David Brooks

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pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Stigler won a Nobel Prize describing it.27 Some conservatives share the frustration of economists with the inefficiencies and redistribution of income characteristic of regulatory capture, including the conservative author and blogger Ross Douthat, writing in 2010: “In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money out of the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores…. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.”28 And here is the author and New York Times columnist David Brooks: “The legitimacy of American capitalism has rested on the fact that many people, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, got rich on the basis of what they did, not on the basis of government connections. But over the years, business and government have become more intertwined. The results have been bad for both capitalism and government.

It seems, however, that such tactics do not enjoy universal support among Republicans or conservatives. University of Chicago jurist Richard A. Posner, for example, argued in January 2010: “We need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails.”86 And conservative journalist David Brooks compared the need to achieve balanced regulation to that of fire: “a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control.”87 Deferred Prosecution Windfalls for Republican Insiders The Reagan era’s use of fines and deferred prosecutions also saw the creation of a new tactic that rewarded well-connected Republicans.

In what is a chilling and revealing quote documenting the devolution of the America business culture, Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, noted, “Today, a CEO would be embarrassed to admit he sacrificed profits to protect employees or a community.”39 An important consequence of the Us vs. Them culture of Reaganomics has been deterioration in the broader American culture. Main Street America has morphed into Mean Street America, with good jobs and good wages increasingly scarce. This culture offends Democrats, as one would expect, but also a number of conservatives, such as David Brooks writing in June 2008: “The United States…. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal. Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

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

Peake, “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 26, no. 6, 1990. 10 Mackenzie Weinger, “Poll: 73 Percent of Americans Say Country Headed in Wrong Direction,” Politico, August 10, 2011, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61031.html. 11 “New Low: Just 14% Think Today’s Children Will Be Better Off Than Their Parents,” Rasmussen Reports, July 29, 2012, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/jobs_employment/july_2012/new_low_just_14_think_today_s_children_will_be_better_off_than_their_parents. 12 Matea Gold, “2012 Campaign Set to Cost a Record $6 Billion,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2012. 13 Thomas Friedman, “Third Party Rising,” New York Times, November 3, 2010. 14 David Brooks, “Pundit under Protest,” New York Times, June 13, 2011. 15 Olympia Snowe, “Olympia Snowe: Why I’m Leaving the Senate,” Washington Post, March 1, 2012. 16 Monica Davey, “Lugar Loses Primary Challenge in Indiana,” New York Times, May 8, 2012. 17 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Weighing the Effect of an Exit of Centrists,” New York Times, October 8, 2012. 18 Alan Murray, “A Raging Moderate Finds Neither Party Is Interested in Him,” Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2004. 19 John P. Avlon, “What Independent Voters Want,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2008. 20 David Brooks, “Party No. 3,” New York Times, August 10, 2006. 21 “Congress Approval Ties All-Time Low at 10%,” Gallup Politics, August 14, 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/156662/congress-approval-ties-time-low.aspx. 22 “Quigley Right Choice for 5th District Seat,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 15, 2009. 23 “Price of Admission,” Historical Elections, OpenSecrets.org, http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/stats.php?

Democratic candidates have become beholden to interest groups with positions that are inimical to the supposed core values of the party. One cannot support the current demands of America’s teachers’ unions while simultaneously claiming to stand for poor and minority children. New York Times columnist David Brooks nicely summarized the failure of either political party to come to grips with America’s economic reality: The Republican growth agenda—tax cuts and nothing else—is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. Giant tax cuts—if they were affordable—might boost overall growth, but they would do nothing to address the structural problems that are causing a working class crisis. . . .

We do need to raise taxes on polluting activities, particularly the emission of carbon. We do need to implement institutional changes that will make government more efficient and responsive. In more normal times, these are the kinds of things that pragmatic Democrats and Republicans would agree to do together. Right now, they are not getting it done. In the words of David Brooks, it is time for “an insurgency of the rational.”20 The American political landscape has evolved before. Like everything else, political parties have a life span. What happened to the Whigs? The Federalists? Life changes. The country changes. Political parties should change too. The Strategy Conventional wisdom suggests that the American political system is hostile to all third parties.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

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

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

The economy had tanked, trillions in savings had been flushed away, and great financial houses had suddenly crashed. Reagan-style capitalism was in disgrace. In the 2008 presidential campaign, not just Barack Obama and Joe Biden but also John McCain and Sarah Palin raged against the “greed and irresponsibility” of Wall Street. “Who knew?” was not good enough. In an early 2009 column, conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times addressed the question of whether the root cause of our financial calamity was greed, stupidity, or both. Worried that the greed story might end with calls to “smash the oligarchy” or at least “restructure the financial sector,” Brooks opted for stupidity. Bankers were simply in over their heads, he wrote.

The rest is history: the crash of Bear Stearns, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the panicked response of the Republican White House and a Democratic Congress to pour massive amounts of money into the banks, investment companies, and insurance firms that were deemed “too big to fail.” Although there undoubtedly were challenged intellects among the public and business leaders who were most responsible for the economic crisis, David Brooks’s stupidity explanation does not fit. As John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger, and many, many other economists, such as Hyman Minsky, had shown, financial excesses were built into the modern economy. Economists might have different ways of explaining the boom-and-bust cycle, but it is inevitable: what goes up must come down.

William Cohan, “A Tsunami of Excuses,” New York Times, March 11, 2009. 7. Quoted in Kevin Phillips, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism (New York: Viking, 2008), 180. 8. Thomas L. Friedman, “Palin’s Kind of Patriotism,” New York Times, October 7, 2008. 9. David Brooks, “Greed and Stupidity,” New York Times, April 2, 2009. 10. Bill Marsh, “A History of Home Values,” New York Times, August 26, 2006, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/26/weekinreview/27leon_graph2.large.gif. 11. Joe Nocera, “The Big Lie,”New York Times, December 23, 2011. Italics mine. 12.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

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

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

Bobos in Paradise The New Upper Class and How They Got There David Brooks SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY Preface This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2004 Bobos in Paradise Praise for Bobos in Paradise “An absolute sparkler of a book, which should establish David Brooks—not that he needs establishing—as the smart, fun-to-read social critic of his generation.” —Christopher Buckley “In his briskly written, clever Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks astutely describes a new-ish American elite…. An enormously accomplished and perceptive reporter.”

., 118–20, 123, 127, 133, 135, 188, 232 Wilson, Edmund, 142, 147, 201 Winkler, Rabbi Gershon, 224 Wolfe, Alan, 248–49 women, education of, 29–31 Woolf, Virginia, 146 World War II, 22, 24, 32 Yergin, Daniel, 148 Zola, Emile, 66, 143 About the Author DAVID BROOKS is a political journalist and “comic sociologist” who writes a biweekly Op-Ed column for The New York Times. He appears regularly on PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and NPR’s All Things Considered. Formerly a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, his articles have also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Men’s Health, and other publications. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Advertisement Also available by David Brooks 0-7432-2739-5 Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat: guys shopping for barbecue grills, doing that special walk American men do when in the presence of lumber; super-efficient übermoms who chair school auctions, organize the PTAs, and weigh less than their kids.

An enormously accomplished and perceptive reporter.” —Benjamin Schwarz, Los Angeles Times “David Brooks has written a smart, funny book about the new meritocracy, the information-age elite whose members … set the tone of our time.” —Diane White, The Boston Globe “A mixture of heartfelt fondness and dead-on ridicule, animated by an energetic glass-half-full ambivalence. The book is a pleasure, simultaneously bracing and comforting.” —Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review “A breezy, well-argued explanation for why affluent, well-educated people crave sub-zero refrigerators. Clever observations … and gentle fun.” —Deirdre Donahue, USA Today “As both comedy and sociology, Bobos in Paradise succeeds nicely.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

Also by David Brooks ON PARADISE DRIVE: HOW WE LIVE NOW (AND ALWAYS HAVE) IN THE FUTURE TENSE BOBOS IN PARADISE: THE NEW UPPER CLASS AND HOW THEY GOT THERE Copyright © 2011 by David Brooks All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Brooks, David The social animal: the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement / David Brooks. p. cm.

Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2006), xvi. 8 75 percent of the anti-Western Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 73–75. 9 Olivier Roy argues Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 10 Harold pointed out David Brooks, “The Wisdom We Need to Fight AIDS,” New York Times, June 12, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12brooks.html. 11 a hospital in Namibia David Brooks, “In Africa, Life After AIDS,” New York Times, June 9, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/opinion/09brooks.html. 12 So the market had partially David Brooks, “This Old House,” New York Times, December 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/opinion/09brooks.html. 13 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Daniel Drezner, “The BLS Weighs in on Outsourcing,” DanielDrezner.com, June 10, 2004, http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001365.html and “Extended Mass Layoffs Associated with Domestic and Overseas Relocations, First Quarter 2004 Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Press Release, June 10, 2004, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/reloc.nr0.htm. 14 Pankaj Ghemawat Pankaj Ghemawat, “Why the World Isn’t Flat,” Foreign Policy, February 14, 2007, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2007/02/14/why_the_world_isnt_flat?

., “Childhood Poverty: Specific Associations with Neurocognitive Development,” Brain Research 1110, no. 1 (September 19, 2006): 166–174, http://cogpsy.skku.ac.kr/cwb-bin/CrazyWWWBoard.exe?db-newarticle&mode=download&num=3139&file=farah_2006.pdf. 8 Research with small mammals Shirley S. Wang, “This Is Your Brain Without Dad,” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754804574491811861197926.html. 9 Students from the poorest David Brooks, “The Education Gap,” New York Times, September 25, 2005, http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/opinion/25brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks. 10 economist James J. Heckman Flavio Cunha and James J. Heckman, “The Economics and Psychology of Inequality and Human Development,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 7, nos. 2–3 (April 2009): 320–64, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.320?


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

In fact, they show admirable concern for the interests of the social class they represent. It’s just that the class they care about the most doesn’t happen to be the same one Truman, Roosevelt, and Bryan cared about. THE HIGH-BORN AND THE WELL-GRADUATED In his syndicated New York Times column for November 21, 2008, David Brooks saluted president-elect Obama for the savvy personnel choices he was then announcing. This was before Brooks had become one of the president’s favorite columnists; before the fabled “bromance” between the two men burst into the raging blaze of mutual admiration it would one day become. But the spark was there already.

Brooks did not point out that choosing so many people from the same class background—every single one of them, as he said, was a professional—might by itself guarantee closed minds and ideological uniformity. Nobody else pointed this out, either. We always overlook the class interests of professionals because we have trouble thinking of professionals as a “class” in the first place; like David Brooks, we think of them merely as “the best.” They are where they are because they are so smart, not because they’ve been born to an earldom or something. Truth be told, lots of Americans were relieved to see people of talent replace George W. Bush’s administration of hacks and cronies back in 2008.

Still, if we want to understand what’s wrong with liberalism, what keeps this movement from doing something about inequality or about our reversion to a nineteenth-century social pattern, this is where we’re going to have to look: at the assumptions and collective interests of professionals, the Democratic Party’s favorite constituency. The historian Christopher Lasch—a kind of cosmic opposite of David Brooks—wrote in 1965 that “modern radicalism or liberalism can best be understood as a phase of the social history of the intellectuals.”3 My goal in this book is to bring Lasch’s dictum up to date: the deeds and positions of the modern Democratic Party, I will argue, can best be understood as a phase in the social history of the professionals.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

All rights reserved. CASS SUNSTEIN: Excerpt from a toast given by Leon Wieseltier at the wedding of Cass Sunstein to Samantha Power. Used by permission. By DAVID BROOKS On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement The Road to Character ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID BROOKS writes an op-ed column for The New York Times, teaches at Yale University, and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s Meet the Press.

Copyright © 2015 by David Brooks All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpt from Halakhic Man by Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), copyright © 1983 by the Jewish Publication Society. Excerpt from George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880–1939 by Forrest C. Pogue (New York: Viking Books, 1963), copyright © 1963 and copyright renewed 1991 by George C. Marshall Research Foundation.

Marshall Research Foundation. Permission credits can be found on this page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brooks, David. The road to character / David Brooks. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8129-9325-7 eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64503-0 1. Character. 2. Virtues. 3. Humility. I. Title. BF818.B764 2015   170'.44—dc23   2015001791 eBook ISBN 9780679645030 www.atrandom.com eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman Cover Design: Eric White Cover Illustration: Ben Wiseman v4.1 a CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright INTRODUCTION: ADAM II CHAPTER 1: THE SHIFT CHAPTER 2: THE SUMMONED SELF CHAPTER 3: SELF-CONQUEST CHAPTER 4: STRUGGLE CHAPTER 5: SELF-MASTERY CHAPTER 6: DIGNITY CHAPTER 7: LOVE CHAPTER 8: ORDERED LOVE CHAPTER 9: SELF-EXAMINATION CHAPTER 10: THE BIG ME Dedication ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES PERMISSION CREDITS By David Brooks About the Author INTRODUCTION: ADAM II Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

CityLab, February 23, 2016. A series of studies by the economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren…: Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” Equality of Opportunity, May 2015. David Brooks described such towns vividly…: David Brooks, “What’s the Matter with Republicans?” New York Times, July 4, 2017. CHAPTER 12: MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN … when manufacturing work becomes less available…: David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men,” National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2017.

