361 Berlin, West: back channel for, 208, 323–24, 326–27 Kissinger’s negotiations on, 201, 250, 323–24, 414, 421 linkage for, 421, 422–23 Soviet threat to, 106, 111–13, 660 Berlin Crisis, 111–13 Berlin Wall, 113 Bernhard, Prince of Netherlands, 756 Bernstein, Carl, 498, 574, 585, 597, 600 Berrigan, Daniel, 282 Berrigan, Philip, 282 Beth Hillel, 35–36, 37 Bhutto, Benazir, 379 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 371, 379 Bilderberg Group, 89, 755, 756 Bingham, Jonathan, 500 biological weapons, 205 Bismarck, Otto von, 16, 65, 67, 77, 98, 105, 109, 139, 240, 488, 509 Kissinger compared with, 107–8, 501, 761 Bistro restaurant, 360, 361–62 Black Death (1349), 18 “Black September,” 286 Blattner, Max (uncle), 29 Blattner, Sara (aunt), 29 Blattner, Selma (cousin), 29 Blood, Archer, 372 Bo, Mai Van, 242 Boethe, Walter, 706 Bohemian Grove, 755 Bok, Derek, 708–9 Bolivia, 14 Boiling, Alexander, 44, 45, 48 Book-of-the-Month Club, 710 Boston Globe, 60–61, 683 “Bottomless Pit, The,” 584 Bowie, Robert, 84, 104, 115, 150 Kissinger’s feud with, 95–97, 106, 195, 604, 623 Bowles, Chester, 91, 178 Braden, Joan, 358, 359, 575 Braden, Tom, 358, 359, 575 Bradlee, Ben, 499, 575, 579, 582, 583 Brando, Marlon, 362 Brandon, Henry, 127, 147, 190, 193, 218–19, 220, 225, 395, 500, 501 Brandon, Muffie, 219 Brandt, Willy, 186, 323 Bremer, L.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

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

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

Like the Great Depression, it might have been expected to produce a backlash against those seen as irresponsible profiteers, resulting in more government intervention and a fairer tax system. Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal economist, described the 2008 financial meltdown as the equivalent for free-market advocates to the fall of the Berlin Wall for Communists. Even the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Washington’s free-market wise man nonpareil, admitted that he’d been wrong in thinking Adam Smith’s invisible hand would save business from its own self-destruction. Potentially, the disaster was a “teachable moment” from which the country’s economic conservatives could learn.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

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

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

After the terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, Merkel rushed to demonstrate solidarity with France, and Hollande continued to support Merkel over the refugee crisis, even though his stance attracted the opprobrium of the French nationalist right. After the flaring up of the refugee crisis, Hollande and Merkel made a joint appearance before the European Parliament, the first such occasion since Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand had spoken in the dramatic circumstances after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hollande said that “more Europe” was needed. And Merkel explained, “We must not fall prey to an inclination to want to act nationally on these matters. We must, to the contrary, act together.”5 Brexit Referendum There is an additional issue, perhaps an even more fundamental European crisis, that is highlighted by the polarization in French politics but also the Brexit vote in June 2016.


pages: 628 words: 170,668

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

At times, alone in a star-filled sky or streaking across the land, he’d ponder the miracle of being able to fly thousands of feet above the ground, witnessing sights inaccessible to previous generations. After four years as a fighter pilot Schweickart, known to everyone as “Rusty,” left the air force and returned to mit, this time as a graduate student in their Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. However, as the building of the Berlin Wall heightened global tensions, Schweickart’s reserve status in the Massachusetts National Guard caused him to be called up again in August 1961 and deployed as a pilot to Europe. He was seated in a coffee shop in eastern France one morning the following February when something in the newspaper caught his attention.


pages: 648 words: 165,654

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

They are as ready for change and democracy as Eastern Europe was in the 1980s and as Latin America was in the 1970s. History is moving. The moment is ours.” That’s the good news. The so-called “Arab spring” of 2005, which offered greater promise than at any time since most countries gained independence, did not endure. It did not set off the toppling dominoes of regional change, as the fall of the Berlin Wall did in Eastern Europe. For much of the Middle East, the challenge of change is today tougher than anywhere else in the world. The Middle East, concluded a United Nations survey in 2005, faces an “acute deficit of freedom and good governance.” Most Arabs live in a “black hole…in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes.”7 The region has the largest proportion of ruling monarchies (eight) and family political dynasties (four) in the world.* The dangers of change are also already visible.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The writing was on the wall—Palestinians had shown Israelis that Palestinian nationalism was not a force that Israel could ignore. It might take years or decades, but for increasing numbers of Israelis, there was now little doubt that Israel would have to leave most of the West Bank, sooner or later. EUROPE, TOO, WAS EXPERIENCING seismic shifts. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. By 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and the United States stood alone as the world’s uncontested superpower. Ever since Israel’s founding, Israel and its Arab neighbor-enemies had been caught in a larger battle between the world’s two superpowers. American-Russian relations impacted the wars of 1956, 1967, and 1973, and much in between.


pages: 496 words: 162,951

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Donald Davies, drop ship, friendly fire, machine readable, South China Sea

In 1954, when the French were trembling on the brink of disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and President Eisenhower's advisers debated the pros and cons of American intervention in Indochina--intervention possibly even including a nuclear strike--then Senator Lyndon Johnson stood up strongly against that folly, arguing against any war on the Asian mainland. Johnson was proud of that. Johnson had, however, inherited John F. Kennedy's hyperactive foreign policy as well as Kennedy's principal advisers, the men he derisively nicknamed the "You-Harvards." In Kennedy's thousand days the nation had gone through the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Berlin Wall crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, and the crisis over the tiny, and largely inconsequential, kingdom of Laos. Days before Kennedy fell to an assassin's bullet, Ngo Dinh Diem, the autocratic ruler of South Vietnam, was deposed and murdered in a coup d'etat that was at least sanctioned, if not sponsored, by Washington.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Likewise, immigrants should fill Europe’s labor breach in coming decades. Despite below-replacement birthrates, in 2012 Germany’s population actually grew by nine hundred thousand, mainly due to immigration from eastern Europe made possible by EU membership. But Germany’s first wave of immigrant labor—thousands of Turks, imported after the Berlin Wall cut off the supply of East German migrants—has been less easy to absorb. Today, there are 4 million Turks in Germany, a source of unresolved cultural tension and tightened immigration policies. In 2010, German chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of Christian Democratic Union Party youth, “At the start of the ’60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

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

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

Reelection was still two years away, but the ominous economic signs already had him nervous. Right now, his poll numbers were actually quite strong. His approval rating had been well north of 50 percent—and often above 60 or even 70 percent—since his inauguration. There was public exhilaration at the sudden weakening of the Soviet Union; the Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989 and democratic revolutions were sweeping across Eastern Europe. Plus, voters tended to like Bush personally. But there was the threat: if the economy was just starting to tank now, Americans wouldn’t really start to feel it until the 1992 campaign was under way—when it would be too late to do anything about it.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

Building on these first cautious efforts, Fisher in 1981 then established the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which served as the core of an international network of other free-market research centers modeled on the IEA. Within the course of the next decade, Atlas took credit for founding seventy-eight institutes around the world (thirty-nine of them in Latin America) and close ties with another eighty-eight. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, these institutes had spawned a global community of economic thinkers schooled in Hayekian principles, many of whom soon fanned out into the countries of the former Soviet bloc to argue the virtues of capitalism.25 “What happened under Ms. Thatcher was an eye-opener, a revelation,” said Palaniappan Chidambaram, who served as India’s finance minister for a while during the 1990s.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

Huhs and a gangly classmate named Carl Longley liked the sound of it: a chance for adventure, rather than the mundane corporate work to which their classmates were headed. The Stanford pair flew east. In their interviews, Giffen told them that superpower relations were changing. The chill generated by two decades of hostilities—Moscow’s invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the crushing of the Prague Spring—had passed. Now, as the 1960s neared an end, détente was blossoming, led by the anti-Soviet warhorse Nixon and his brainy German-born adviser Kissinger. Trade barriers between the United States and the Soviets were falling, Giffen told his visitors, and the Park Avenue firm he represented was well positioned to profit from the boom that was sure to come.