The Southcentral Foundation… treats health problems and behavioral problems as tied together…: Joanne Silberner, “The Doctor Will Analyze You Now,” Politico, August 9, 2017. CHAPTER 22: BUILDING PEOPLE “Character is the main object of education”: David Brooks, “Becoming a Real Person,” New York Times, September 8, 2014. … William James wrote around the same time that character and moral significance are built…: David Brooks, “Becoming a Real Person,” New York Times, September 8, 2014. SAT scores have declined significantly in the last 10 years: Nick Anderson, “SAT Scores at Lowest Level in 10 Years, Fueling Worries about High Schools,” Washington Post, September 3, 2015

Finally, there are the small towns on the periphery, places that feel like they have truly been left behind. The ambient economic activity is low. There’s a rawness to them, where you sense that human beings are closer to a state of nature. They have their heads down and are just doing whatever it takes to get by. David Brooks described such towns vividly in a New York Times op-ed: Today these places are no longer frontier towns, but many of them still exist on the same knife’s edge between traditionalist order and extreme dissolution… Many people in these places tend to see their communities… as an unvarnished struggle for resources—as a tough world, a no-illusions world, a world where conflict is built into the fabric of reality… The sins that can cause the most trouble are not the social sins—injustice, incivility, etc.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” www.africa.upenn.edu. 149 Conservative commentator Tony Blankley: Left, Right and Center, 15 Jan. 2010, www.kcrw.com. 150 As America’s Misery Index soars: www.miseryindex.us. 151 “We have to lean on one another …”: Barack Obama, eulogy for West Virginia Miners, 25 Apr. 2010, www.whitehouse.gov. 152 David Brooks has written about the need: David Brooks, “The Broken Society,” 18 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com. 153 “Volunteering, especially among professional classes and the young”: Philip Blond “Cameron’s ‘Big Society,’ ” 25 Apr. 2010, www.guardian.co.uk. 154 In 2002 in San Francisco’s Mission district: “About 826,” www.826valencia.org. 155 In Brooklyn, New York, FEAST: Danny LaChance, “An Idea Grows in Brooklyn,” University of Minnesota Alumni Association, spring 2010, www.minnesotaalumni.org. 156 Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor for the Economist: Howard Davies, “A New Take on Giving,” 10 Jan. 2009, www.guardian.co.uk. 157 Social entrepreneurs pinpoint social problems: Caroline Hsu, “Entrepreneur for Social Change,” 31 Oct. 2005, www.usnews.com. 158 Providing microcredit to small businesses: Devin Leonard, “Microcredit?

But the losers in those bets weren’t Goldman Sachs investors—they were millions of Americans whose sole crime was to optimistically buy into the American Dream, only to find it had been replaced by a sophisticated scam. In November 2008, as the initial aftershocks of the economic earthquake were being felt, New York Times columnist David Brooks predicted the rise of a new social class—“the formerly middle class”—made up of those who had just joined the middle class at the end of the boom, only to fall back when the recession began.6 “To them,” he wrote, “the gap between where they are and where they used to be will seem wide and daunting.”

As America’s Misery Index soars, so must our Empathy Index.150 THE EMPATHY INDEX: FROM THE LOCAL TO THE VIRTUAL “We have to lean on one another and look out for one another and love one another and pray for one another,” Barack Obama said when he delivered the eulogy for the fallen West Virginia miners in April 2010.151 This is a call that transcends left and right political divisions. David Brooks has written about the need to replace our “atomized, segmented society” with a society “oriented around relationships and associations”—an approach advocated by conservative British writer Phillip Blond in his book Red Tory.152 “Volunteering, especially among professional classes and the young,” Blond wrote, “has doubled in recent months”—proof, he suggests, that “the wish to make a difference is a common and rising aspiration.”153 Those who are working to address the devastation in their own communities are willing to experiment, try many things, fail, and try again, the way you do when you really care.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

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

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

Gazzaniga, Human, Harper Perennial, 2008, p. 215. 73–74 Even today, we remain … more than two million: J. Anderson Thompon Jnr, Why We Believe in God(s), Pitchstone, 2011, pp. 34–37. 74 two hundred and fifty thousand cells a minute: David Brooks, The Social Animal, Short Books, 2011, p. 30. 74 ‘an alien kind of computational material’: David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Canongate, 2011, p. 1. 74 capable of receiving millions of pieces of information at any given moment: David Brooks, The Social Animal, Short Books, 2011, p. x, quoting Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia. 74 One cubic millimetre: Email to author from Professor Chris Frith. 74 It has eighty-six billion of these cells: James Randerson, ‘How many neurons make a human brain?

Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, Harper Perennial, 1998, p. 8. 75 And yet, he continues, ‘We know so little about it’: V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, Harper Perennial, 1998, p. 83. 75 Other mammals give birth to their young when their brains have developed: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Arrow, 2006, p. 52. 75 babies create around 1.8 million synapses per second: David Brooks, The Social Animal, Short Books, 2011, p. 47. 75 Throughout childhood, the brain is extraordinarily alive: Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture, MIT Press, 2008, p. 43. 75 In his book Brain and Culture Professor Bruce E. Wexler writes: Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture, MIT Press, 2008, p. 5. 76 up to 90 per cent of what you are seeing right now: Richard Gregory, ‘Brainy Mind’, British Medical Journal 317 (1998), pp. 1693–95. 76 When writer Jeff Warren was trained to ‘wake up’: Jeff Warren, Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, Oneworld, 2007, p. 117. 77 The light is not out there: David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Canongate, 2011, p. 40. 77 The music … rose petal has no colour: Richard Gregory, ‘Brainy Mind’, British Medical Journal 317, pp. 1693–95 (1998). 77 in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith: Chris Frith, Making up the Mind, Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 78 In a startling 1974 experiment that tested these principles: M.

Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, Belknap Harvard, 2002, p. 24. 81 Professor John Gray has it at ‘perhaps 14 million’: John Gray, Straw Dogs, Granta, 2002, p. 66. 81 As V. S. Ramachandran writes, ‘The brain must have some way …’: V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, Harper Perennial, 1998, p. 134. 81 the maximum number of points of information we are able to appreciate consciously: David Brooks, The Social Animal, Short Books, 2011, p. x. 81 ‘One option is to revise your story …’ writes Ramachandran: V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, Harper Perennial, 1998, p. 134. 81 cartoon characters, loved ones and historical characters: Todd E. Feinberg, Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 9–10. 82 Ten per cent of elderly people … similar processes: Chris Frith, Making up the Mind, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 30. 82 Dr Clarence W.


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

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

In 1994, in The Bell Curve, the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I discussed the driving forces behind this phenomenon, the increasing segregation of the American university system by cognitive ability and the increasing value of brainpower in the marketplace.2 We labeled the new class “the cognitive elite.” In 2000, David Brooks brought an anthropologist’s eye and a wickedly funny pen to his description of the new upper class in Bobos in Paradise. Bobos is short for “bourgeois bohemians.” Traditionally, Brooks wrote, it had been easy to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the bohemians. “The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones.

The latent propensity to create a different culture existed, but the intellectuals of Harvard Square didn’t have the critical mass to reshape the community in the ways that their tastes and preferences would reshape it when a critical mass materialized.7 The New-Upper-Class Culture Over the next few decades, they got that critical mass, and the result was becoming visible by the late 1980s, when thirtysomething began. By the end of the 1990s, the new culture had fully blossomed. Its mise-en-scène is captured in Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks’s description of the transformation of Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he had attended high school in the late 1970s. Wayne is one of Philadelphia’s famous Main Line communities. When Brooks had lived there, the business district had been an unremarkable place with a few restaurants with names like L’Auberge, a few tasteful clothing stores with names like the Paisley Shop, and a small assortment of pharmacies, grocery stores, and gas stations that tended to the day-to-day needs of the affluent residents of Wayne.

The best I can do is use the DDB Life Style data that were provided to Robert Putnam in the research for Bowling Alone and are now available to other scholars.11 That database does not permit us to isolate the top few centiles—the highest income code is $100,000—but it does give a quantitative measure of the relationship between income, education, and a wide variety of tastes and preferences. I also continue to draw heavily on the work of David Brooks and Richard Florida. Both Bobos in Paradise and The Rise of the Creative Class, along with their other books, have extensive documentation, some quantitative and some qualitative, for the generalizations they draw about the tastes and preferences of their Bobos and Creative Class, respectively, and my endnotes contain references to their discussions.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

As time goes on, educated people are more likely to associate only with other educated people, to live in the same parts of town as other graduates, to marry other educated people and to pass on their advantages to their children. In this way, university education and the social capital and respect it brings with it has become almost a birthright of the professional class. Academics call this process ‘assortative mating’ or ‘associative mating’, which, as cultural commentator David Brooks has pointed out, has meant that marriage announcements in major newspapers have started to look like law firm mergers. A number of studies have shown that recent decades have been marked by a decline in marriages across educational divides and that this might also have contributed to a rise in income inequality.

Where the end goal was once, correctly, the elimination of prejudice and a move to a colour-blind society, modern identity politics seems to thrive on division and difference. Often, an excessive policing of language and a desire to maximise differences risks making a virtue out of such division and ignoring the importance of common bonds and solidarity. Identity politics is too often an ‘all or nothing’ concept that maximises conflict and eschews moderation. As David Brooks has argued, the main issue with wokeness is that ‘it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it … To make a problem seem massively intractable is to inspire separation – building a wall between you and the problem – not a solution.’3 By seeing differences as defining and virtuous, and prejudice as inevitable and intractable, woke politics risks baking in division.

Instead, it must be done by building a coalition that crosses sexuality, race and gender lines and accepts that the vast majority of people, regardless of identity don’t want to denigrate British history nor divide the country. Notes 1 Jeremy Bohonos, ‘Critical race theory and working-class white men’, Gender, Work and Organization (2020), vol. 28, no. 1. 2 Mason, ‘Corbynism is over’. 3 David Brooks, ‘The problem with wokeness’, Seattle Times, 8 June 2018. 4 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020), p. 12. 5 Rory Tingle, ‘Outrage as controversial taxpayer-funded black studies professor who says Britain is “built on racism” claims Churchill was “a white supremacist” in debate’, Daily Mail, 12 February 2020. 6 Dan Falvey, ‘Oxford lecturer doesn’t want UK to find coronavirus vaccine due to political correctness’, Daily Express, 24 April 2021. 7 Edward Said, ‘A window on the world’, The Guardian, 2 August 2003. 8 Trevor Phillips, ‘When you erase a nation’s past, you threaten its future’, The Times, 18 September 2020. 9 Craig Simpson, ‘Churchill college panel claims wartime PM was a white supremacist leading an empire “worse than the Nazis”’, Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2021. 10 ‘Keele manifesto for decolonizing the curriculum’, Pluto Journals (2018), vol. 5, nos 1–2, pp. 97–9. 11 See the ‘Decolonise Education’ section of the NUS website. 12 Gurminder K.


pages: 197 words: 59,656

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer

Albert Einstein, clean water, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Flynn Effect, hedonic treadmill, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer: altruism, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, trolley problem, William MacAskill, young professional

The Psychology of Earning to Give In 2013 an article in the Washington Post featured Jason Trigg, an MIT computer science graduate working in finance and giving half of his salary to the Against Malaria Foundation. Trigg was described as part of “an emerging class of young professionals in America and Britain” for whom “making gobs of money is the surest way to save the world.”6 In the New York Times the columnist David Brooks wrote that Trigg seemed to be “an earnest, morally serious young man” who might well save many lives. Nevertheless, Brooks urged caution. He warned, first, that our daily activities change us, and by working in a hedge fund your ideals could slip so that you become less committed to giving. Second, he thought that choosing a profession that does not arouse your passion for the sake of an “abstract, faraway good” might leave you loving humanity in general but not the particular humans around you.

When I learned that I could spend my exorbitant monthly gym membership (I don’t even want to tell you how much it cost) on curing blindness instead, the only thought I had was, ‘Why haven’t I been doing this all along?’ That question changed my life forever. I rethought all my financial priorities. Because sentimentalism had ruled my charitable choices up to that point, Effective Altruism was like a beam of clarity.”3 The New York Times columnist David Brooks recognized the intellectual basis of effective altruism—and was clearly uncomfortable with it—when he was criticizing the idea of “earning to give”: “If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way.

Philipp Gruissem provided information in an email to the author, July 24, 2014; see also Lee Davy, “A Life Outside Poker: Philipp Gruissem—An Effective Altruist,” February 19, 2014, http://calvinayre.com/2014/02/19/poker/philipp-gruissem-life-outside-of-poker-ld-audio-interview/. 6. Dylan Matthews, “Join Wall St., Save the World,” Washington Post, May 31, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/31/join-wall-street-save-the-world/. 7. David Brooks, “The Way to Produce a Person,” New York Times, June 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/brooks-the-way-to-produce-a-person.html?_r=2&. 8. The preceding paragraphs are based on emails to the author from the people mentioned, dating between January 2013 and July 2014. 9. Cartoon by P.


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

Rivington, 1801), pp. 57 and 59. 34 “the institutionalist has a deep reverence”: See David Brooks, “What Life Asks of Us,” New York Times, January 26, 2009. 35 “Americans’ distrust of politicians”: See “Farewell Address by Senator Christopher Dodd, The Senate Chamber,” Federal News Service, December 29, 2010. 36 “ ‘bankers, bankers, bankers’ ”: See Matthew Dalton, “A Banker’s Plaintive Wail,” Davos Live, Wall Street Journal Blogs, January 27, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/davos/2011/01/27/a-bankers-plaintive-wail/, accessed January 19, 2012. 37 “My own trust in our political leaders is at a personal low”: David Brooks and Dick Cavett, “In Whom Can We Trust?”

The revolutionaries, Burke explained, had “pulled down to the ground their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures” leaving the door open to “an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.” Institutionalists live in fear of a society without central repositories of authority, one that could collapse into mob rule at any time. The New York Times columnist David Brooks is institutionalism’s most accessible advocate (the Times op-ed page contains multitudes) and in 2009 he laid out its vision. Citing the political scientist Hugh Heclo, who wrote the book On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks writes that “the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of … Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior.”