pages: 442 words: 39,064

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, continuous double auction, currency peg, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, Erdős number, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, global village, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, law of one price, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

In testimony before the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noted with understatement that “In retrospect, it is clear that more investment monies flowed into these economies than could be profitably employed at modest risk” [96]. THE RUSSIAN STOCK MARKET After the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, following the highly symbolic destruction of the Berlin wall in 1990, the Russian stock market developed as an emerging market open to foreign investments. It is thus interesting to analyze whether the same patterns observed for essentially all emerging markets are also found there. As can be expected from the universal behavior of investors, the answer is positive.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Thus, writes Johnson, “one could use the Internet directly to improve people’s lives, but also learn from the way the Internet had been organized, and apply those principles to help improve the way city governments worked, or school systems taught students.” Not surprisingly, he believes that in their political significance, major developments in Internet history are comparable to, say, the French Revolution or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hence, “the creation of ARPANET and TCP/IP . . . should also be seen as milestones in the history of political philosophy.” To Hobbes and Rawls, now we must add ARPANET and TCP/IP. Why? Well, Johnson believes that sites like Wikipedia and Kickstarter, a popular fund-raising platform for aspiring artists and geeks, work because they embed the decentralizing spirit of “the Internet”—the same spirit that runs through and regulates its physical networks.


pages: 520 words: 164,834

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

His reply was, ‘I invited everybody who was in (Communist) power when we started to make our deal here. I invited everybody in power (in the Solidarity government) today. And I also invited everybody that I think is going to be in power next week. So I have three times as many politicians as I need.’ You know what? He was right.” Exactly two weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell. It was an unforgettable symbol of the end of the Cold War and an opening of the Eastern Bloc to the West. “We just opened a hotel in Warsaw,” CFO Shaw noted at a press conference. “Some say that was the most planned stroke of genius in history, but we’ve been working on that for five years.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and artificial music, here Chaconne, here Coffee Cantata, here and neuroscience, here St Matthew Passion, here, here, here, here The Well-Tempered Clavier, here, here Backstreet Boys, here Baker, Geoffrey, here balag, here Bandô prisoner-of-war camp, here Barber, Samuel, here Barreau, Pierre, here Barrington, Daines, here Bartók, Béla, here, here, here Batiste, Lionel, here Battle of Lepanto, here Battles, here beacon effect, here Beatles, The, here, here, here, here, here, here Becker, Judith, here, here Beckett, Samuel, here Bede, here Bee Gees, here Beethoven, Ludwig van, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and artificial music, here Emperor Concerto, here Eroica Symphony, here, here Fifth Symphony, here, here, here, here, here, here late style, here Ninth symphony and ‘Ode to Joy’, here, here, here, here, here Pastoral Symphony, here, here behavioral variability, here Bengalese finches, here, here, here, here Benjamin, Walter, here, here Beowulf, here Berlin Wall, fall of, here Berlioz, Hector, here, here Bernstein, Leonard, here, here Berry, Chuck, here Betanzos, Juan de, here Bharatabhasya, here Bible, the, here, here, here Bieber, Justin, here, here Binchois, Gilles, here bipedalism, here, here, here, here, here, here Bira ancestral ceremony, here birdsong, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bishop, Benedict, here Black Atlantic, here, here, here Blacking, John, here, here blind musicians, here, here Blombos Cave, here, here Bloom, Harold, here Bloom app, here ‘Blow the Man Down’, here blues, origins of, here Blumenthal, Heston, here Boden, Margaret, here Boethius, here Bolaño, Roberto, here Bold, Jonas, here Bonampak, here bone flutes, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Book of Deuteronomy, here Book of Ecclesiastes, here Book of Genesis, here Boone, Benjamin, here Boulez, Pierre, here Bourdieu, Pierre, here Bowie, David, here Boxgrove, here Boyle, Susan, here Brahms, Johannes, here, here, here, here breathing, here Bregman, Albert, here, here Breuning, Eleanore von, here Broca’s area, here Brown, James, here, here Bruce, James, here Bruckner, Anton, here BTS, here, here bucina, here Buddhism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Buena Vista Social Club, here Burial, here Burling, Robbins, here Burns, George, here Busnois, Antoine, here Byrd, William, here Byzantine church music, here, here Cage, John, here, here Caillois, Roger, here, here Call to Prayer (adhan), here call-and-response, here Camerata de’ Bardi, here canticum, here carmen, here Caro, Fray Juan, here Caruso, Enrico, here castrati, here Catal Höyük, here, here, here Catchpole, Clive, here Cavalli-Sforza, Luca, here cave paintings, see rock and cave art cephalopods, here Cerchio, Salvatore, here chaconas, here Chailley, Jacques, here Chaplin, Bill, here Charlemagne, Emperor, here, here, here, here, here Charles V, Emperor, here Chatwin, Bruce, here Chaucer, Geoffrey, here Chauvet Cave, here Chávez, Hugo, here chimpanzees, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chinese music, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and HMV marketing, here invention of opera, here, here ‘Needham Question’, here, here piano virtuosos, here scales, here, here, here, here, here see also Marquis Yi of Zeng bells chironomy, here, here, here, here chiroplast, here Chomsky, Noam, here, here, here Chopin, Frédéric, here, here Chopin International Piano Competition, here ‘Chopsticks’, here Chu Tsai-yu, here Chukchi, here Cicero, here, here Clark, Kenneth, here Clark, Petula, here Clash, The, here Classic FM, here Claudius, Emperor, here Coasters, The, here ‘Cockles and Mussels’, here Coenen, Adriaen, here Cogitore, Clément, here Cohen, Sara, here Coleman, Ornette, here, here Collins, Nick, here colobine monkeys, here Colombian music, here colonialism, here Colville, Robert, here common practice period, here, here, here compositionality, here, here, here concert halls, here conch shells, here, here Condillac, Étienne, here conductors, here, here Confucianism, here, here, here Congo Square, here Constantine, Emperor, here Cooder, Ry, here Cook, Captain James, here, here, here Coon, Jessica, here Cope, David, here Copernicus, Nicolaus, here Copland, Aaron, here Corelli, Arcangelo, here cornu, here Cortés, Hernán, here, here, here, here, here Costner, Kevin, here Council of Ferrara-Florence, here counterpoint, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and colonialism, here metaphor for globalisation, here Cox, Arnie, here Crawford Seeger, Ruth, here Creative Adversarial Networks, here creativity ‘Faustian bargain’ theory, here, here group creativity, here crickets, here, here, here, here Cross, Ian, here, here Crumb, George, here Crusades, here, here, here cuneiform script, here, here, here, here cyborgs, here cymbals, here cynocephali, here, here Daft Punk, here Dagbamba, here ‘Daisy Bell’, here Dan, here Dante, here Daoism, here darabukka, here Darwin, Charles, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here David, King, here, here, here, here, here, here Davis, Miles, here, here Dawkins, Richard, here, here de Waal, Frans, here Deacon, Terence, here, here, here, here Dead Sea Scrolls, here Debussy, Claude, here, here, here, here, here, here, here deep play, here DeepDream, here ‘deficit’ culture, here, here Delhi Sultanate, here, here Delius, Frederick, here Dennett, Daniel, here DeNora, Tia, here Descartes, René, here, here dhas, here Dhrupads, here, here, here, here Diamond, Jared, here, here digital music, here Dikshitar, Muthuswami, here Diocletian, Emperor, here Dion, Céline, here Dionysus, here, here, here, here dithyrambs, here, here, here, here, here Dixon, Daniel, here djembe drums, here Dodgy, here Donald, Merlin, here, here, here, here Donegan, Lonnie, here dopamine, here Dossi, Dosso, here du Sautoy, Marcus, here Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, here Dudamel, Gustavo, here Dufay, Guillaume, here, here Duhigg, Charles, here Dukas, Paul, here Dulles, John Foster, here Dunbar, Robin, here Durkheim, Émile, here Dutton, Denis, here Dylan, Bob, here Eastman School of Music, here Echo and the Bunnymen, here echolocation, here Echternach goose dance, here Edison, Thomas, here, here Egyptians, ancient, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ehrenzweig, Anton, here Einstein, Albert, here, here Eisenhower, Dwight D., here Ekman, Paul, here El Mirador, here El Sistema, here, here elephant greeting ceremony, here elephant tusk trumpets, here, here elephant skin drums, here Elgar, Sir Edward, here Eliot, T.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

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

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

Just to make sure, Nixon met with his HEW secretary, Robert Finch, and told him to personally monitor that any action on school desegregation was “inoffensive to the people of South Carolina.” Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman was the linchpin of the White House system. He and his partner and UCLA college buddy John Ehrlichman, they of the twin militaristic brush cuts, were known as Nixon’s “Berlin Wall.” Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns came in for an Oval Office meeting one Wednesday. On the way out the door, he remembered something else he needed to discuss. Haldeman blocked him bodily: “Your appointment is over, Dr. Burns. Send a memo.” Boasted Haldeman to an underling, “Even John Mitchell has to come through me now.”

Honolulu landscaping: Reeves, President Nixon, 192. Naps: Reeves, President Nixon, 30. “John Quincy Adams and Grover Cleveland”: Ibid., 31. “To: Mrs. Nixon”: Ibid., 28. Operation Menu: Ibid., 58–59; Schell, Time of Illusion, 32. “Nothing should happen in the South”: Reeves, President Nixon, 117. “Berlin Wall”: Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 81; “Your appointment is over”: Ibid., 71. “I still have not had any progress report”: Reeves, President Nixon, 37. “Nixon Network”: Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 632; “Nixon Hoped Antitrust Threat Would Sway Network Coverage,” WP, December 1, 1997; Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (dir.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

But while coercive regimes cannot control what goes on in people’s minds, they can control and manpulate oblique and horizontal transmission mechanisms (schools, churches, media) and thus try to influence beliefs and enforce what could be called political and ideological socialization. Repressive regimes can also arrest people known to have deviant or inconvenient beliefs or force them to leave the country, and thus to try to homogenize the distribution of beliefs in the country. Before the completion of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experimented with such policies, but in the long term these turned out to be ineffective. The historical evidence that coercion actually works at the level of values, based on the experience of political revolutions from the French to the Russian to the Iranian, is rather mixed. But clearly government-controlled entities, such as schools and the military, can reproduce certain elements of socialization including a belief in punctuality, discipline, temperance, and the virtuousness of obedience, hard work, and technology.9 Salient events bias: Highly dramatic and traumatic events can have a discontinuous effect on culture through powerful framing effects.


pages: 572 words: 179,024

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

“We could finally learn how to beat the MiG in air-to-air combat,” Colonel Slater explains. The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962 when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project Palladium out of Fort Bliss. “I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

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

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

No distinction is made between hegemony and domination as in approaches of Gramscian inspiration.11 The promises of neoliberalism are revealed for what they were: a sham. An ideology that seduced most of the population is broken. The psychic and political consequences are incalculable.12 The fall of Wall Street is to neo-liberalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.13 This naturalization of market logic (or “values,” to use Massimo de Angelis’s language) was nothing more than a spell. This spell was broken in 2008, a year after The Beginning of History was published. The point of all this: When I argue that we now live in a postneoliberal world, I do not mean that its practices or program have ceased (Ireland, Greece, and Portugal make it loud and clear that it’s alive and kicking), but that the narrative of the market’s universality is no longer unchallenged.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

In 1963, the NSA station began operating in newly constructed buildings at the top of Teufelsberg, its satellite antennae positioned in prime hilltop spots concealed by the canvas-covered spheres. The station became a key surveillance station for American and British intelligence officers studying the goings-on in East Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the station was abandoned. In 1996 the site was sold to property developers Hartmut Gruhl and Hanfried Schütte, who envisioned a bold transformation involving luxury apartments, a hotel, and a restaurant. Those plans, however, have not materialized. The former NSA station is still at Teufelsberg, and has attracted artists looking to make their mark on its abandoned walls and, eventually, establish an official residency.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The same was true and had always been true for companies, countries, and cities alike. Kasarda matched Lenski’s thesis with Vernon’s product cycle and Hawley’s history of hubs and began groping toward a new theory of economic geography. So was the rest of the world. Borders increasingly ceased to matter after the Berlin Wall fell and the WTO was established. Supply chains had been redefined as value chains, in which each link is expected to add value to the finished product. And as multinationals grew in size and power, how they chose to distribute their chains—from headquarters on down to the rawest of raw materials—would decide the hierarchy of the world’s cities and regions, and redirect the flow of wealth among them.


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

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

But some of its affiliate national networks helped trigger and feed nationwide public debates. One inÂ�terÂ�estÂ�ing case is Germany, where Â�there had been some modest interest in basic-income ideas in the 1980s, in parÂ�ticÂ�uÂ�lar among Â�people close to the incipient green movement. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany (in October 1990) created such a daunting challenge for the German welfare state that the discussion about basic income and related ideas practically disÂ�appeared for many years.136 It was spectacularly revived as a reaction to the so-Â�called “Agenda 2010,” also known as “Hartz IV,” the profound reform of the German welfare state finalized in 2005 by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s coÂ�aliÂ�tion of social democrats and greens.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Not very long ago, the world was divided into three blocs: the First World, the rich democratic nations of Europe, North America, and Japan; the Second World, the Communist nations, including the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, where the government directly controlled most of the economy; and the Third World, a collection of wildly different nations with only one fundamental thing in common—poverty. Despite some small local success stories, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, it looked like the world would forever stay split among the rich; the regimented and poor; and the very poor indeed. The world has changed enormously for the better in the generation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of a world split eternally between rich and poor, we’ve entered the era of the great global middle. Most of the world today is at least middle class by the standards of the twentieth century. There has been an extraordinary surge of wealth, unparalleled in human history. China, India, and most recently, nations in Africa have been the primary beneficiaries of this incredible economic expansion, but the United States has benefitted as well—not only through cheaper prices, which is the standard economic explanation, but also through new labor markets, increased cultural contact, and the gradual easing of the threat of global war.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

With the number of societies generally declining century after century, we might imagine that all the remaining nations of the world will someday drop their boundaries sufficiently to create a cosmopolitan community that is more significant to people than the societies themselves. Some claim the internationalization of culture (think McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz, Star Wars) and connections (with Facebook bringing people together from Aa, Estonia, to Zu, Afghanistan) are a harbinger of a Berlin Wall–type collapse of state borders. This is false. Societies have never freely merged, and that won’t change. Populations worldwide may devour KFC, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola while screening Hollywood blockbusters—and enjoy sushi, flamenco, French couture, Persian carpets, and Italian cars. They may adopt, and at times be swamped by, cosmopolitan trends.


pages: 604 words: 177,329

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, rolodex, Silicon Valley, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle Eastern terrorism. There was little in his background that prepared him for this new turn—but that was true of the bureau as a whole, which regarded terrorism as a nuisance, not a real threat. It was difficult to believe, in those cloudless days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that America had any real enemies still standing. Then, in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,” he stated.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

But by testing his argument he tested the one I just outlined above, that the expected life of an item is proportional to its past life. Gott made a list of Broadway shows on a given day, May 17, 1993, and predicted that the longest-running ones would last longest, and vice versa. He was proven right with 95 percent accuracy. He had, as a child, visited both the Great Pyramid (fifty-seven hundred years old), and the Berlin Wall (twelve years old), and correctly guessed that the former would outlive the latter. The proportionality of life expectancy does not need to be tested explicitly—it is the direct result of “winner-take-all” effects in longevity. Two mistakes are commonly made when I present this idea—people have difficulties grasping probabilistic notions, particularly when they have spent too much time on the Internet (not that they need the Internet to be confused; we are naturally probability-challenged).


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Corcoran Gallery MUSEUM Offline map Google map (www.corcoran.org; cnr 17th St & New York Ave NW; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5pm Wed-Sun, to 9pm Thu) DC’s oldest art museum, the Corcoran Gallery, has had a tough time standing up to the free, federal competition around the block, but this hasn’t stopped it from maintaining one of the most eclectic exhibitions in the country. Newseum MUSEUM Offline map Google map (www.newseum.org; 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW; adult/child $22/13) Although you’ll have to pay up, this massive, highly interactive news museum is well worth the admission price. You can delve inside the major events of recent years (the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, Hurricane Katrina), and spend hours watching moving film footage, perusing Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs and reading moving works by journalists killed in the line of duty. WASHINGTON, DC IN… Two Days Start your DC adventure at the Mall’s much-loved Air & Space Museum and National Museum of Natural History .