What divides the institutionalist from the insurrectionist is a disagreement over whether the greatest threat we face is distrust—a dark and nihilistic tendency that will produce a society bankrupted of norms and order—or whether the greater threat is the actual malfeasance and corruption of the pillar institutions themselves. But even the most ardent institutionalists have to admit that things aren’t working. “My own trust in our political leaders is at a personal low,” David Brooks wrote on the Times’ website in 2010. “And I actually know and like these people. I just think they are trapped in a system that buries their good qualities and brings out the bad.” Ultimately, whether you align yourself with the institutionalist or the insurrectionist side of the debate comes down to just how rotten you think our current pillar institutions and ruling class are.


pages: 342 words: 86,256

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This is a concept that is both stunningly obvious—cities exist, after all, because people benefit from coming together—and tantalizingly challenging to prove.● This hasn’t kept it from the lips of some of our leading thinkers, including Stewart Brand, Edward Glaeser, David Brooks, and Malcolm Gladwell. Speaking at the Aspen Institute, David Brooks pointed out how most U.S. patent applications, when they list similar patents that influenced them, point to other innovators located less than twenty-five miles away. He also mentioned a recent experiment at the University of Michigan, where “researchers brought groups of people together face to face and asked them to play a difficult cooperation game.

Leinberger, “Federal Restructuring.” 29. Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, Carjacked, 207. 30. Leinberger, Option, 77–78, and “Here Comes the Neighborhood”; Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, 143. 31. Jon Swartz, “San Francisco’s Charm Lures High-Tech Workers.” 32. David Brooks, Lecture, Aspen Institute; and David Brooks, “The Splendor of Cities.” 33. Mapes, 268. 34. Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” 3. 35. Ibid., 4. 36. Hope Yen, “Suburbs Lose Young Whites to Cities”; Leinberger, Option, 170. 37. Ibid. WHY JOHNNY CAN’T WALK 1. Jim Colleran, “The Worst Streets in America.” 2.

●According to the census, Portland’s bicycling mode share is 5.8 percent, and local studies place it at just under 8 percent. The national average is 0.4 percent. ■“The Young and the Restless,” 34. As the number of college graduates in a metropolitan area increases by 10 percent, individuals’ earnings increase by 7.7. This applies even to non–college graduates in the city because their productivity rises, too (David Brooks, “The Splendor of Cities”). ●More than twenty-five years ago, William Whyte’s research tracked the stock performance of thirty-eight New York City companies that chose to relocate to the suburbs, and found that they appreciated at less than half the rate of thirty-five similar companies that had stayed put (Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center, 294–95).


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 1972, at the age of seventy-two, suffering from insomnia and unsettled by the fame that the Nobel Prize had brought him, Kawabata killed himself by putting his head in a gas oven. As a practitioner of Zen, he did not believe in an afterlife. But perhaps he believed in the afterlife of art. And he chose well the month of his death – April, as the cherry blossom flowered. (2008) A Hesitant Radical in the Age of Trump: David Brooks David Brooks is often called the in-house conservative at the liberal New York Times but his writings are much more interesting than that reductive label would suggest. Unlike many Republicans, he is not an anti-government Randian. He rejects Trumpism but understands what has enabled it. In recent years, his probing twice-weekly columns have become more preoccupied with ethical, philosophical and theological questions.

Incremental improvements and progress are possible, but not inevitable. What is gained can just as easily be lost – but what is lost can also be regained. One should accept the complexity of the world and the limits of our understanding. Moderation is desirable, especially in this age of extremes. In the words of the American commentator David Brooks, ‘Being a moderate does not mean picking something mushy in the middle, but picking out the strong policies at either end, because politics is essentially about balance, getting the balance right.’ For the political philosopher and New Statesman writer John Gray, ‘politics is the pursuit of a succession of temporary remedies to recurring human evils’.

I’ve also changed my view about the capability of central government to get everything right. I have much more confidence in strong local government, both to make successes and also to get things wrong but then be held to account.’ He joked about discovering his inner Michael Heseltine, and he was interested in, to adapt a phrase of the New York Times columnist David Brooks, ‘building relationships across differences’. Consider the Northern Powerhouse project. Richard Leese, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, told me that he considered Osborne to be ‘a very political animal’. And yet, he added, ‘here’s a right-wing Chancellor supporting a northern Labour authority.


pages: 519 words: 142,851

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine, David Brooks, gun show loophole, Kickstarter, McMansion, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Timothy McVeigh, white flight

Other experts brought in by the FBI cooperated as well, including Dr. Hare, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and others who spoke off the record. On the fifth anniversary of the massacre, a summary of their analysis was published. New York Times columnist David Brooks devoted an op-ed piece to the team’s conclusions. Tom Klebold read it. He didn’t like it. He sent David Brooks an e-mail saying so. Brooks was struck by how loyal Tom still felt toward Dylan. After several exchanges, Tom and Sue agreed to sit down with Brooks to discuss their boy and his tragedy—the first and only media interview any of the four parents has ever given.

Yet they had just read the analysis by some of the top experts in North America; they had dismissed it for providing the wrong explanation. They complained that Dr. Fuselier had assessed their son without interviewing them. Fuselier was dying to. Mostly, the four parents remain a mystery. They have chosen that path. But David Brooks spent enough time with the Klebolds to form a distinct impression, and he has proven himself a good judge of character. He concluded his column with this assessment: Dylan left Tom and Sue to face terrible consequences. “I’d say they are facing them bravely and honorably.” The Klebolds wanted to understand what happened.

Jeff Moores, Marilyn Saltzman, Rick Kaufman, Keith Abbot, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins helped in many ways. So many volunteers pitched in at my Web sites, especially Melisande, Greg Smith, and the moderators, tech staff, artists, and editors. Thanks to the writers and bloggers who featured my work, especially David Brooks, Hanna Rosin, Jeralyn Merritt, Duncan Black, Stephen Green, Scott Rosenberg, Will Leitch, Rolf Potts, Michelangelo Signorile, Cyn Shepard, and all the members of the Brokeback forum and Open Salon. Ten years on a massacre can be tough on the soul. Great friends got me through. Extra thanks to Tito Negron, Gregg Trostel, Elizabeth Geoghegan, Staci Amend, Tom Kotsines, Jonathan Oldham, Patrick Brown, Jessica Yoo, Miles Harvey, Kevin Davis, Bill Kelly, Maureen Harrington, Andy Marusak, Tim Vigil, Karen Auvinen, Tom Willison, Pat Patton, Scott Kunce, Greg Dobbin, Ira Kleinberg, Justin Griffin, Chuck Roesel, Bill Lychack, Alex Morelos, the cabin group, Natalie and the Muckrakers in New Orleans, my eight siblings, seven nieces and nephews, and my parents, Matt and Joan Cullen.


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

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

We have Walter Lippmann, the famous leading public intellectual of the twentieth century, also a progressive, saying that we’ve got to protect the responsible men, the intelligent minority, from the “trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”25 That’s what the huge public relations industry is devoted to. In late 2011, New York Times columnist David Brooks reported that a Gallup poll showed that in answer to the question “Which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future—big business, big labor, or big government?” close to 65 percent of respondents said the government and 26 percent said corporations.26 Is that an example of the persuasion and manufacturing of consent that you alluded to?

If you look a little bit beyond that question and you ask, “What do you want the government to do?” the answer will be, “Stop bailing out the banks. That’s why I hate the government. Don’t bail out the banks. Stop freeing the rich from taxes. I want more taxes on the rich. Increase spending on health and education.” And so on down the line. So yes, the question is framed so that people like David Brooks can draw this conclusion. Take welfare. There’s strong public opposition to welfare. On the other hand, there’s strong public support for what welfare does. So if you ask the question, “Should we spend more on welfare?” No. “Should we spend more on aid to women with dependent children?” Yes.27 That’s successful propaganda.

Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 24. 24. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2005), p. 127. 25. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p.91. 26. David Brooks, “Midlife Crisis Economics,” New York Times, 26 December 2011. Elizabeth Mendes, “In U.S., Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level,” Gallup, 12 December 2011. 27. See Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Question Wording,” no date, available at http://www.people-press.org/methodology/questionnaire-design/question-wording/. 28.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

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

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

Desperate parents compromise their principles in order to spare their children rejection. But it is the system itself that must be rejected. True merit cannot be bought—and admission should not be either. —Originally published October 29, 2013 College Is a Promise the Economy Does Not Keep In 2000, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a sociological study of the United States that now reads like science fiction. Bobos in Paradise chronicled how a new upper class of “Bobos”—bourgeois bohemians—struggled to navigate life’s dazzling options in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As presidential candidates Al Gore and George W.

College does not offer a better future, but a less worse one. College is not a cure for economic insecurity, but a symptom of the broader plague of credentialism. In an op-ed for New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells cites the popularity of French economist Thomas Piketty to claim that the questions David Brooks and others raised “about the culture of the meritocracy, about what kinds of people got ahead in American life” were “obsolete.” America’s new language is economics, he writes—oblivious to the fact that economics is, and always has been, the language of meritocracy. “The Bobo meritocracy will not easily be toppled, even if some group of people were to rise up and conclude that it should be,” Brooks wrote in 2000.

Amplification is tied to prestige, meaning that where you publish—and what privileges you already have—gives your words disproportionate influence. The terms of public debate are rarely set by the public. “Inequality” has risen to the fore in pundit discourse, but mostly in terms of whether it deserves to be debated at all, as recent columns by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and The New York Times’ David Brooks demonstrate. For a public well aware of income inequality—since they have to live with its consequences every day—such debates reflect an inequality of their own: a paucity of understanding among our most prominent voices. In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

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

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

Reiss would go on to chair the city’s Regional Transit Authority under Mayor Ray Nagin, taking control of New Orleans’s meager public transit options. Then governor Kathleen Blanco presented the storm as an opportunity to rebuild and do away with the city’s history of poverty, especially in the school system. But most prophetic was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist. In a column that came out just over a week after the storm—when people were still stuck in hotels or waiting for food in the Superdome—Brooks advocated for using the storm to leave the poor sections of New Orleans behind, and encourage rich people to move in in their place: The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before.

As Ishiwata points out, we didn’t just go back to forgetting that issues of inequality and racism exist; we went back to forgetting that an entire group of disenfranchised people exists. Closing that window explains why it took only days before people seemed to stop caring about the rebuilding of New Orleans, to stop caring that nearly 100,000 African Americans were not able to return after the storm. To many politicians and thought leaders such as David Brooks, the idea that we’d need to get a majority-black, majority-poor city back to its former self seemed unnecessary, even irresponsible. After taking a tour of the Houston Astrodome, where thousands had been bused after Katrina, former first lady Barbara Bush told a radio show that people seemed better off there than in New Orleans.

The city is indeed growing at a rapid clip, making its way up the lists featured in business magazines and newspaper travel sections of the top ten places to live or work or fall in love. New Orleans, despite the tens of thousands still missing from it, is “back.” And now, with the benefit of hindsight, despite all that went wrong, and all those the recovery failed, its leaders are confirming that, yes, just like David Brooks said, Katrina was truly a blessing in disguise. This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as “People are starting to move to that neighborhood,” or “No one used to go there, but that’s changing.”


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

Moritz thus describes as “brutal” both the drop between 1968 and 2013 in the US minimum wage (when inflation is accounted for) from $10.70 to $7.25 and the flattening of a median household income that, not even accounting for inflation, has crawled up from $43,868 to $52,762 over the same forty-five-year period.67 According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, this inequality represents capitalism’s “greatest moral crisis since the Great Depression.”68 It’s a crisis, Brooks says, that can be captured in two statistics: the $19 billion Facebook acquisition of the fifty-five-person instant messaging Internet app WhatsApp in February 2014, which valued each employee at $345 million; and the equally disturbing fact that the slice of the economic pie for the middle 60 percent of earners in the US economy has dropped from 53 percent to 45 percent since 1970.

As the work of prominent American psychologists like Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell, and Elias Aboujaoude indicates, our contemporary obsession with public self-expression has complex cultural, technological, and psychological origins that can’t be exclusively traced to the digital revolution.20 Indeed, Twenge and Campbell’s Narcissism Epidemic was published in 2009, before Systrom even had his “aha” moment on that Mexican beach. As David Brooks notes, our current fashion for vulgar immodesty represents another fundamental break with the Great Society, which, in contrast with today, was represented by a culture of understatement, abnegation, and modesty. “When you look from today back to 1945,” Brooks notes about the “expressive individualism” of our networked age, “you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line.”21 Nor is Instagram alone in crossing this narcissism line.

Nunes, “Big-Bang Disruption,” Harvard Business Review, March 2013, hbr.org/2013/03/big-bang-disruption. 61 Ibid. 62 Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2014), p. 193. 63 Jason Farago, “Our Kodak Moments—and Creativity—Are Gone,” Guardian, August 23, 2013, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/photography-photography. 64 George Packer, “Celebrating Inequality,” New York Times, May 19, 2013. 65 Ibid. 66 “The Onrushing Wave,” Economist, January 18, 2014, p. 25. 67 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap,” TechCrunch, September 9, 2013. 68 David Brooks, “Capitalism for the Masses,” New York Times, February 20, 2014. 69 Ibid. 70 George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes: The Libertarian Futurism of a Silicon Valley Billionaire,” New Yorker, November 28, 2011. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. 74 Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 7. 75 Eduardo Porter, “Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality,” New York Times, April 15, 2014. 76 Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, “The Global Decline of Labor Share,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014. 77 Thomas B.


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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

Politics is an argument about what we value, and public life, just like private lives, can get things out of balance. In recent decades public life has been too dominated by a cognitive class that has been trained to value the cognitively complex and quantifiable, and too often this has led to a narrow rationalism and economism. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, reports that, according to Google, over the last thirty years there has been a sharp increase in the use of economic words and a decline in the use of moral words: “gratitude” down 49 percent, “humility” down 52 percent, and “kindness” down 56 percent.1 In the summer of 2019, I heard David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary, talking about Brexit, and when asked whether Labour in power (1997–2010) might have contributed to the alienation expressed in that vote, all he could talk about was economic growth and issues of inequality—nothing about identity or immigration, nothing about national sovereignty, nothing about the rapid change that makes many people feel that the past was better than the present.