Assassinations (John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F Kennedy), riots, a devastating and unpopular war, political corruption (Watergate) and sexual liberation ensure there’s never a dull moment in the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s. It’s also a time of momentous change as African Americans achieve hard-won victories in the realm of civil rights. The 1980s see decaying cities and a stratified society as whites take flight to the suburbs. Communism ends with a bang as the Berlin Wall collapses and the USSR dissolves. It’s good times again in the 1990s, with peace and prosperity, budget surpluses and a growing high-tech sector. The 21st century starts off badly, with a devastating attack on New York and Washington, DC, followed by two costly wars lasting well into the next decade.

Today, this decision remains controversial and divisive, pitting ‘right to choose’ advocates against the ‘right to life’ anti-abortion lobby. 1980s New Deal–era financial institutions, deregulated under President Reagan, gamble with their customers’ savings and loans, and fail, leaving the government with the bill: $125 billion. 1989 The 1960s-era Berlin Wall is torn down, marking the end of the Cold War between the US and the USSR (now Russia). The USA becomes the world’s last remaining superpower. 1990s The World Wide Web debuts in 1991. Silicon Valley, CA, leads a high-tech internet revolution, remaking communications and media, and overvalued tech stocks drive the massive boom (and subsequent bust). 2001 On September 11, Al-Qaeda terrorists hijack four commercial airplanes, flying two into NYC’s twin towers, and one into the Pentagon (the fourth crashes in Pennsylvania); nearly 3000 people are killed. 2003 After citing evidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, President George W Bush launches a preemptive war that will cost over 4000 American lives and some $3 trillion. 2005 On August 29, Hurricane Katrina hits the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, rupturing poorly maintained levees and flooding New Orleans.


pages: 647 words: 201,252

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan by Samuel R. Delany

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, East Village, gentrification, index card, Pepto Bismol, place-making, publish or perish, rent stabilization, sexual politics

Up in the apartment, I changed my clothes. While I was in the bedroom, tugging off slacks and pulling on jeans, I thought: Here’s the whole country, busy replacing vinyl with tape and worrying if it’s going to have to go through the whole process again a year or so from now with the new, silver CDs; since the Berlin Wall tumbled last November, millions are paused for the leap into cyberspace, where everything glitters and soars, but nothing dribbles or squishes; the summer is getting into spandex and roller blades; the number of AIDS cases is now within a stone’s throw, one way or the other, of 100,000; a while ago, the Variety had been closed down because, said an article in the Daily News, “158 acts of unsafe sex” had been observed there by a plainclothes inspector over—what?


pages: 694 words: 197,804

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis by Julie Holland

benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, confounding variable, drug harm reduction, intentional community, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, traumatic brain injury, University of East Anglia, zero-sum game

Reforming America’s marijuana laws can be likened to assembling a jigsaw puzzle: finding the first few pieces to join together is difficult and time consuming, but the more pieces come together, the clearer the puzzle’s pattern becomes, and the easier the job gets. One by one, often with great difficulty, the pieces are coming together. The pattern is becoming clearer. MPP is committed to leading the fight for reform until, like the Berlin Wall, the edifice of marijuana prohibition comes crashing down under the weight of its own futility. 42 The ACLU and Cannabis Drug Policy An Interview with Graham Boyd, J.D. Julie Holland, M.D. JULIE HOLLAND: How has the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) been involved in defending civil liberties as they relate to drug policy?


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Needless to say, the bid stirred up intense controversy, involving all the issues of the previous halfcentury of piracy debates: public responsibility, curatorship, canonicity, and nationalism. Columbia’s huge backlist of classic films represented something close to the American “soul,” it was said. What did it mean for a nation to sell its soul? Moreover, the deal happened to come to fruition at a moment of extraordinary global uncertainty. It culminated just as the Berlin wall fell. With the Soviet bloc in terminal disarray, a fundamental reconfiguration of global politics was in the offing. Washington’s anxieties about the place of Japan in that process found a focus in the Sony bid. What epitomized the fear was a pirated book. The original had been published in Japan back in January and swiftly sold five hundred thousand copies.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Labuda, Damian, Lefebvre, Jean-Francois, Nadeau, Philippe, and Roy-Gagnon, Marie-Hélène. 2010. “Female-to-male breeding ratio in modern humans—an analysis based on historical recombinations.” American Journal of Human Genetics 86: 353–363. Lakner, Christoph, and Milanovic, Branko. 2013. “Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719. Larrimore, Jeff. 2014. “Accounting for United States household income inequality trends: the changing importance of household structure and male and female labor earnings inequality.” Review of Income and Wealth 60: 683–701.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

By 1970 it numbered 2,216; ten years later it numbered 7,480. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new thinking” notwithstanding, the Soviet Union added almost 4,000 bombs and warheads to its nuclear inventory during the 1980s, ending up with 11,320 strategic nuclear weapons in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Furthermore, most Soviet strategists apparently believed that their country had to be prepared to fight and win a nuclear war.172 This is not to say that Soviet leaders were eager to fight such a war or that they were confident that they could gain a meaningful victory. Soviet strategists understood that nuclear war would involve untold destruction.173 But they were determined to limit damage to the Soviet Union and prevail in any nuclear exchange between the superpowers.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Are Political Scientists Better Than Pundits? The disintegration of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc occurred at a remarkably fast pace—and all things considered, in a remarkably orderly way.* On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall—an applause line that seemed as audacious as John F. Kennedy’s pledge to send a man to the moon. Reagan was prescient; less than two years later, the wall had fallen. On November 16, 1988, the parliament of the Republic of Estonia, a nation about the size of the state of Maine, declared its independence from the mighty USSR.


Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

“The entire marketing program,” Nilsen said, “is designed to build awareness for Sonic 2sday, the street date of Sonic 2.” “And on that date,” Schroeder explained, “the game won’t just be available at retail in the U.S., but also in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the rest of the world!” “Yup,” Nilsen confirmed. “We’re working to make Sonic 2sday the biggest international event since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” To someone outside this room, the idea of a coordinated worldwide release might have seemed interesting but irrelevant. But the point of a global launch wasn’t to dazzle with concept; the point was that the concept created connection. Normally, with games released at different stores on different days, customers couldn’t help but feel like these things sort of fell out of thin air.


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

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

Although Lockheed got a prime contract, it was the first sign that the mighty boost that the Reagan years brought to Sunnyvale’s fortunes would soon fade away.27 Yet the Valley did not leave the foreign-policy spotlight as the Reagan era came to a close. In the early summer of 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev came to Stanford for an event that sounded like a call-and-response to Reagan’s speech in Moscow two years earlier. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the West had won the Cold War. But “let us not wrangle over who won it,” Gorbachev told the large campus crowd gathered in the cavernous Memorial Auditorium. Let us instead look toward the future, for “the ideas and technologies of tomorrow are born here in California.” Gorbachev was as smitten with the Bay Area as Charles de Gaulle had been thirty years before.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

Incidentally, one of the nice things about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is that top-level American planners are finally becoming a bit more honest about some things. So for example, every year the White House puts out a big glossy document explaining to Congress why we need a huge military establishment—and for a long time it was always the same story: the Russians are coming, this-that-and-the-other-thing. Well, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they had to change the computer disk for the first time. The bottom line had to remain the same: we need a big military, a big so-called “defense” infrastructure (read: support for electronics)—but now the justification had to change. So in 1990, the reason they gave was no longer “the Russians are coming,” it was what they called “the technological sophistication of Third World powers”—especially ones in the Middle East, where they said, our problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.”