Chapter Two: The Rise of the Cognitive Class 1 Kirby Swales, “Understanding the Leave Vote,” NatCen, December 2016, http://natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/understanding-the-leave-vote/. 2 OECD Family Database, http://www.oecd.org/social/family/database.htm. 3 “Populations Past—Atlas of Victorian and Edwardian Population,” University of Cambridge, updated May 29, 2018, https://www.populationspast.org/about/. 4 David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” Atlantic (March 2020). 5 Guy Routh, Occupations of the People of Great Britain 1801–1981 (London: Macmillan, 1987); French Occupational Census of 1911, Monthly Review of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 5, no.1 (July 1917); US Census Bureau, Part II: Comparative Occupation Statistics, 1870–1030: A Comparable Series of Statistics Presenting a Distribution of the Nation’s Labor Force, by Occupation, Sex, and Age; “Employment by occupation—ILO modelled estimates,” International Labor Organization, November 2018. 6 Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations: A Study in Professionalism (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1964). 7 Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter?

And What Should We Do About It?” Keynote Address, Tri-Nuffield Conference, May 16, 2019, https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/news/why-is-democratic-capitalism-failing-so-many-sir-angus-deatons-keynote-lecture-to-the-tri-nuffield-conference. 10 Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin, 2005). 11 David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” Atlantic, March 2020. 12 Ibid. 13 Harry Benson, Family Stability Improves as Divorce Rates Fall (Marriage Foundation, January 2019) 14 Why Family Matters, Centre for Social Justice, March 2019, 5. 15 Health Survey for England 2016: Well-Being and Mental Health, ONS/NHS Digital, December 13, 2017. 16 Antidepressants Were the Area with Largest Increase in Prescription Items in 2016, NHS Digital, June 29, 2017. 17 Mental Health Bulletin 2017–18 Annual Report, NHS Digital, November 29, 2018. 18 NatCen, University of Leicester, Department of Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014, NHS Digital, September 2016. 19 Edmund S.


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Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, behavioural economics, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, IKEA effect, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, science of happiness, Snapchat, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

PHOTO: BRET HARTMAN/TED RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM Barry Schwartz The way we think about work is broken What makes work satisfying? Apart from a paycheck, there are intangible values that, Barry Schwartz suggests, our current way of thinking about work simply ignores. It’s time to stop thinking of workers as cogs on a wheel. David Brooks The social animal Columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences—insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge. In a talk full of humor, he shows how you can’t hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness.


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

The Kristol-Kagan agenda was driven by a belief that this kind of activist foreign policy was in the best interests of the United States. But it was also driven by a less obvious political calculation. During the Clinton years, when the United States did not seem to be facing any serious external threats, David Brooks, then an editor at the Weekly Standard, began advocating pursuit of a policy of "national greatness," taking the administration of Theodore Roosevelt as a model. 25 National greatness was seen as an antidote to the small- or anti-government liber-tarianism of one important wing of the Republican Party, the wing that had been isolationist up through the Second World War and might turn in that direction again.

Chapter 2: The Neoconservative Legacy 1. Elizabeth Drew, quoted in Joshua Muravchik, "The Neoconservative Cabal," and Howard Dean, quoted in Adam Wolfson, "Conservatives and Neoconservatives," in Irwin Stelzer, ed., The Neocon Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 243, 216; Mary Wakefield, The Daily Telegraph, Jan. 9, 2004. 2. See David Brooks, "The Neocon Cabal and Other Fantasies," and Max Boot, "Myths About Neoconservatism," in Stelzer, Neocon Reader. Notes to Pages 14-20 3. See Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic, 1983); Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995); and Norman Podhoretz, "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy," in Norman Podhoretz, The Norman Podhoretz Reader (New York: Free Press, 2004). 4.

See Robert Kagan, "America's Crisis of Legitimacy," Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 65-87, and the subsequent debate between him and Robert W Tucker and David C. Hendrickson; Tucker and Hendrick-son, "The Sources of American Legitimacy," Foreign Affairs 83, no. 6 (2004); and Kagan, "A Matter of Record," Foreign Affairs 84, no. 1 (2005); Kristol and Kagan, Present Dangers, 16-17. Notes to Pages 42-52 25. David Brooks, "A Return to National Greatness," Weekly Standard, Mar. 3, 1997. 26. On neoconservative issues see Francis Fukuyama, "The National Prospect Symposium Contribution," Commentary 100, no. 5 (1995): 55-56. On economics see, for example, Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976), and Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1978).


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Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

See Women’s Voices, Women Vote, “Unmarried Women in the Electorate: Behind the Numbers.” 9. Packaged Facts, “Singles in the U.S.,” p. 16. 10. Euromonitor International, “Single Living.” 11. See David Brooks, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” New York Times, March 29, 2010. The response on DePaulo’s Psychology Today blog, Living Single, appeared later the same day. See “David Brooks + Sandra Bullock = Matrimonia” at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201003/david-brooks-sandra-bullock-matrimania. 12. Available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/26/3/836.short. Chapter 6: Aging Alone 1. See the U.S. Administration on Aging report, “A Profile of Older Americans 2009,” at www.aoa.gov/AoARoot/Aging_Statistics/Profile/2009/6.aspx; the European Commission report, “Independent Living for the Ageing Society,” at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/policy_link/brochures/documents/independent_living.pdf; and the Japan Times report at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100514x2.html; on China, see Xin Meng and Chuliang Luo, “What Determines Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Urban China,” 2004, http://people.anu.edu.au/xin.meng/living-arrange.pdf; on South Korea, see Young Jin Park, “The Rise of One-Person Householders and their Recent Characteristics in Korea,” Korea Journal of Population and Development 23 (1994), no. 1: 117–29. 2.

When a politician makes a baseless claim about the hazards of living alone or the benefits of marriage, it’s only a matter of hours before she’s posted a refutation on her blog for Psychology Today. When a scholar or serious journalist does it, she sharpens her razors and attacks. A few days before our conversation, DePaulo took umbrage with a New York Times op-ed about Sandra Bullock’s post-Oscar marital humiliation in which David Brooks mentions a study that claims (in his words) that “being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.” This infuriated DePaulo, and she immediately fired off a response: “Studies that compare the currently married to everyone else (which is the vast majority of marital status studies) can tell us nothing about the implications of getting married for happiness, health, or anything else.


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

In 2012, The Economist forecast a wave of corporate mergers and increasing consolidation of monopoly market power.50 There are few reasons to think that is a positive development for democratic governance.51 The ideology of any social order eventually accepts and trumpets the existing system; the prevalence of monopoly is no longer possible to ignore, so it is celebrated by the troubadours of the status quo. “The future of the country,” David Brooks concluded in 2012, “will probably be determined by how well Americans can succeed at being monopolists.”52 “Don’t you see?” former U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin answered when asked if the big banks, the most controversial of modern megacorporations, should be broken up. “Too big to fail isn’t a problem with the system.

., working-class young people—could secure full-time employment, and wages are stagnant or falling, with a massive oversupply of labor for available jobs.10 A group of eighteen leading global environmental scientists came together in 2012 to report that humanity faces an “absolutely unprecedented emergency,” and societies have “no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.” In effect, the report rejected really existing capitalism in toto and called for a complete redesign of the economic system.11 Many of those in power or sympathetic to those in power understand that a crisis is at hand and new policies are necessary, as the status quo is unsustainable. David Brooks calls for a “structural revolution,” while Edward Luce thoughtfully chronicles a nation in sharp decline, where the system is not working.12 But there is little indication that those in power, unwilling to question the foundations of capitalism, have any idea how to return it to a state of strong growth and rising incomes, let alone address the environmental crisis that envelops the planet.

., A Guide to Post–Keynesian Economics (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1979), 37–38. 49. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 50. “Surf’s Up,” The Economist, May 19, 2012, 83. 51. Luigi Zingales makes this point well. See Zingales, Capitalism for the People, 8–39. 52. David Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 2012, A23. 53. David Rothkopf, Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), p. 266. 54. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “Some Theoretical Implications,” Monthly Review, July–Aug. 2012, 40–41.


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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

In many cities, the only businesses that could legitimately claim to be community gathering places were bars, most of which were smoky, sleazy, and too loud for conversation. Plus, only goods that enhance productivity could curry favor under the new social regime; alcohol and tobacco were increasingly being seen as health-wrecking evils. “Smoking is now considered a worse sin than at least five of the ten commandments,” the New York Times columnist David Brooks explains in his book Bobos in Paradise. “Coffee becomes the beverage of the age because it stimulates mental acuity, while booze is out of favor because it dulls the judgment.” The coffee-house offered an antidote to these social deficiencies: a place to just hang out. As a comfortable and safe community nexus, free of drunks and secondhand smoke, the café eased the problem of disconnection while offering an item that people could come in for every day; it became America’s version of the British pub.

Terrified executives saw that they had a simple choice: convince consumers that your brand stands for Something Important — and thus that buying your merchandise is not just crass materialism, but something closer to an artistic statement — or fall into a price-cutting bloodbath with the generics. As David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, once explained it, “The people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products.” In so many words, Brooks just put Starbucks’s astoundingly successful marketing apparatus in a nutshell. Through unwavering repetition of a basic theme — Starbucks coffee equals romance, relaxation, and luxury — the company made itself synonymous with those concepts, transforming a cheaply produced, age-old commodity into a “sophisticated coffee indulgence.”

My discussion of recent U.S. social trends and the changing American consumer owes much to Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Trading Up: The New American Luxury (New York: Portfolio, 2003); John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); and Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1999).


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The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

In each of these decisions, big and small, they strive to feel informed and legitimate in their belief that they have made the right and reasonable decision based on facts (whether regarding the merit of organic food, breast-feeding, or electric cars). In short, unlike Veblen’s leisure class or David Brooks’s “bobos,” this new elite is not defined by economics. Rather, the aspirational class is formed through a collective consciousness upheld by specific values and acquired knowledge and the rarified social and cultural processes necessary to acquire them. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks chronicled the cognitive dissonance of “bobos” (bohemian bourgeois) who grew up in the counterculture 1960s and felt a deep discomfort around their adulthood wealth.

Consider that even the wealthiest aspirational class kitchens often decorate with copper pots, rustic Stickley dining tables, and Aga-like stoves that resemble the stoves used in the kitchen of Downton Abbey, rather than the upstairs formal baroque style of English aristocrats. Casualness in all facets of life has become a part of aspirational class habitus. In this respect, the aesthetics of the aspirational class are in line with those of bobos. As David Brooks writes in his book Bobos in Paradise, “Educated elites are expected to spend huge amounts of money on things that used to be cheap … We prefer to buy the same items as the proletariat—it’s just that we buy rarefied versions of these items that members of the working class would consider preposterous.

But the outward status markers of such productive success lie in accompanying lifestyle and consumption choices.60 Bell’s great contribution in this respect is that society has culturally shifted so that anti-bourgeois lifestyles (even bohemian) have become a signifier of higher economic status. Or as David Brooks remarks, bobos make every effort to turn consumer choices into sacred and moral decisions (water purifiers, private meditation classes, lactation consultants, and slate Zen bathrooms). These choices that seem to be instinctual or a return to a more natural way of living are actually a product of how capital allows us freedom to be this way.


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The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Smaller suburban governments allowed households to cluster together in relatively homogeneous political jurisdictions. Racial, ethnic, and class concentrations existed before drivable sub-urbanism appeared on the scene, but not to the extent possible in the late twentieth century, as codified by political boundaries. As David Brooks said in his book, On Paradise Drive, “We all loudly declare our commitment to diversity, but in real life, we make strenuous efforts to find and fit in with people who make us feel comfortable.”10 This seems to work particularly well when political boundaries can be imposed to maintain homogeneity.

Metropolitan areas were expanding geometrically as farms were converted into subdivisions named after what they replaced—Whispering Woods, Bubbling Brook, Woodmont. Yet a countertrend had certainly started with downtowns reviving and transitand nontransit-served suburban town centers taking off with new development, revitalization, and excitement. Many contemporary observers of the built environment, such as Joel Kotkin, Robert Bruegmann, and David Brooks, feel the rediscovery of walkable urbanisn is at best a small niche, at worst a Yuppie fad that will soon fade. Kotkin disdainfully referred to downtown revitalization as a “Potemkin strategy” producing a “boutique city” for the “so-called creative class.” These critics generally feel that drivable sub-urban development is the continuation of thousands of years of sprawl.

Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form.” Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001): 415–444. 10. David Brooks, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 69. 11. Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press; Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1997). 12.


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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

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine Is Yours1 was an important book for the Sharing Economy, setting out a vision that has helped to define the movement. The book opens with the story of Airbnb’s beginnings, and Botsman also looks to Airbnb to set the tone for her TED talk on sharing. When leading public commentators like New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas Friedman write about the Sharing Economy, they look to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. And Chesky speaks out about the values of sharing; in March 2014 he wrote a photo-heavy manifesto-like short essay called “Shared City,” which started like this: Imagine if you could build a city that is shared.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lauds “Airbnb’s real innovation—a platform of ‘trust’—where everyone could not only see everyone else’s identity but also rate them as good, bad or indifferent hosts or guests. This meant everyone using the system would pretty quickly develop a relevant ‘reputation’ visible to everyone else in the system.” 2 Friedman was writing just a couple of weeks after his New York Times stablemate David Brooks described “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other”: “Companies like Airbnb establish trust through ratings mechanisms . . . People in the Airbnb economy don’t have the option of trusting each other on the basis of institutional affiliations, so they do it on the basis of online signaling and peer evaluations.” 3 Sharing Economy companies are not the first to use ratings and algorithms to guide behavior.