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Most migrants like George were hired into either menial labor—janitors or window cleaners or assembly-line workers—or hard labor—longshoremen, coal miners, stokers of foundries and diggers of ditches, which is what he had done before landing the assembly-line job at Campbell Soup. Many companies simply didn’t hire colored workers at all but for altogether different reasons from the South. It wasn’t because of an explicit Berlin Wall of exclusion, written into law and so engrained as to not need to be spelled out for people on either side, as in the South. Instead, in the North, companies and unions said that, however much they might want to hire colored people, their white workers just wouldn’t stand for it. And, for the sake of morale, the companies and unions weren’t going to force the issue.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

In the early 1980s, he made the seemingly absurd forecast that a little-known project called the Arpanet would become a worldwide communications network, linking together humanity in a way previously impossible. Around the same time, he made the equally ridiculous claim that the cold war, which had just heated up with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was going to end in just a few years. The Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall made Kurzweil look like a clairvoyant. “You’ll often hear people say that the future is inherently unpredictable and then they will put up some stupid prediction that never came to bear. But actually the parameters of it are highly predictable,” says Kurzweil. He isn’t arguing that he can see into the future exactly and his business plan isn’t to pick lottery numbers.


Fodor's Costa Rica 2012 by Fodor's

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The yellow colonial-style building to the east of the modern INS building is the 1912 Casa Amarilla, home of Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry (closed to the public.) The massive ceiba tree in front, planted by John F. Kennedy and the presidents of all the Central American nations in 1963, gives you an idea of how quickly things grow in the tropics. A garden around the corner on Calle 13 contains a 6-foot-wide section of the Berlin Wall donated by Germany’s foreign ministry after reunification. Ask the guard to let you into the garden if you want a closer look. | Bordered by Avdas. 7–3 and Cs. 11–17, Barrio El Carmen | 10101 | 2257–7202. Parque Morazán. Anchored by the 1920 Templo de Música (Temple of Music), a neoclassic bandstand that has become the symbol of the city, downtown’s largest park is somewhat barren, though the pink and golden trumpet trees on its northwest corner brighten things up when they bloom in the dry months.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

., ‘Electronic Warfare: British Style’, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, January-March 1996: 23–7 Maddrell, P., ‘British-American Scientific Intelligence Cooperation during the Occupation of Germany’, IØNS, 15/2 (2000): 74–95 —‘The Western Secret Services, the East German Ministry of State Security and the Building of the Berlin Wall’, IØNS, 21/5 (2006): 829–47 —‘Operation “Matchbox” and the Scientific Containment of the USSR’, in Jackson, P. and Siegel, J. (eds), Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society (Westport CT: Praeger, 2005): 173–206 Madsen, W., ‘Crypto AG: The NSA’s Trojan Whore?’


pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Indeed, the Anarchists were dedicated to little more than the informal principles of direct action and civil disobedience. In one of its few communiqués, the protest camp veterans declared: “We forced open the gate at Mas’ha to open a gap in the wall of hatred and to provide without actions a living, kicking alternative to the apartheid policy of the Israeli government. . . . The Berlin Wall was not dismantled by rulers and agreements, but by the citizens who felled it with their own hands. . . . The ethnic cleansing is occurring before our eyes and we have only one option: to use the few rights we still have from the remnants of Israeli democracy and break the racist, immoral laws.”


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once offered to make Sidney Weinberg, Goldman’s legendary leader, ambassador to the Soviet Union. “I don’t speak Russian,” Weinberg replied in turning down the president. “Who the hell could I talk to over there?” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Goldman was among the first Western banks to try to crack its market, and three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Boris Yeltsin’s new government named the firm its banking adviser. Profits proved to be elusive, however, and Goldman pulled out of the country in 1994 but would eventually return. By 1998 it had helped the Russian government sell $1.25 billion in bonds; when, two months later, after the default, the bonds proved to be virtually worthless, the firm again withdrew.


Lonely Planet Eastern Europe by Lonely Planet, Mark Baker, Tamara Sheward, Anita Isalska, Hugh McNaughtan, Lorna Parkes, Greg Bloom, Marc Di Duca, Peter Dragicevich, Tom Masters, Leonid Ragozin, Tim Richards, Simon Richmond

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, low cost airline, mass immigration, pre–internet, Steve Jobs, the High Line, Transnistria, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

May An excellent time to visit Eastern Europe, May is sunny and warm and full of things to do, but never too hot or crowded. Big destinations feel busy, though hiking areas and villages remain quiet. zInternational Labour Day, Russia Bigger than Christmas back in communist times, International Labour Day (1 May) may have dropped in status since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it's still a national holiday in Russia and several other former Soviet republics. You'll find fireworks, concerts and even military parades. 6Czech Beer Festival, Czech Republic An event most travellers won't want to miss is the Czech Beer Festival (www.ceskypivnifestival.cz), where lots of food, music and – most importantly – over 150 beers from around the country are on offer in Prague from mid- to late May. 3Prague Spring & Fringe, Czech Republic Three-week international music festival Prague Spring is the most prestigious event in the Czech capital's cultural calendar, with concerts held in an array of venues.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

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

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

But this Leviathan, though it prevents Warre, does not necessarily make its subjects’ lives much richer than the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence that people eke out under the Absent Leviathan. Nor do its subjects really “submit their wills” to the Leviathan—any more than East Europeans chanting the “Internationale” in the streets before the collapse of the Berlin Wall really submitted their wills to Soviet Russia. The implications for citizens are different in some ways, but still there is no liberty. A very different type of Leviathan, a shackled one, emerges when there is a balance between its power and society’s capacity to control it. This is the Leviathan that can resolve conflicts fairly, provide public services and economic opportunities, and prevent dominance, laying down the basic foundations of liberty.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”9 Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing.


China: A History by John Keay

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, invention of movable type, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, éminence grise

Sympathy for the deceased Hu translated itself into censure of the regime and demands for a whole gamut of Western liberal reforms. Beijing’s citizens seemed to support the protesters, the local authorities seemed ambivalent, the Politburo undecided. For six weeks the world looked on in amazement. As an alfresco spectacle, Tiananmen Square would defer only to the Berlin Wall later in the same year. The protesters in their jeans and T-shirts looked much like students anywhere; their music was familiar, their tactics standard, their cause universal. When a hundred or so went on hunger strike, amazement turned to admiration; then admiration turned to horror as the talks broke down and the tanks moved in.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Madison’s most interesting sites come in a four-block strip above 53rd Street. The tiny, vest-pocket-sized Paley Park is on the north side of East 53rd between Madison and Fifth avenues. Its soothing mini-waterfall and transparent water tunnel are juxtaposed with a haunting five-panel section of the former Berlin Wall. Around the corner, the Continental Illinois Center looks like a cross between a space rocket and a grain silo, but the Sony Building (formerly the AT&T Building), at no. 550 between 55th and 56th streets, has grabbed more headlines. A Johnson–Burgee collaboration, it follows the postmodernist theory of borrowing from historical styles: a Modernist skyscraper is sandwiched between a Chippendale top and a Renaissance base.


Fodor's Costa Rica 2013 by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

airport security, Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban sprawl

The yellow colonial-style building to the east of the modern INS building is the 1912 Casa Amarilla, home of Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry (closed to the public.) The massive ceiba tree in front, planted by John F. Kennedy and the presidents of all the Central American nations in 1963, gives you an idea of how quickly things grow in the tropics. A garden around the corner on Calle 13 contains a 6-foot-wide section of the Berlin Wall donated by Germany’s foreign ministry after reunification. Ask the guard to let you into the garden if you want a closer look. | Bordered by Avdas. 7–3 and Cs. 11–17, Barrio El Carmen | 10101. Parque Morazán. Anchored by the 1920 Templo de Música (Temple of Music), a neoclassic bandstand that has become the symbol of the city, downtown’s largest park is somewhat barren, though the pink and golden trumpet trees on its northwest corner brighten things up when they bloom in the dry months.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