Bradshaw, Tim. “Lunch with the FT: Brian Chesky,” December 26, 2014. http://www .ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fd685212-8768-11e4-bc7c-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition =intl#axzz3UxDunrnM. Brooks, David. “The Evolution of Trust.” The New York Times, June 30, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/david-brooks-the-evolution-of-trust .html. Bruce, Chris. “Uber Miami Accused of Coaching Drivers to Circumvent Airport Laws.” Autoblog, November 14, 2014. http://www.autoblog.com/2014/11/14/uber-coaching-airport-drivers-violate-rules/. Bulajewski, Mike. “The Cult of Sharing,” August 5, 2014. http://www.mrteacup.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html.


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Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

“Supply Chain Scenario Modeler: A Holistic Executive Decision Support Solution,” Interfaces (a journal published by INFORMS, a professional society for operations research and management sciences) 44, no. 1 (February 2014): 85–104. In Atlanta: Information for the Emory University Hospital comes mainly from Dr. Timothy Buchman, and interviews with him on Sept. 1 and Oct. 9, 2013. David Brooks, my colleague: David Brooks column, “The Philosophy of Data,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013, p. A23. Ninety percent of all of the data: The estimate comes from IBM Research. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/infographic/storwize-data.html. In 2014, International Data Corporation estimated: This is from yearly report on data conducted by the research firm IDC, and sponsored by the data storage company, EMC. http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2014/20140409-01.htm.

Big-data technology is ushering in a revolution in measurement that promises to be the basis for the next wave of efficiency and innovation across the economy. But more than technology is at work here. Big data is also the vehicle for a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be—and perhaps should be—made in the future. David Brooks, my colleague at the New York Times, has referred to this rising mind-set as “data-ism”—a term I’ve adopted as well because it suggests the breadth of the phenomenon. The tools of innovation matter, as we’ve often seen in the past, not only for economic growth but because they can reshape how we see the world and make decisions about it A bundle of technologies fly under the banner of big data.


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The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

Mozart, an early standard-bearer for the inspiration theory of creativity, was, in fact, a practitioner of intense and diligent effort. Yet the inspiration theory of creativity shows up not just in pop culture and films, but also in mainstream media and academia. The New York Times columnist David Brooks, in a 2016 piece about creativity, argues that “inspiration is not something you can control.” He does not believe it is merely the result of hard work. “People who are inspired have lost some agency,” Brooks goes on. “They often feel that something is working through them, some power greater than themselves.

If they’re not true, why have so many come to believe the inspiration myth? And what is the actual truth about creative talent? The History of Creativity “A poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.” If you believe this is another David Brooks quote you’re only off by a couple thousand years. Plato said it. Much of our modern perspective on creativity goes all the way back to the early Greeks. Plato considered an artist to be one who imitated the reality that God created. In fact, the word that the Greeks used to describe an artist’s work is mimesis, which means “to imitate.”

Per la ricuperata salute: “Mozart and Salieri ‘Lost’ Composition Played in Prague,” BBC News, February 16, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/​news/​world-europe-35589422; and Sarah Pruitt, “Mozart’s ‘Lost’ Collaboration with Salieri Performed in Prague,” History Channel, February 17, 2016, http://www.history.com/​news/​mozarts-lost-collaboration-with-salieri-performed-in-prague. in a 2016 piece about creativity: David Brooks, “What Is Inspiration?” New York Times, April 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/​2016/​04/​15/​opinion/​what-is-inspiration.html. Ph.D. dissertations: Lucille Wehner et al., “Current Approaches Used in Studying Creativity: An Exploratory Investigation,” Creativity Research Journal, January 1991, http://www.tandfonline.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​10400419109534398.


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Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

National Security, according to MIT Report,” April 27, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/04/27/lack_of_science_funding_is_seriously_threatening_u_s_na-tional_security_according_to_mit_report/. 20. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 118. 21. Ibid., 169. 22. Ibid. 23. David Brooks, “Goodbye, Organization Man,” The New York Times, September 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/opinion/david-brooks-goodbye-organization-man.html. 24. Coll, “Citizen Bezos.” 25. “Google Lunar XPRIZE,” Google Lunar XPRIZE, accessed April 16, 2015, http://lunar.xprize.org/. 26. NASA is building the Orion spacecraft which is designed for “deep space destinations such as an asteroid and eventually Mars.”

Progress was to still to be found in the collective exercise of the commons, in the decisions of the government as representative of the people’s will. Then the shift: what was once seen as a collective enterprise for the betterment of humanity became something individuals could and should seek to own and control. “A few generations ago,” notes David Brooks in a New York Times column, “people grew up in and were comfortable with big organizations—the army, corporations and agencies. . . . Now nobody wants to be an Organization Man. We like start-ups, disrupters and rebels . . . people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs.”23 As just one example of this general shift, today we have a whole new conception of space travel.

Jake New, “Incoming Students’ ‘Emotional Health’ at All-Time Low, Survey Says,” Inside Higher Ed, February 5, 2015, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/05/incoming-students-emotional-health-all-time-low-survey-says. 5. Walter Hamilton, “Employers Have Negative View of Gen Y Workers, Study Finds,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-employers-negative-gen-y-millennials-20130903-story.html. 6. David Brooks, “The Streamlined Life,” The New York Times, May 5, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/opinion/brooks-the-streamlined-life.html. 7. “Any Anxiety Disorder Among Adults,” NIMH, accessed April 24, 2015, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-anxiety-disorder-among-adults.shtml. 8.


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

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

The New Age movement that began in the 1970s exemplified the merging of market and countercultural values. It was a movement, in fact, that drew much of its strength from an aggressive, proselytizing merchant class. Many other Americans with countercultural sympathies also decided that making money was what could really set them free to realize their individualism. As David Brooks has recounted in Bobos in Paradise, the '60s ultimately paved the way for a permanent cease-fire in the long war between bohemian and bourgeois value systems.14 The "yuppie" phenomenon underscored how easily '60s individualism morphed into '80s materialism. The yuppie officially appeared in March 1983, discovered by Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene in an article about Jerry Rubin, the former yippie turned Wall Street networker.

"Job tenure is down for everyone and the possibility that workers will have to take temporary work or work involuntarily has risen.... The changes in the security of work were mirrored by changes in benefits and health and safety at work. Over time, health and pension benefits decreased for all workers."5 None of this means that Americans are ready for a socialist revolution. As David Brooks and a thousand other social critics have pointed out, Americans vote their dreams, not their realities. The middle class and the working class consistently elect politicians who actively work against their economic interests. Perhaps at no time in American history is this more true than today.6 The psychological fallout from people's economic struggles has been significant.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979). For an overview of the rise of the Christian right, see Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America 1978–1988 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). [back] 14. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). [back] 15. Poll cited in Hendrik Hertzberg, "The Short Happy Life of the American Yuppie," in Nicolaus Mills, ed., Culture in an Age of Money: The Legacy of the 1980s in America (Chicago: Ivan R.


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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

Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality.” Ibid. [back] 21. Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel, and Mark Tessler conducted a survey of 2,300 adults in Iraq in 2004 and found that Iraqis, in the words of David Brooks, are “a people who, buffeted by violence, have withdrawn into mere survival mode. They are suspicious of outsiders and intolerant toward weak groups, and they cling fiercely to what is familiar and traditional.” David Brooks, “Closing of a Nation,” New York Times, September 24, 2006. [back] 22. See Michael Adams, American Backlash (New York: Penguin, 2005). [back] 23. See Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Having grown up in the corridors of power, environmental leaders from the generation of ’68 were never forced to grapple with the kinds of existential and philosophical questions pondered by those currently holding the short end of the historical stick. “Liberals are less conscious of public philosophy,” the conservative columnist David Brooks observed, “because modern liberalism was formed in government, not away from it.” Conservative political impotence in the early seventies was the mother of antienvironmental invention. Out of power, young conservatives got clear that social policy and government action did not result from identifying the best, most efficacious, or most rational policies but rather were an expression of social values, public morality, and political power.

Thirty-eight percent named the economy, 28 percent named unemployment, 11 percent health care, 10 percent the war in Iraq, 7 percent terrorism, 5 percent lack of religion or morality, 5 percent manufacturing/business/jobs going overseas. The poll was conducted among four hundred likely voters in Pennsylvania by the Evans/McDonough Company, April 22–24, 2003. [back] 18. Environics Research Group, “Socio-Cultural Trends: 3SC,” 2004, www.americanenvironics.com. [back] 19. David Brooks, “A House Divided, and Strong,” New York Times, April 5, 2005. [back] 20. The insecurity people experience appears to be based on personality, social values, and situations. In other words, some people are more likely to feel insecure than others, while certain situations can create feelings of insecurity.


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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

This may explain how President Bush was able to win the vote of Christian conservatives in the 2004 election without surrendering his support (tax breaks and deregulation) for the market firms whose profitability depends on a materialist consumerism that necessarily undermines conservative values. In this spirit, conservative pop-cultural commentator David Brooks has found a way to sacralize shopping, becoming a champion of shopping as a vocation imbued “with sacred intent.” In a witty but at least half-serious tribute to the “transcendent significance” of spending in the modern marketplace, Brooks portrays the way in which spiritual desire becomes physical desire in what he calls a literal “transubstantiation of goods.”10 Thomas Frank skewers this very same ambivalence in his What’s the Matter with Kansas, where he asserts that the right fails to discern “the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation.”

This ethos would be made up in equal parts of an ethic of infantilized consumers and a theology of infantilized true believers. We need only revisit the rash of television entrepreneurs and business-school gurus over the last decade or two to find a tribe of preachers who, far from abandoning the language of ethics, imitate George Gilder and David Brooks and reinvent it. They draw absurdist parodies of self-rationalizing solipsism and turn them into a new capitalist ethic. Ayn Rand’s great libertarian egoist Howard Roark, who in The Fountainhead famously declared “I came here today to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life…that I am a man who does not exist for others,”24 is a rather mild solipsist compared with the moralizing egotists of the new capitalism.

Yuppies are the young urban professionals who gave foreign cars, fancy restaurants, and urban homesteading their cachet. Soccer moms presumably describe multitasking suburban women trying to “do it all” in a society that permits them to be professionals as long as they remain moms, housekeepers, and (most essentially) shoppers. And bobos, the coinage of journalist David Brooks (self-described as a “comic sociologist, but now an editorial page columnist for the New York Times”), fastens onto the “bourgeois bohemians” who manage to blend the hippie counterculture of the 1960s with the hardworking, meritocratic mainstream culture of the 1990s. Bobos are found in all developed commercial societies, from London’s Sloane Square to Paris’s rive gauche American-style malls, mimicking the great Mall of America in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency toward systematization as follows: There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to “spend more time working deeply” doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm. In a 2014 column titled “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks endorsed this approach of letting ambitious goals drive focused behavior, explaining: “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”

Slate, May 16, 2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/john_updike_william_faulkner_chuck_close_they_didn_t_wait_for_inspiration.html. “[Great creative minds] think like artists”: from Brooks, David. “The Good Order.” New York Times, September 25, 2014, op-ed. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/opinion/david-brooks-routine-creativity-and-president-obamas-un-speech.html?_r=1. “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth”: This Nietzsche quote was brought to my attention by the excellent book on walking and philosophy: Gros, Frédérick. A Philosophy of Walking. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso Books, 2014.


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Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Open tournament despite a severe, painful knee injury, the golfer Tiger Woods’s imperturbable top-down focus on his game brought him near godlike status in our increasingly distractible culture. (According to his father, by the age of six months, little Tiger could settle into his bouncy-chair and focus on watching golf for two hours.) Even the New York Times’s psychologically savvy political columnist David Brooks took a break from election-year commentary to enthuse about the hero’s mental energy: “In a period that has brought us instant messaging, multitasking, wireless distractions and attention deficit disorder, Woods has become the exemplar of mental discipline.” Like all great athletes, he has superb physical skills, but as Brooks points out, “It is his ability to enter the cocoon of concentration that is written about and admired most.”

The rates of psychological problems: Peter Suedfeld, “Stressful levels of environmental stimulation,” in I. G. Sarason and C. D. Spielberger (eds.), Stress and Anxiety, Halstead, 1979. CHAPTER 1: PAY ATTENTION p.17. Many extraordinary achievers are fueled: David Lykken, “Mental Energy.” Intelligence 33, 2005. p.18. Even the New York Times’s psychologically savvy: David Brooks, “The Neural Buddhists.” New York Times, July 13, 2008. p.19. An amusing experiment on “change blindness”: Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events.” Perception 28, 1999. p.20. A little knowledge about this neurological “biased competition”: Robert Desimone and John Duncan, “Neural Mechanisms of Selective Visual Attention.”

Augustine, Saint awareness Bach, Johann Sebastian ballet Bardeen, John Bartók, Béla bathrooms Beatles beauty bias Beck, Aaron behavioral change behavioral economics behavioral research behavioral therapy Be Here Now (Alpert) Behrmann, Marlene Bell, Joshua Beowulf Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo Bhagavan Das biased competition Bible Big Sort, The (Bishop and Cushing) bird-watching birthdays Bishop, Bill BlackBerries blacks Blake, William body image Bonanno, George bonding boredom Born Fighting (Webb) bottom-up attention magicians and negative emotion and pros and cons of bounded rationality Bradbury, Thomas Bradley, Charles Brahms, Johannes brain ADHD and amygdala of cerebellum of cortex of creativity and Davidson’s views on hemispheric neglect and hippocampus of insula of left hemisphere of LSD and motivation and multitasking and neuroplasticity of Norman’s conceptual model of older vs. younger parietal and frontal cortexes of paying attention and Posner’s model of attentional system of prefrontal cortex of right hemisphere of time-traveling capacity of visual cortex of Brain Fitness program “Break-Up” (radio show episode) Brim, Gilbert Brooks, David Brooks, Rodney Brown, Bill Browning, Elizabeth Barrett brownout Brown University Bryant, Fred Buckley, William F., Jr. Buddha Buddhism bulimics bull’s-eye mode of paying attention Burke, Edmund Burke, Renny Burke, Tracey cafeteria line workers California, well-being in California Milk Processor Board cancer Capote, Truman cardiovascular disease careers, choice of cars Carstensen, Laura Castellanos, Javier cell phones CEOs change blindness character moments Chartrand, Tanya Chicago, University of childbirth children ADHD in, see ADHD attention drugs and creativity and depressed electronic communications gap of executive attention of neurophysiological differences in personality tests for productivity and quality and quantity of family time of socialization and language learning in China, Chinese motivation of Chouinard, Yvon Clement VIII, Pope Clinton, Bill “cocktail party effect” coffee Cog (robot) cognition consciousness and see also thought cognitive appraisal of emotions cognitive illusions cognitive therapy colleges admissions process at selection of Collins, Phil compassion computers attentional training and concentration creativity and interference with machines and Ritalin and time and top-down attention and work and Concerta consciousness cosmic health and consumer goods Consumer Reports contamination, fear of context, Asian focus on control relationships and conversation dinnertime e-mail or voice mail vs.


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

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

Despite the elite’s fixation on entrepreneurship and knowledge workers, America is powered by wage-earners who punch the clock, wear uniforms, and don’t remotely have any power to “lean in” to climb the corporate ladder. For decades now we’ve been sold the idea that a growing army of knowledge workers, innovating and ideating in amenity-rich office parks, hold the key to our nation’s prosperity. Column after column written by the likes of Thomas Friedman and David Brooks argue that the future success of our economy rests on cultivating skills such as creative problem-solving and critical thinking, with a special affinity for fields in science, technology, and engineering. What they fail to acknowledge is that those spots in our labor force are minuscule compared to the scads of new jobs being created in home health care, fast food, and retail.

Political scientist Robert Putnam also explored the disparities in familial upbringing between college-educated and non-college-educated households in his most recent book, Our Kids. While Putnam’s book lacks the judgmental bromides of Murray’s, it nonetheless paints a picture of a working class that is mired in drug abuse, teen pregnancy, abusive marriages, and absent parents. David Brooks, the moralizing columnist at the New York Times, devoted one of his columns to the lessons we must take from Putnam’s book. Writing in his typical condescending manner, he asserted, “It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965, at http://www.​dol.​gov/​oasam/​programs/​history/​webid-​meynihan.​htm. 19. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Revisiting the Moynihan Report, cont.,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2013. 20. David Brooks, “The Cost of Relativism,” New York Times, March 10, 2015. 21. Bryce Covert and Josh Israel, “What 7 States Discovered After Spending More than $1 Million Drug-Testing Welfare Recipients,” Center for American Progress Action Fund, February 26, 2015, at http://think​progress.​org/​economy/​2015/​02/​26/​3624447/​tanf-​drug-​testing-​states/; Jason Stein, “Scott Walker’s Light-on-Details Drug-Testing Plan a Hit on the Stump,” Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, March 17, 2015, at http://www.​jsonline.​com/​news/​statepolitics/​scott-​walkers-​light-​on-​details-​drug-​testing-​plan-​a-​hit-​on-​the-​stump-​b99461974z1-​296580231.​html. 22.


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How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

“They turn nature into an achievement”: David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 212. “Locus of control, according to”: Richard B. Joelson, “Locus of Control,” Psychology Today, August 2, 2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/201708/locus-control. “There is a strain of discourse”: Clare Coffey, “Failure to Cope ‘Under Capitalism,’ ” Gawker, August 12, 2022, https://www.gawker.com/culture/failure-to-cope-under-capitalism. “It is still true that they”: David Brooks, The Paradise Suite: Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), ii.

It’s that 15 percent that generates the vast share of any conversation about what’s best for our country and the Democratic Party politically, and it’s the distance between that group’s political values and the median voter that generates so much political angst. To consider what makes vocal liberals what they are, we need to do a little sociology. A TAXONOMY OF THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIBERAL Perhaps a good place to start is a text from what I would consider the early days of what constitutes contemporary liberalism. David Brooks, the longtime New York Times columnist and many people’s platonic ideal of a centrist, wrote a turn-of-the-millennium-era book titled Bobos in Paradise. (“Turn of the millennium,” as in published on January 1, 2000.) The book meticulously chronicles the habits of the titular “bobos”—the bohemian bourgeois—who yearn to accumulate wealth like their forefathers, but insist on doing so in a more enlightened style.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

As a team of Cornell University researchers put it in a 2008 paper, “With the GPS you no longer need to know where you are and where your destination is, attend to physical landmarks along the way, or get assistance from other people in the car and outside of it.” The automation of wayfinding serves to “inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it.” 4 As is so often the case with gadgets and services that ease our way through life, we’ve celebrated the arrival of inexpensive GPS units. The New York Times writer David Brooks spoke for many when, in a 2007 op-ed titled “The Outsourced Brain,” he raved about the navigation system installed in his new car: “I quickly established a romantic attachment to my GPS. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line.”

We may grimace when we hear people talk of “finding themselves,” but the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are. We can’t extract the self from its surroundings, at least not without leaving something important behind. A GPS device, by allowing us to get from point A to point B with the least possible effort and nuisance, can make our lives easier, perhaps imbuing us, as David Brooks suggests, with a numb sort of bliss. But what it steals from us, when we turn to it too often, is the joy and satisfaction of apprehending the world around us—and of making that world a part of us. Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, draws a distinction between two very different modes of travel: wayfaring and transport.

Chapter Six: WORLD AND SCREEN 1.William Edward Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London: John Murray, 1824), 277. 2.Claudio Aporta and Eric Higgs, “Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 5 (2005): 729–753. 3.Interview of Claudio Aporta by author, January 25, 2012. 4.Gilly Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2008), 1675–1684. 5.David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,” New York Times, October 26, 2007. 6.Julia Frankenstein et al., “Is the Map in Our Head Oriented North?,” Psychological Science 23, no. 2 (2012): 120–125. 7.Julia Frankenstein, “Is GPS All in Our Heads?,” New York Times, February 2, 2012. 8.Gary E. Burnett and Kate Lee, “The Effect of Vehicle Navigation Systems on the Formation of Cognitive Maps,” in Geoffrey Underwood, ed., Traffic and Transport Psychology: Theory and Application (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 407–418. 9.Elliot P.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

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

Greenwald, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013). 229 John Macnamara pointed out John Theodore Macnamara, A Border Dispute: The Place of Logic in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 231 “are obsessed with intelligence” Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Books, 2003), 149. As David Brooks writes David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2012), xi. Malcolm Gladwell . . . argues Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008), 76. 232 IQ is critically important For a good review of the state of the art here, see David Z.

But when it comes to intelligence, there is a law of diminishing returns. The difference between an IQ of 120 and an IQ of 100 (average) is going to be more important than the difference between 140 and 120. And once you pass a certain minimum, other capacities might be more important than intelligence. As David Brooks writes, social psychology “reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ.” Malcolm Gladwell, for his part, argues for the irrelevance of a high IQ. “If I had magical powers,” he says, “and offered to raise your IQ by 30 points, you’d say yes—right?”


pages: 424 words: 119,679

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

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

Chapter 8 Former Colorado senator Gary Hart noted of negativism in American annals: James Fallows, “How America Can Rise Again,” The Atlantic, January 2010. The Atlantic’s 1994 cover story: Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic, February 1994. In 2012, Barack Obama’s National Intelligence Council produced a report declaring: “Global Trends 2030” (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, 2012). David Brooks wrote in 2017: David Brooks, “The Crisis of Western Civ,” New York Times, April 21, 2017. The demographics of the United States and European Union are shifting: “Structure and Aging” (Brussels: European Commission, 2016). refusal to admit Jewish refugees until late in World War II: Recounted in Winik, 1944.

And if you want to mess with America’s military in 2030, be my guest. Intellectuals embrace declinism because other views are looked down upon as Pangloss or Pollyanna. In contemporary US academia, the idea that the United States has been a net positive for humanity is close to a forbidden thought. David Brooks wrote in 2017, “Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western-civ narrative. Now students are taught that Western civilization is a history of reactionary oppression.” American history is indeed full of acts of violence against minorities. But had Western civilization never occurred, the academics who now condemn it would not have comfortable positions at universities.

History has an arrow, and the arrow of history points forever upward. Acknowledgments For the realization of this volume, thanks are due to my friends, colleagues, and editors: Ben Adams, Jon Alter, Maya Aubrey, James Bennet, Sandra Beris, Jenny Blake, Lyndsey Blessing, Frank Bowman, David Bradley, David Brooks, Glenn Brooks, Carol Browner, Cindy Buck, Robin Campbell, Michael Carlisle, Stephen Carter, Diane Chandler, Katharine DeShaw, Eric Dezenhall, Martha Drullard, Thomas Dunne, Darcy Eveleigh, James Fallows, Henry Ferris, Franklin Foer, Lindsay Fradkoff, Timothy Fuller, Paul Glastris, Donald Graham, David Gray, Tedd Habberfield, Carla Hall, Laura Hall, Toby Harshaw, Stephen Hayes, Marjorie Hazen, David Hendrickson, Alexis Hurley, Debbie Ida, Walter Isaacson, Bob Jaffe, Martin Janik, Jan Jones, Jonathan Karp, Bob Kerrey, Michael Kinsley, Arkadiy Klebaner, Barbara Klie, Charles Lane, Jaime Leifer, Nicholas Lemann, David Leonhardt, Toby Lester, Jan Lewis, Thomas Lindblade, Ben Loehnen, James Mallon, Jane Mayer, Deborah McGill, Robert Messenger, John Milner, Toni Monkovic, Rosh Moorjani, Michael Mungiello, Cullen Murphy, Timothy Noah, Joe Nocera, Lynn Olson, Steve Olson, Peter Osnos, Sue Parilla, Don Peck, Beth Peters, Charles Peters, Clive Priddle, Melissa Raymond, Diane Rehm, William Reilly, Clay Risen, Janet Robinson, Tina Rosenberg, Claudia Russell, Isabel Sawhill, Aaron Schatz, Greg Shaw, Eric Schmidt, Hannah Schwartz, Charles Sciandra, Greg Shaw, John Skipper, Anne Stadler, Janet St.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

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

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

Sandel looks forward to a more balanced future in which we stop fetishizing merit and put more emphasis on democracy and community. The Markovits–Sandel fusillade is the latest example of the ‘revolt of the elites’ against the very ideology that is the foundation of their elite position. The New York Times and the Washington Post, the elites’ favourite papers, regularly contain op-eds arguing that ‘our elites stink’ (David Brooks)23 and that ‘it’s time to abandon the cruelty of meritocracy’ (Steven Pearlstein).24 Publishers have invented a new form of misery memoir that stars disillusioned meritocrats grappling with the intellectual and moral emptiness of life in elite educational institutions: read Ross Douthat’s Privilege (2005), David Samuels’s The Runner (2008) and Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009) and shed a sympathetic tear.

The next chapter will show just how counterproductive the left-wing revolt against the meritocracy proved to be. 15 The Corruption of the Meritocracy The egalitarianism of the 1960s and 1970s was followed by the festival of capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s. The pro-market revolution gave birth to a new elite that soon acquired a plethora of names: ‘the new class’ (Irving Kristol), the ‘creative class’ (Richard Florida), ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (David Brooks), the ‘anywheres’ (David Goodhart), the ‘Brahmins’ (Thomas Piketty), ‘Davos Man’ (Samuel Huntington) or the ‘cognitive elite’ (various). This new elite regarded itself as the meritocratic spirit made frequent-flying flesh. It was significantly bigger than the old meritocracy: high-IQ jobs expanded rapidly in these years, in both the public and the private sectors, and universities expanded even more rapidly in order to (over) supply the new market for academic talent.

They like to socialize at ideas-rich conferences such as the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, in Switzerland, in the winter; at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colorado in the summer; and at various meetings of TED throughout the year; indeed, they mark the passing of the seasons with conferences in the way that the old rich used to mark them out with horse races and regattas. They count big thinkers such as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks among their friends. They subscribe to ideas-led magazines such as Foreign Affairs and the New Yorker. They are the Economist rich rather than the Tatler rich. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who founded PayPal and was one of the first investors in Facebook, likes to fly provocative intellectuals to have dinner with him in San Francisco to discuss their latest books (he has also written a rather good book of his own, Zero to One).3 Mark Zuckerberg hosts an online book club.


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

Americans of all stripes have been given the license to abandon the relationships that don’t interest them for those that do; we’ve been given the opportunity to pick and choose the relationships we most want to maintain. And that brings us to the most significant evidence of the Chinatown Bus effect: the transformation of the local neighborhood. In September 2003, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a long piece in The Atlantic magazine exploring an odd disconnect between what Americans said and how they actually behaved. Brooks had noticed that while we paid lip service to the benefits of diversity, Americans were often choosing to make “strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who [were] basically like themselves.”

One recent study has found that nearly a fifth of those who use social networks like Facebook have blocked, “unfriended,” or hidden a contact based on a political disagreement.27 It wasn’t just, as Eli Pariser articulated, that corporations were manipulating what comes up in our news feeds and ad spaces. Empowered with the opportunity to connect with people who reflect our values and outlook, we’ve become more microscopically homogenous amid a sea of diversity. In the mid-1990s, well before David Brooks had begun to note how neighborhoods were becoming monolithic and Bill Bishop had revealed the full extent of the Big Sort, a longtime editor of Governing magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt, published a book on an underappreciated shift in ordinary American life. Tracing changes in three separate neighborhoods of Chicago—one settled predominantly by working-class whites, another situated in the heart of the South Side, and a third in the more affluent suburbs—he noted one crucial similarity.