1401 First Lollard Martyr 1403 Percy’s Revolt; Henry Percy killed at Shrewsbury 1406 James I of Scots 1409 Owen Glyndŵr 1411 Foundation of Guildhall in London 1413 Henry V 1415 Agincourt 1420 Treaty of Troyes; Paston Letters 1422 Henry VI 1429 Joan of Arc at Orléans 1437 James II of Scots 1450 Cade’s Rebellion 1453 End of Hundred Years War; Gutenberg Bible 1455 Wars of the Roses begin 1460 James III of Scots 1461 Edward IV c.1474 Caxton prints first book in English 1483 Richard III 1485 Henry VII; founding of the Yeomen of the Guard 1488 James IV of Scots 1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America 1509 Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon 1513 James V of Scots 1519 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 1527 Henry VIII fails in attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon 1533 Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn; Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury 1536 Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour; Wales annexed to England 1540 Henry VIII marries and divorces Anne of Cleves; marries Catherine Howard 1540 Henry VIII, King of Ireland 1542 Mary, Queen of Scots 1547 Edward VI 1549 First Book of Common Prayer 1553 Mary I 1556 Cranmer executed 1558 Elizabeth I 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots returns to Scotland from France 1562 British slave trade starts 1567 James VI, King of Scotland 1571 First anti-Catholic Penal Law 1580 Drake’s circumnavigation 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots executed 1596 Robert Cecil, Secretary of State 1600 British East India Company incorporated 1601 Essex executed 1603 James I 1603 Ralegh treason trial and imprisonment 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible 1616 Death of William Shakespeare 1618 Ralegh executed; Thirty Years War starts 1625 Charles I 1632 Lord Baltimore granted patent for the settlement of Maryland 1641 The Grand Remonstrance issued 1642 Civil War starts; Battle of Edgehill 1643 Battle of Newbury 1644 Battle of Marston Moor 1645 New Model Army established 1649 Charles I executed; massacres at Wexford and Drogheda 1651 Charles II crowned at Scone; Hobbes’ Leviathan published 1655 Jamaica captured 1658 Cromwell dies 1660 Charles II; Declaration of Breda; Pepys begins his diary 1662 The Royal Society; Boyle’s Law 1666 Fire of London 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company 1673 Test Act 1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress 1685 James II 1689 William III and Mary II 1690 Battle of the Boyne 1692 Massacre of Glencoe 1694 Bank of England 1695 Bank of Scotland 1702 Queen Anne 1704 Battle of Blenheim; capture of Gibraltar 1707 Union with Scotland 1714 George I 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1722 Walpole, first Prime Minister 1727 George II 1740 War of Austrian Succession; Arne composes ‘Rule Britannia’ 1742 Handel’s Messiah 1746 Battle of Culloden 1751 Clive captures Arcot 1755 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary 1756 Seven Years War 1759 General Wolfe dies at Battle of Quebec 1760 George III 1765 Stamp Act; Hargreaves’ spinning jenny 1767 Revd Laurence Stone’s Tristram Shandy 1768 Royal Academy of Arts founded 1772 Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Bengal 1773 Boston Tea Party 1774 Priestley isolates oxygen 1775 American Revolution – Lexington and Concord 1776 American Declaration of Independence 1779 Captain Cook killed in Hawaii 1780 Gordon Riots; Epsom Derby 1781 Battle of Yorktown 1783 Pitt the Younger PM 1788 Regency Crisis 1789 French Revolution 1792 Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man 1799 Napoleon 1801 Union with Ireland 1805 Trafalgar 1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act 1815 Waterloo 1820 George IV 1828 University of London founded 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act 1830 William IV 1832 First Reform Act 1833 Abolition of slavery in British colonies Act 1834 Houses of Parliament burned down 1836 Births, Marriages & Deaths Act 1837 Queen Victoria 1838 Public Records Office founded 1839 Bed Chamber Crisis; Opium War 1840 Prince Albert; Treaty of Waitangi 1843 Joule’s First Law 1844 Rochdale Pioneers; first telegraph line in England 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws 1847 Marks and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto 1849 Punjab conquered 1850 Public libraries; Tennyson, Poet Laureate 1854 Crimean War; British Medical Association founded 1855 Daily Telegraph founded; Palmerston PM 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (Indian Mutiny); Trollope’s Barchester Towers 1858 Canning, first Viceroy of India 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 1861 Prince Albert dies; American Civil War 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated 1867 Second Reform Act; first bicycle 1868 TUC 1869 Suez Canal opened; Cutty Sark launched 1870 Death of Dickens 1876 Victoria made Empress of India 1880 Gladstone PM 1881 First Boer War 1884 Third Reform Act 1885 Gordon dies at Khartoum 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 1891 Elementary school fees abolished 1895 Salisbury PM 1896 Daily Mail founded 1898 Omdurman 1899 Second Boer War 1900 Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius 1901 Edward VII 1903 Suffragettes 1904 Entente Cordiale 1908 Borstal opened 1909 Old Age Pensions 1910 George V 1914 Irish Home Rule; First World War 1916 Lloyd George PM 1918 RAF formed from Royal Flying Corps; Marie Stopes 1919 John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace 1920 Black and Tans; Anglican Church in Wales disestablished 1921 Irish Free State 1922 Bonar Law PM 1923 Baldwin PM 1924 First Labour Government (MacDonald PM); Baldwin PM; Lenin dies 1925 Britain joins Gold standard 1926 General Strike 1928 Women over twenty-one given vote 1929 The Depression; MacDonald PM 1931 National Government; Statute of Westminster 1932 British Union of Fascists 1933 Hitler 1935 Baldwin PM 1936 Edward VIII; George VI; Spanish Civil War 1937 Chamberlain PM 1938 Austria annexed by Germany; Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 1939 Second World War 1940 Battle of Britain; Dunkirk; Churchill PM 1942 Beveridge Report; fall of Singapore and Rangoon 1944 Butler Education Act; Normandy allied landings 1945 Attlee PM; Germany and Japan surrender 1946 UN founded; National Insurance Act; National Health Service 1947 India Independence; Pakistan formed 1948 Railways nationalized; Berlin Airlift; Ceylon (Sri Lanka) independence 1949 NATO; Irish Independence; Korean War 1951 Churchill PM 1952 Elizabeth II 1955 Eden PM; Cyprus Emergency 1956 Suez Crisis 1957 Macmillan PM 1958 Life Peerages; EEC 1959 Vietnam War; Fidel Castro 1960 Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech 1963 Douglas-Home PM; De Gaulle veto on UK EEC membership; Kennedy assassination 1964 Wilson PM 1965 Southern Rhodesia UDI 1967 Pound devalued 1969 Open University; Northern Ireland Troubles; Robin Knox-Johnston first solo, non-stop sailing circumnavigation 1970 Heath PM 1971 Decimal currency in UK 1972 Bloody Sunday, Northern Ireland 1973 Britain in EEC; VAT 1974 Wilson PM 1976 Callaghan PM; first Concorde passenger flight 1979 Thatcher PM; Rhodesian Settlement 1982 Falklands War 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev; Global warming – British report hole in ozone layer 1986 Chernobyl; Reagan–Gorbachev Zero missile summit 1987 Wall Street Crash 1988 Lockerbie 1989 Berlin Wall down 1990 John Major PM; Iraq invades Kuwait 1991 Gulf War; Helen Sharman first Briton in space; Tim Berners-Lee first website; collapse of Soviet Communism 1992 Maastricht Treaty 1994 Church of England Ordination of Women; Channel Tunnel opens 1995 British forces to Sarajevo 1996 Dolly the Sheep clone 1997 Blair PM; Diana Princess of Wales dies; Hong Kong returns to China 1998 Rolls-Royce sold to BMW; Good Friday Agreement 1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections 2001 Terrorist attacks on New York 2002 Elizabeth the Queen Mother dies 2003 Second Gulf War 2004 Asian Tsunami 2005 Freedom of Information Act; Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles wed; terrorist attacks on London 2006 Queen’s eightieth birthday 2007 Ministry of Justice created; Brown PM 2008 Northern Rock collapse 2009 Market crash; banks partly nationalized; MPs expenses scandal 2010 Cameron PM.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

And, quite remarkably, the demise of a vastly more extensive and incomparably more powerful Soviet empire was accomplished—aside from an aborted coup staged by the Communist old guard in August 19–21, 1991, by removing Gorbachev from power, when just three people died—without any violence. The Soviet Union’s European possessions (under de facto control since the end of WWII) regained their independence during a domino-like sequence that started in Poland in April 1989 and ended in late 1989: the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, the end of the Communist regimes in Sofia and Prague came on, respectively, November 10 and 28, and in Bucharest on December 22 (Fowkes 1995). The Communist Party’s control within the Soviet Union had weakened steadily during 1990. Russia declared sovereignty with a limited application of Soviet laws in June 1990 and the inevitable unraveling was made legal on December 8, 1991 at a meeting in one of the most unlikely places to dissolve an empire, in a state hunting lodge in one the continent’s last primeval forests, in Belarus near the Polish border (Plokhy 2014).