Even in the depths of the Civil War, President Lincoln committed the federal government to establish both an intercontinental railroad and a national network of land-grant colleges. Amid dilapidated infrastructure and woefully deficient test scores, adherents of this view argue today for a broad new wave of public investment. Unfortunately, members of these two schools all too frequently fall victim to what New York Times columnist David Brooks has termed “the No. 1 political fantasy in America today, which . . . is the fantasy that the other party will not exist. It is the fantasy that you are about win a 1932-style victory that will render your opponents powerless.”14 Even for those not squarely in one camp or the other—those who see merit in proposals made on both sides of the aisle—the temptation is to blame the persistent and self-defeating inability of the nation’s leaders to compromise.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

National Trust for Historic Preservation, “HOPE Crew—Hands-On Preservation Experience: Engaging a New Generation of Preservationists,” https://savingplaces.org/hope-crew/#.VjLRoLerTIU. 13. Yale Books Unbound, “Robots in Our Midst: A Conversation with Jerry Kaplan,” Yale University Press blog, July 29, 2015, http://blog.yupnet.org/2015/07/29/robots-in-our-midst-a-conversation-with-jerry-kaplan/. 14. David Brooks, “The Working Nation,” New York Times, October 23, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/opinion/david-brooks-the-working-nation.html?_r=1. 15. Edward Moore Geist, “Is Artificial Intelligence Really an Existential Threat to Humanity?,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 30, 2015, http://thebulletin.org/artificial-intelligence-really-existential-threat-humanity8577. 16.

University of London professor Guy Standing, who coined the term “precariat” to describe a working class increasingly stressed by precarious work arrangements, says that, even more important than a redistribution of wealth, guarantees of basic income would constitute a “redistribution of security.” Opponents of the idea are much more inclined to think humans are naturally lazy, and that if given the opportunity to do nothing for their income, will do exactly that. While such critics are legion, we would put, for example, New York Times columnist David Brooks in this camp. Brooks has said that, as part of a job creation agenda, the government should “reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are.”14 To find out who is right, the city of Utrecht, Netherlands, in partnership with researchers from the University of Utrecht, has taken the portion of its residents who are already on welfare, and who are currently obliged to fulfill certain requirements to keep receiving it, and divided them into three groups.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

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

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

During the same period, meanwhile: More than two million people are now employed in education and health services, up from less than 1.5 million in January 2000, according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1967, 97 percent of American men: Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, “The Problem with Men: A Look at Long-Term Employment Trends,” Brookings Institution, December 3, 2010. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2010/1203_jobs_greenstone_looney.aspx. New York Times columnist David Brooks: David Brooks, “The Missing Fifth,” The New York Times, May 9, 2011. In 1950, roughly one in twenty men: According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey, the employment-population ratio for men between twenty-five and fifty-four was 95.3 percent in 1950 and 81.4 percent in 2011.

Lately economists have begun to focus on this lack of wage opportunities for men as “the single most destructive social force of our era,” says Michael Greenstone, an MIT economist and former chief economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks memorably defined this problem as “the missing fifth,” referring to the percentage of men—most of them without a college diploma—who are not getting up and going to work. In 1950, roughly one in twenty men of prime working age was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.


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

Just as FBI profilers can guess the perpetrator of crimes by looking at victimology, you can reverse-engineer your way to popular op-ed stances just by looking at audiences and determining what points of view are most likely to please them. Writers like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and cohort David Brooks are perfect examples. Friedman, whose target audience is upscale New Yorkers and international businesspeople, has been writing the same “Capitalism, surprisingly, works!” column for thirty years. In 2002, Slate ran a story about why Friedman was the most important columnist in the world. “He’s effective not because he sounds like a historian, but because he sounds like an advertisement.

The tough-talking, bard-of-the-streets, people’s columnist of the Royko or Jimmy Breslin school once held exalted positions in most big cities. These larger-than-life figures had begun to vanish from American newspapers in the eighties and nineties. They were replaced, en masse, by representatives of what Frank calls “Ivy League monoculture,” pundits like Boot and David Brooks and E. J. Dionne and Ross Douthat, whose ideas about politics were tied up more with modernity than class. These were voices for the yuppie set, urban, educated, white collar, in perpetual awe of productivity and corporate innovation. Frank didn’t really belong to the Royko tradition. He grew up in Mission Hills, Kansas, which he described in What’s the Matter With Kansas?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was wrong about Operation Iraqi Freedom turning around in the “next six months” fourteen consecutive times, famously telling America’s enemies they could “Suck on this.” Current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg won an Overseas Press Club award for speculating about Saddam Hussein’s “possible ties to al-Qaeda.” David Brooks is an on-again-off-again Republican, a famed mangler of words, the author of a book about the superior consumer taste of the American rich, and a self-described teacher of “humility” at Yale. When he was with the Weekly Standard in the Iraq years, he had a boner for war and dumped on “peaceniks.”


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

A humble approach to our technologies helps us strive to understand these human-made, messy constructions, yet still yield to our limits. And this humble approach to technology fits quite nicely with biological thinking. While at every moment an incremental approach to knowledge provides additional understanding of a system, this iterative process will always feel incomplete. And that’s okay. New York Times columnist David Brooks has noted, “Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty.” Humility, alongside an interest in the details of complex systems, can do what both fear and worship cannot: help us peer and poke around the backs of our systems, even if we never look them in the face with complete understanding. In many instances, an incomplete muddle of understanding may be the best that we can do.

video game designer and writer Ian Bogost: Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/. a perfect and immaculate process: This is discussed further in Bogost, “Cathedral of Computation.” the “humble programmer”: Edsger Dijkstra, “The Humble Programmer.” Communications of the ACM 15, no. 10 (1972): 859–66. “Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty”: David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), 263. nevertheless see a “glorious mess”: Carl Zimmer, “Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?” The New York Times Magazine, March 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/is-most-of-our-dna-garbage.html. The book includes maxims: These examples are all from Appendix I of John Gall, The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small, 3rd ed.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

The university’s president at the time was a sociologist, a traditional academic; the university’s Board of Visitors was dominated by wealthy figures from finance and real estate who wanted (of course) to dump the classics department and who thought the university needed to get with the online thing toot sweet because David Brooks had said it was a good idea in his New York Times column. When the board members forced the president to resign, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit. At first, the only explanation available for the ouster came in a leaked email from a super-wealthy trustee of the business school—Mr.

“It’s compromise,” is how Goodwin summarized the film’s message for an interviewer. And the commentariat chimed in unison: Yes! We have learned from this movie, they sang, that politicians must Make Deals. That one must Give Something to Get Something. The film was a study in the “nobility of politics,” declared David Brooks in the New York Times; it teaches that elected officials can do great things, but only if they “are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.” Michael Gerson of the Washington Post suggested that members of Congress be made to watch the thing in order to acquire “a greater appreciation for flexibility and compromise.”1 According to Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, the film shows our greatest president “doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective.”


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

A transactional relationship is when your accountant files your tax returns and in exchange you pay him for his time. An alliance is when a coworker needs last-minute help on Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning presentation, and even though you’re busy, you agree to go over to his house and help. These “volleys of communication and cooperation” build trust. Trust, writes David Brooks, is “habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people … slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.”9 You cooperate and sacrifice because you want to help a friend in need but also because you figure you’ll be able to call on him in the future when you are the one in a bind.

Neil Rackham and John Carlisle, “The Effective Negotiator, Part I: The Behaviour of Successful Negotiators,” Journal of European Industrial Training 2, no. 6 (1978): 6–11, doi:10.1108/eb002297 8. Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9. David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011), 155. 10. How is he defining weak tie? In the study, he uses frequency of contact as a proxy for how strong the relationship is. This is an imperfect measure: you may see your secretary or the doorman every day, but that does not make him a strong tie.


pages: 232 words: 60,093

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

A 2008 national survey of the major metropolitan areas that appealed most to people found that the favorites—Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, and Tampa—all shared “warm weather, a casual lifestyle and rapid growth.”11 In fact, all of the top ten cities on the list were in temperate climates, seven in the West and three in the South. It also helps if a city is close to attractive natural amenities such as lakes, mountains, beaches, or the desert. Given the popular interest in the outdoors, and outdoor activities, nearby wilderness areas have become important urban amenities. As David Brooks put it, “These [favorite cities] are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage—filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.”12 Industrial cities didn’t need beautiful settings; postindustrial cities do.

Ibid. 8. Office of Technology Assessment, The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1995), 12. 9. Edward L. Glaeser, “Houston, New York Has a Problem,” New York Sun, July 16, 2008, 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Denver Tops List, 5. 12. David Brooks, “I Dream of Denver,” New York Times, February 17, 2009, A29. 13. See Blake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 14. Kristol, “Urban Civilization,” 31. 15. According to the U.S. Census, the total number of people living in cities larger than 250,000 was 39.4 million in 1960, 42.3 million in 1970, and 52.1 million in 2006.


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

This Will Make You Smarter New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking Edited by John Brockman Foreword by David Brooks Contents David Brooks: Foreword John Brockman: Preface: The Edge Question Martin Rees “Deep Time” and the Far Future Far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up until now. Marcelo Gleiser We Are Unique Modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite. P.Z. Myers The Mediocrity Principle Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.

Ernst Pöppel A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage Because we are a victim of our biological past, and as a consequence a victim of ourselves, we end up with shabby SHAs, having left behind reality. Acknowledgments Index About the Author Books by John Brockman Credits Copyright About the Publisher Footnotes Foreword David Brooks Columnist, New York Times; author, The Social Animal Every era has its intellectual hotspots. We think of the Bloomsbury Group in London during the early twentieth century. We think of the New York intellectuals who wrote for little magazines like Partisan Review in the 1950s. The most influential thinkers in our own era live at the nexus of the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and information technology.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

STEP 2: THE DASH EXERCISE This is a twist on the obituary exercise based on the poem “The Dash” by Linda Ellis.9 The title refers to the dash between the date that you’re born and the date that you die. “For it matters not, how much we own, the cars . . . the house . . . the cash. What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.” Take the challenge of the poem to consider: How do I want to spend my dash? STEP 3: THE VIRTUES EXERCISE David Brooks, in his New York Times article “The Moral Bucket List,” notes that American society spends more time teaching and rewarding us to develop our resume virtues than our eulogy virtues.10 “The resume virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral—whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful.

Savage, Roz, Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010). 9. Ellis, Linda, “The Dash,” Linda Ellis, 1996. www.linda-ellis.com/the-dash-the-dash-poem-by-linda-ellis-.html 10. Brooks, David, “The Moral Bucket List,” The New York Times, April 11, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html 11. Shell, Richard, G., Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success, Penguin Group, August 15, 2013. 12. Gilbert, Daniel Todd, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006). 13. Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). 14.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

House majority leader Eric Cantor, who had maneuvered into becoming the point man for the Republican Right and/or who was irked at being cut out of the secret Obama-Boehner talks, had torpedoed the deal. He told Boehner that House Republicans would not accept any tax increases and that Boehner had to back out of talks with Obama. Boehner bowed to that dictum and rejoined the Republican chorus against any tax increase. Republican-friendly columnist David Brooks exploded in exasperation at the adamant refusal of the Tea Party–dominated Republicans to accept what he saw as Obama’s lopsided concessions. In a New York Times column headlined “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” Brooks wrote: “A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government,” but not a Republican Party in the grip of the Tea Party Right.

Some mainstream Republican senators such as Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana, like GOP presidential candidates playing to the hard-core Right in the primaries, swerved to adopt hard right positions in their reelection campaigns to ward off Tea Party purging. Hatch survived the initial Tea Party purge, but Lugar was knocked off. Conservative columnist David Brooks likened Republican primaries to “heresy trials” imposing ideological purity, and he sharply chided Hatch and Lugar for bowing to these pressures. “It’s not honorable to kowtow to the extremes so you can preserve your political career,” Brooks commented. “Of course, this is exactly what has been happening in the Republican Party for the past half century.

Realpolitik,” The New York Times, July 11, 2011; “Boehner Says Obama ‘Not Serious’ About Deficit,” CBS News, Face the Nation, May 15, 2011; Kane, “President, Speaker Motivated by ‘Big Deal.’ ” Matt Bai, “The Game Is Called Chicken,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2012. 70 The risk was Kane, “President, Speaker Motivated by ‘Big Deal.’ ” 71 Boehner had to back out Ibid.; David A. Fahrenthold and Paul Kane, “Eric Cantor Emerges a Key Player in Debt Negotiations,” The Washington Post, July 11, 2011. 72 “The Mother of All No-Brainers” David Brooks, “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. 73 In this final push, their grand bargain Bai, “The Game Is Called Chicken,” and Peter Wallstein, Lori Montgomery, and Scott Wilson, “He Promised Change in Washington. Then the Debt Deal Collapsed. So Obama Changed Course,” The Washington Post, March 18, 2012. 74 Lowest level in sixty years Senator Daniel K.


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The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The financial industry regularly claims that thousands of high-paying jobs would be threatened by regulation, which could send trading to other, less-regulated countries. Supporters of intellectual property argue that software and entertainment are important exports, and American jobs depend on protecting them from uncompensated use. An especially vivid example of the value of reputation is seen in a column by David Brooks, which cites the following examples of American greatness: “The Food and Drug Administration is the benchmark for medical standards. The American patent system is the most important in the world.”25 The widespread belief that these forms of industry protection are the jewel in the crown of the American economy, rather than an illegitimate profit grab, is an enormous source of social power, and one that means that those industries need to rely far less on more visible, brute-force sources of influence.