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

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

At Callen’s urging, he indulged in anonymous sex from time to time, an arrangement that soon led to an open affair with a vivacious and quick-talking schoolteacher named Carl Valentino. Throughout, Dworkin reassured Callen of his love and devotion. Callen feigned equanimity, but he told friends that Dworkin’s divided affections left him feeling like a failure “as a partner and as a person.” — OUR TELEVISIONS that winter filled with images of the Berlin Wall coming apart. Young people danced atop the cold war’s tumbling emblem, the sound of swinging hammers and popping champagne corks drowning out the weepy speeches from politicians. It wasn’t long before chunks of the wall made their way around the world as souvenirs, carried joyously through Checkpoint Charlie, suddenly with no guard in sight.


pages: 1,266 words: 278,632

Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston

Berlin Wall, business intelligence, business process, database schema, Debian, dumpster diving, failed state, fault tolerance, full text search, job automation, Kickstarter, operational security, rolling blackouts, side project, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, web application

Make sure every DBA knows how to restore your databases! Unique Database Requirements The unique backup and recovery requirements of each of the databases covered in this book could generate an entire book for each product. What, then, is the purpose of these chapters? That’s simple—to break down, once and for all, the “Berlin Wall” that exists between DBAs and SAs. Until now, if you wanted to learn about how to back up DB2, you had to buy a whole book on DB2. One of the problems with books like these is that they assume you are a DBA! The authors assume that you understand tablespaces and transaction logs and rollbacks. The result is that you get only half the story.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

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 the late 1980s plans were afoot, driven above all by Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, and his supporters in the French Socialist Party, for another round of negotations over monetary integration. Given the national interests at stake those would most likely have gone nowhere had it not been for the sudden end to the cold war. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s irresistible push for national reunification threatened to make Germany even more dominant. A currency union and irrevocable economic unification seemed to both Kohl and Mitterrand the best way of securing a much larger Germany in a peaceful and stable continent.3 As a price of surrendering the Deutschmark, the Germans exacted the promise that the new European Central Bank would continue the conservative heritage of the Bundesbank.


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

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

It was a Saturday afternoon in late 1962 or maybe early 1963-sometime in the Kennedy administration, anyway, not too long after Tracy's family had moved down from the Boston area so his father could go to work for the De- fense Department. The air in Washington was electric in those days, with all the energy and drama of a new, young administration. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, the Civil Rights marches-it was heady stuff for a fifteen-year- old. So when his dad had offered to take him along to his office that afternoon while he picked up some papers he'd forgotten to bring home, Tracy had jumped at the chance. He was still slightly awestruck at the very thought of the Pentagon.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Galleries cover the arc of the man’s life from his childhood in Dixon, Illinois, through his early days in radio and acting to his years as governor of California, although the focus is obviously on his stint as president (1980–88) in the waning years of the Cold War. The museum features re-creations of the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, Reagan family memorabilia, gifts from heads of state, a nuclear cruise missile and even a graffiti-covered chunk of the Berlin Wall. His grave is on the grounds as well. Get there via the I-405 (San Diego Fwy) north to the 118 (Ronald Reagan Fwy) west; exit at Madera Rd South, turn right on Madera and continue straight for 3 miles to Presidential Dr. Tours Esotouric HISTORY, LITERATURE ( 323-223-2767; www.esotouric.com; bus tours $58) Hip, offbeat, insightful and entertaining walking and bus tours themed around literary lions (Chandler to Bukowski), famous crime sites (Black Dahlia) and historic neighborhoods.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Ze’evi thought in terms of overall national security. Everything that could be done against the terrorists’ incursions had already been done. There wasn’t a country in the world whose military was capable of doing things the IDF could not, with the possible exception of the USSR. But even then, some people managed to breach the Berlin Wall. And so the solution was not defensive—that approach had never succeeded anywhere in the world. Any analysis would show, Ze’evi said, that the only way to finish off a war was to address its cause—in this case, Syria. Ze’evi gave three reasons that had led him to this conclusion. First, the IDF was not designed for small wars.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

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

Likewise, the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (MECW), published in Moscow, London and New York between 1975 and 2005 in fifty volumes, was aimed at a lay public. But since these editions were also published under Communist Party editorial control, their reliability is as limited as that of MEGA. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of the Institutes of Marxism–Leninism in Berlin and Moscow 1990, the continued publication of the works was entrusted to the newly established Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung in Amsterdam. For some time, the future of the project remained in doubt owing to a lack of sufficient funding.


Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series) by Noam Chomsky

active measures, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, centre right, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, information security, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, public intellectual, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman

“Withdrawal from Gaza” and other territories is understood to exclude Jewish settlements and the resources they control. And even this “permanent settlement” lies well down the road. It is understandable, then, that the Times editors, expressing the prevailing view, should see the “historic deal” as a great opportunity. It is “the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall,” chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman proclaimed on the same day. The projected arrangements represent the “triumph of realism over fanaticism and political courage over political cowardice.” “Realists” understand that in this world, you follow U.S. orders. Those who are not convinced of the justice of traditional U.S.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

The CIA was also under pressure from the mujahedin’s champions in Congress because of logistical problems that had crimped the weapons pipeline to Pakistan. In addition, the civil war now raging openly between Hekmatyar and Massoud raised questions about whether the rebels could ever unite to overthrow Najibullah. The mujahedin had not captured a single provincial capital since the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989 changed the Afghan war’s geopolitical context, making it plain that whatever danger Najibullah might represent in Kabul, he was not the vanguard of hegemonic global communism anymore. And McWilliams’s arguments about the dangers of Islamic radicalism had resonated in Washington.


pages: 1,037 words: 294,916

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

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

(the first show tune to top the pop charts in nearly a decade), the producer of the show got a court to issue a cease-and-desist order. Thereafter the tune took on an underground life: Hello, Barry, well hello, Barry, It’s so nice to have you here with us today.... The donkey brayed us into chaos From the Bay of Pigs to Laos, Said the Berlin Wall helped make the people free.... Goldwater fans circulated elaborate accounts of a “Kennedy-Lincoln Coincidence” portending inevitable Goldwater victory: Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who lost for reelection; Kennedy was assassinated and replaced by Johnson, who ... Even if Goldwater supporters could not afford it, they gave money.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Downtown Las Vegas Top Sights Fremont Street Experience C2 Sights 1Arts Factory B4 2Binion's C2 3Blue Sky Yoga B4 4El Cortez D2 5Golden Gate C2 6Golden Nugget C2 7Main Street Station C1 8Neon Museum Outdoor Galleries C2 Sleeping 9California C1 10El Cortez Cabana Suites D2 Golden Nugget (see 6) Main Street Station (see 7) Eating Aloha Specialties (see 9) Golden Gate (see 5) Golden Nugget Buffet (see 6) Grotto (see 6) Lillie's Asian Cuisine (see 6) 11Second Street Grill C2 The Flame Steakhouse (see 4) 12Triple George Grill C1 Drinking 13Beauty Bar D2 Burlesque Hall of Fame (see 14) 14Emergency Arts D2 The Beat Coffeehouse (see 14) Triple 7 Restaurant & Microbrewery (see 7) Shopping 15Attic B4 16Gamblers General Store B3 17Las Vegas Premium Outlets A3 Main Street Station CASINO (www.mainstreetcasino.com; 200 N Main St) This surprisingly elegant neo-Victorian casino hotel is adorned throughout with notable objets d’histoire under its pressed tin ceilings and elegant ceiling fans. Pick up a free Guide to Artifacts, Antiques & Artworks pamphlet from the hotel registration desk, then look for the art-nouveau chandelier from a Parisian opera house and a graffiti-covered chunk of the Berlin Wall. Binion’s CASINO (www.binions.com; 128 E Fremont St) This old-school casino hotel is best known for its ‘zero limit’ betting policy and for being the birthplace of the World Series of Poker. While its heyday is over, it’s a perfect place for beginners to learn blackjack at the low-limit ($2 and up) tables.


Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, buttonwood tree, classic study, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Easter island, job satisfaction, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, margin call, New Journalism, oil shock, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, undersea cable

People were lingering at lunch now, Scott noticed, and none of the supervisory personnel were making much of a big deal about it. The main cross-building corridor that opened to the building's courtyard was always fuller than it had been in the old days, and people never stopped looking at the big segment of Berlin Wall that had been on display for years. Especially the old hands, it seemed to Scott, who felt himself to be one of those. Well, at least he had work to do this day, and that was a welcome change. Back in his office, Chris Scott closed his drapes and loaded the slides into a projector. He could have selected only those he'd made special notes on, but this was his work for the day—perhaps the whole week if he played his cards right—and he would conduct himself with the usual thoroughness, comparing what he saw with the report from that NASA guy.


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Tourist information about the area is available from the West Belfast Tourist Information Point located inside the Culturlann Arts & Culture Centre. You might also consider taking a Black Taxi Tour ( niblacktaxitours.com) covering both sides of the Peace Line – a divide longer than the Berlin Wall. THE TROUBLES IN WEST BELFAST The Troubles in West Belfast have their origins in the nineteenth century, when the city’s population expanded dramatically as people flocked from the countryside to work in the booming new flax and linen industries. Many of these migrants were crammed into jerry-built housing in the grids of streets which still today define this part of the city.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

While Europe anticipated a new unity, Lebanon had acquired two rival governments, one led by the Christian General Michel Aoun, the other by a Sunni Muslim prime minister. Two Lebanons thus surfaced, a Christian rump state controlled by half the country’s army, and a powerless Muslim nation dependent upon Syria. As the Berlin Wall was torn down, Lebanon’s front lines grew in number. South of Sidon, below the Jezzine mountains, Shia Muslims fought for control of four broken villages, martyring each other in the very terrain they had liberated from the Israelis. Nowhere across the Middle East did the spirit of détente bless the land.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

On the Parque España’s northeast corner is the Casa Amarilla (Map; Av 7 btwn Calles 11 & 13), an elegant colonial-style house that is home to the ministry of foreign affairs (and is closed to the public). The glorious ceiba tree in front was planted by John F Kennedy during his 1963 visit to Costa Rica. If you walk around to the property’s northeast corner, you can see a graffiti-covered slab of the Berlin Wall standing in the rear garden. To the southwest of the Parque España is another park, the Parque Morazán (Map; Avs 3 & 5 btwn Calles 5 & 9), named for Francisco Morazán, the 19th-century general who attempted to unite the Central American nations under a single flag. Once a notorious center of prostitution, the park is now beautifully illuminated in the evenings.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

In other words incompetence or agenesis of the corpus callosum leads to a picture of apparently increased interconnectivity of function.16 This apparently paradoxical finding makes sense if the main purpose of the corpus callosum is to maintain separation of the hemispheres.17 Independent functioning of the hemispheres is one of the achievements of matur ity: children are, relatively speaking, split-brain subjects, with less interhemispheric independence.18 Babies and young children are less reliant on the corpus callosum: callosal myelination does not even begin until the end of the first year of life, and progresses only slowly thereafter.19 Pre-adolescent children find it relatively difficult to use their hemispheres separately, which is still further evidence of the inhibitory role played by the corpus callosum in adults.20 Interhemispheric connectivity grows during childhood and adolescence, with the result that the hemispheres become more independent.21 It may not be a coincidence that babies and young children are also more reliant on the right hemisphere, which matures earlier than the left, and it may be that it is the increasing importance of left-hemisphere function with age that necessitates the separation, in both hemispheres’ interests, of their realms of activity. The Berlin Wall that meets this need would be the increasingly efficient corpus callosum. All in all, my view is that the corpus callosum does act principally as the agent of hemisphere differentiation rather than integration, though ultimately differentiation may be in the service of integration. This complex, almost paradoxical, function at the very core of the brain, forming a bridge that nonetheless separates the worlds of the hemispheres, is captured with extraordinary prescience in one of the verses of the Hindu spiritual treatise The Upanishads: ‘In the space within the heart lies the controller of all … He is the bridge that serves as the boundary to keep the different worlds apart.’22 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HEMISPHERES What do we know of the normal working relationship of the hemispheres, in those whose brains have not been artificially split?


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Love him or hate him, the exhibits here are fascinating, spanning from his childhood in Dixon, Illinois, through his early days in radio and acting and stint as governor of California, through his presidency (1980–88). Some highlights: re-creations of the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, gifts from heads of state, a nuclear cruise missile and a graffiti-covered chunk of the Berlin Wall. Pasadena & San Gabriel Valley Resting below the lofty San Gabriel Mountains, Pasadena is a genteel city with old-time mansions, superb Arts and Crafts architecture and fine-art museums. Every New Year’s Day, it is thrust into the national spotlight during the Rose Parade. The main fun zone is Old Town Pasadena, a bustling 20-block shopping and entertainment district in handsomely restored historic Spanish colonial buildings along Colorado Blvd west of Arroyo Pkwy.


Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) by Fionn Davenport

air freight, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, centre right, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, McMansion, new economy, period drama, reserve currency, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

After you cross the busy Westlink dual carriageway, look along Townsend St, the first street on the right, and you’ll see the steel gates that mark the beginning of the so-called Peace Line, the 6m-high wall of corrugated steel, concrete and chain link that has divided the Protestant and Catholic communities of West Belfast for almost 40 years. Begun in 1970 as a ‘temporary measure’, it has outlasted the Berlin Wall and zigzags for some 4km from the Westlink to the lower slopes of Black Mountain. These days the gates in the wall remain open during the day, but most are still closed from 5pm to 8am. There are now more than 20 such barriers in Belfast, and a total of more than 40 throughout Northern Ireland, the most visible sign of the divisions that have scarred the province for so long.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Epilogue During the summer of 1990, the world was still in the euphoria over the end of the Cold War and the new, more peaceful world that it portended. For 1989 had certainly been the annus mirabilis—the miracle year—in which the international order had been remade. The East-West confrontation was over. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe had collapsed, along with the Berlin Wall itself, the great symbol of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was in the midst of a profound transformation arising not only from political and economic change but also from the eruption of long-repressed ethnic nationalisms. Democracy appeared to be taking hold in many countries where, until shortly before, such a possibility would have been dismissed as totally unrealistic.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The militarily minded may also enjoy the jungle tableau of the Gurkha Museum ( 01962-842832; www.thegurkhamuseum.co.uk; adult/senior/child £2/1/free; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, noon-4pm Sun), the Light Infantry Museum ( 01962-828550; admission free; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat, noon-4pm Sun), complete with a chunk of the Berlin Wall, and the Royal Hussars Museum ( 01962-828541; admission free; 10am-4pm Tue-Fri, noon-4pm Sat & Sun), which gallops through combat history from the Charge of the Light Brigade to armour-clad vehicles. WOLVESEY CASTLE & PALACE The fantastic, crumbling remains of early-12th-century Wolvesey Castle (EH; 023-9237 8291; admission free; 10am-5pm Apr-Sep) huddle in the protective embrace of the city’s walls, despite the building having been largely demolished in the 1680s.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

You were born too late to remember a time when the rise of totalitarianism seemed unstoppable, when one country after another fell to secret police and the thunderous knock at midnight, while the professors of free universities hailed the Soviet Union’s purges as progress. It feels as alien to you as fiction; it is hard for you to take seriously. Because, in your branch of time, the Berlin Wall fell. And if Orwell’s name is not carved into one of those stones, it should be. Orwell saw the destiny of the human species, and he put forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. Orwell’s weapon was clear writing. Orwell knew that muddled language is muddled thinking; he knew that human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA:1 In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up across Israel until Ariel Sharon began building a vast wall across the West Bank, cutting off hundreds of Palestinian villages, carving a de facto annexation into the land which was supposed to be a Palestinian state. The wall, it should be said at once, could not be called a wall by most journalists—even though it was far longer than the old Berlin Wall. “Wall” has ugly connotations of ghettoes and apartheid. So it became a “security barrier” in The New York Times and on the BBC or else, even more fancifully, a “fence.” The International Court at The Hague—to which the broken Palestinian Authority sent its spokesmen—ruled the construction illegal.