The City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14.The general phenomenon of the erosion of public interest legislation is discussed in Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 15.Arthur Wilmarth, “Turning a Blind Eye: Why Washington Keeps Giving In to Wall Street,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 81, no. 4 (2013): 1283-1446. 16.Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006): 69–84; Richard Hall and Frank Wayman, “Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990): 797–820. 17.Cass Sunstein, Simpler: The Future of Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 175. 18.Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 19.Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 20.Baumgartner and Jones, The Politics of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), ch. 4. 21.Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability. 22.Charles Geisst, Wall Street: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 23.James Kwak, “Cultural Capital and the Financial Crisis,” in Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, ed. Dan Carpenter and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 24.Anthony Heyes, “Expert Advice and Regulatory Complexity,” Journal of Regulatory Economics 24, no. 2 (September 2003): 119–33, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1024 714610368. 25.David Brooks, “Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?” New York Times, August 19, 2016. 26.William New, “Confidential USTR Emails Show Close Industry Involvement in TPP Negotiations,” Intellectual Property Watch, May 6, 2015, http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/06/05/confidential-ustr-emails-show-close-industry-involvement-in-tpp-negotiations/. 27.Charles Lindblom, “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no. 2 (May 1982): 324–36 28.James Gimpel and Frances Lee, “The Check Is in the Mail: Interdistrict Funding Flows in Congressional Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 2 (April 2008): 373–94. 29.Eleanor Powell, “Legislative Consequences of Fundraising Influence,” http://www.eleanorneffpowell.com/uploads/8/3/9/3/8393347/powell__2015__-_legislative_consequences_of_fundraising_influence.pdf. 30.Adam Bonica, “Professional Networks, Early Fundraising, and Electoral Success,” Scholars Strategy Network Paper, http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/bonica_professional_networks_early_fundraising_and_electoral_success.pdf. 31.Edward Glaeser, “Preservation Follies,” City Journal, Spring 2010, http://www.city-journal.org/html/preservation-follies-13279.html. 32.Tim Lee, “How a Rogue Appeals Court Wrecked the Patent System,” Ars Technica, September 30, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appeals-court-wrecked-the-patent-system/. 33.Steven Teles, “Kludgeocracy in America,” National Affairs 17 (Fall 2013): 97–114. 34.United States Department of the Treasury, Distribution Tables 2016 005b.


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Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

In addition to Homer and the Greeks, we borrowed the term “odyssey years” from David Brooks, the noted New York Times columnist. In his October 9, 2007, column, Brooks was describing the new realities of twenty-two-to-thirty-five-year-old Americans when he said, “With a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years [italics added]. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.” David Brooks, “The Odyssey Years,” The Opinion Pages, New York Times, October 9, 2007, http://​www.​nytimes.​com/2007/​10/​09/​opinion/​09brooks.​html?


pages: 222 words: 70,132

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

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

This would suggest that Zuckerberg and his wife are not techno-determinists, as Page and Thiel are, and that they are making a commitment to democracy and all the messiness it implies. Democracy thrives because of competing voices in politics as well as in the media. If Facebook becomes my primary source of news, with the ability to filter what I see, then the civic square will no longer exist. If I “unfriend” Fox News and conservative commentator David Brooks in order for my worldview to be continually affirmed, then a principal aspect of our democracy—the need to remain informed—will die. The 2016 presidential campaign brought Facebook’s political power into focus. The New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote, “Among techies, there is now widespread concern that Facebook and Twitter have hastened the decline of journalism and the irrelevance of facts.

The anonymity that Twitter provides is a shield that brings out the worst in humans. Plato (Republic 2.359a–2.360d) told a tale of the Ring of Gyges: when put on, it would render the wearer invisible. He asked the question: If we were shielded from the consequences of our actions, how would that change the way we act? We know the answer. As David Brooks says, we have created a “coliseum culture” in which a celebrity gets thrown to the lions on a weekly basis. Punishing strangers ought to be a risky endeavor. They can strike back and therefore threaten our long-term survival. Evolution, as Darwin pictured it, favors narrow self-interest. But the anonymity of the Internet shields the person who punishes the stranger.


pages: 234 words: 68,798

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better by Will Storr

data science, David Brooks, Demis Hassabis, Gordon Gekko, heat death of the universe, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Wall-E

Bergen (Basic, 2012) p. 206. 1.8 In a classic 1932 experiment, the psychologist Frederic Bartlett: Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin, 2012), p. 68. Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits: Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy D. Wilson, (Belknap Harvard, 2002), p.24. no more than forty: The Social Animal, David Brooks (Short Books, 2011) p. x. the ‘Cosmic Hunt’ myth: ‘The Evolution of Myths’, Julien d’Huy, Scientific American, December 2016. BANANAS. VOMIT: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (Penguin, 2011) p. 50. the early twentieth century by the Soviet filmmakers: Film Technique and Film Acting, Vsevolod Pudovkin (Grove Press, 1954) p. 140.

‘Human personalities are rather like fractals,’: Personality, Daniel Nettle (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 7. People make ‘identity claims’: Snoop, Sam Gosling (Basic Books, 2008) pp. 12–19. The psychologist Professor Sam Gosling advises: Snoop, Sam Gosling (Basic Books, 2008) p. 19. 2.4 Between the ages of zero and two: The Social Animal, David Brooks (Short Books, 2011) p. 47. It’s the main reason we have such greatly extended childhoods: The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood (Constable and Robinson, 2011) p. 22. Play, including storytelling, is typically overseen: Brain and Culture, Bruce Wexler (MIT Press, 2008) p. 134. See also: C. M. Walker & T.


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

Stanley Hall articulated, in place of the long, gray winter so widely assumed today. THE GENERATIVITY REVOLUTION Of all the benefits to be realized through creating a new stage, the biggest prize of all may be a cultural transformation to accompany the talent revolution described above. We could produce what columnist David Brooks calls a Generativity Revolution. Many are concerned today, across the political spectrum, that we are disregarding our future, leaving matters worse for coming generations environmentally, educationally, financially, and in myriad other ways. Bill Clinton made this observation in 2010, contending that we need to once again become a “tomorrow society,” to get back into “the future business.”

Time, February 29, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1718568,00.html. 41 The writer, Christopher Noxon: Christopher Noxon, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). 42 two New York Times columns: Nicholas D. Kristof, “Geezers Doing Good,” New York Times, July 20, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/opinion/20kristof.html; David Brooks, “The Geezers’ Crusade,” New York Times, February 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02brooks.html. 43 The late Daniel Boorstin: Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Touchstone, 1993). 47 pick up a copy of the January–February 2010 issue: Jack A. Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2010. 48 Economist Laurence Kotlikoff, in his book: Laurence J.


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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

“I can’t bear to think about the conflagrations to come,” he wrote.4 In that same edition of the Times, Roger Cohen concluded that “the world as we knew it is no more,” even as he reassured himself that the United States was “not Weimar Germany.”5 Yet. On the following day, it was Charles Blow’s turn. “Trump represents a clear and very present danger,” he asserted, while demanding that he be “placed under unrelenting pressure.… That begins today.”6 On November 11, David Brooks recounted the reaction of his family and friends to Trump’s election. “This is victory for white supremacy,” they told him, “for misogyny, nativism and authoritarianism. Fascism is descending.” Brooks would by no means be the last columnist to bring the f-word into the conversation. Yet he consoled himself with the thought that “the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year.”7 On that same page, Paul Krugman predicted, “A Trump administration will do immense damage to America and the world.”

Gail Collins, “Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump,” New York Times (November 9, 2016). 4. Frank Bruni, “Trump’s Shocking Success,” New York Times (November 9, 2016). 5. Roger Cohen, “President Donald Trump,” New York Times (November 9, 2016). 6. Charles M. Blow, “America Elects a Bigot,” New York Times (November 10, 2016). 7. David Brooks, “The View from Trump Tower,” New York Times (November 11, 2016). 8. Paul Krugman, “Thoughts for the Horrified,” New York Times (November 11, 2016). 9. Ross Douthat, “You Must Serve Trump,” New York Times (November 11, 2016). 10. Charles Blow’s columns for the New York Times are archived at https://www.nytimes.com/column/charles-m-blow, accessed September 12, 2018. 11.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

The authors of a recent McKinsey Quarterly article made the point that “more and more positions require employees with deeper expertise, more independent judgment, and better problem solving skills.”4  We are already seeing that many organizations place a premium on analytic skills and problem solving and make it the essential criterion to be hired. Commentator David Brooks of the New York Times takes this conclusion even further when he says, “It doesn't matter if you are working in the cafeteria or the inspection line of a plant, companies will only hire people who can see problems and organize responses.”5 Education Gaps If creative problem solving is the critical twenty‐first century skill, what are schools and universities doing to develop these skills in students?

This quote from Nobel Laureate Herb Simon captures much of what we set out to do in the book: “Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”11 Notes 1  Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Random House, 2008). 2  Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern, The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible (Public Affairs, 2017). 3  Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum, 2016). 4  Boris Ewenstein, Bryan Hancock, and Asmus Komm, “Ahead of the Curve: The Future of Performance Management,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2016. 5  David Brooks, “Everyone a Changemaker,” New York Times, February 18, 2018. 6  Beno Csapo and Joachim Funke (eds.), The Nature of Problem Solving: Using Research to Inspire 21st Century Learning. (OECD Publishing, 2017). 7  Douglas Belkin, “Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical‐Thinking Skills,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2017. 8  Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Random House, 2015). 9   Tobias Baer, Sven Hellistag, and Hamid Samandari, “The Business Logic in Debiasing,” McKinsey Latest Thinking, May 2017. 10  Planting Healthy Air (The Nature Conservancy, 2016). 11  Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (MIT Press, 1968).


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

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

Before concluding this discussion of the community culture, it should be pointed out that ethnicity is a predominant base of cultural diversity, but it is not the only source. Lifestyles, social values, and identity politics are other contributors to the cultural diversity of cities and societies. Bohemians, Yuppies, Punks, or, to use David Brooks’s term for the new upper class, Bobos19 are often viewed as distinct cultural communities on the basis of their lifestyles and values. Yet much of the multiculturalism discourse is about ethnic communities and their subcultures. This is how the term community culture will be used in the book. Ethnicity, Identity, and Community Culture Ethnicity is a social boundary that defines who is inside and also, by implication, outside a group.

Ficher, “The Subcultural Theory of Urbanism: A TwentiethCentury Assessment,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 3 (1995), 568. Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton, “Networks, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1979), 363–90. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, 44. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, “The Making of a Multicultural Metropolis,” 30. Adapted from Wsevolod Isajiw, Definitions of Ethnicity, Occasional Papers in Ethnic and Immigration Studies (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1979), 25.

Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future, Report of Commission de Consultation sur les Pratiques d’Accommodement Reliées aux Différences Culturelles (Quebec, 2008), 19. Banting, Courchene, and Seidle, “Introduction” in Belonging? ed. Banting, Courchene, and Seidle, 1. Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions (Toronto: Penguin, 1994), 113. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 3. David Brooks, “The Death of Multiculturalism,” New York Times, 27 April 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E1DC133FF9 34A15757C0A9609C8B63. Lawrence Martin, “Enough of Multiculturalism – Bring on the Melting Pot,” Globe and Mail, 31 March 2009, A17. Jan Rath, “Debating Multiculturalism,” Harvard International Review, 6 January 2011, http://hir.harvard.edu/archives/2773.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

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

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

And projections from the U.S. Census Bureau show that this trend will continue—will even accelerate—in the current century. Birthrates are higher in Republican areas than in Democratic areas. This phenomenon has been described as the "liberal baby bust" by USA Today. In 2004, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that the higher birthrates in Republican areas were part of a "natalism" movement. "They are having three, four or more kids," Brooks wrote of America's "natalists." "Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do.

I want to split my own wood and be less dependent on government." Randy Penrod, a 285-pound rugby player and Scott County's Republican Party chair, said that Republicans and Democrats have a basic difference: "I have a theory that the farther away you are from another human being, the more likely you are to be a Republican." New York Times columnist David Brooks described the exurbs in his impressionistic 2004 book On Paradise Drive. After these fast-growing counties appeared to have reelected Bush that year, there was a mini-burst of research into what the exurbs were all about. The research was never particularly rewarding because nobody could agree on how an exurb differed from a suburb or a rural community.

In one difference from Bob Cushing's analysis, Keeter slightly changed the dividing line for a strong partisan county. Instead of a io-point difference, Keeter designated "landslide" counties as those with 20-point margins. Just under half the voters in 2004 lived in one of these counties. 6. Phillip Longman, "The Liberal Baby Bust," USA Today, March 14, 2006; David Brooks, "The New Red-Diaper Babies," New York Times, December 7, 2004; Joel Kotkin and William Frey, "Parent Trap," New Repuhlic, December 2, 2004, http://www.joelkotkm.com/Politics/NR%20Parent_Trap.htm. 7. Ronald Brownstein, "As Democrats Look West, Colorado Budges," Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2006. 8.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The parents of British children—who spend an average of six hours a day in front of such screens—“felt that they had things about right,” summarized Lydia Plowman, the lead British researcher of a long-term study of media use.12 In families where the culture is to leave kids to their own devices (literally), what role do hours of screen time play in a child’s psychological development, school progress, or even happiness? Screens and Social Class Before I even get to the screens, consider how skill gaps are widened by social class. In The Social Animal, David Brooks describes some of the ways that child-rearing styles among lower-class families differ from the engaged, debate- and tutorial-driven parenting of the professional classes. In lower-class homes “there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children’s world,” Brooks writes.

Relating Television Use to Children’s Free-Time Activities,” Pediatrics 117, no. 2 (2006); Mendelsohn et al., “Infant Television and Video Exposure”; Tomopoulous et al., “Infant Media Exposure.” 17. Kevin Hartnett, “The Perils of Parenting Style,” Pennsylvania Gazette, September/October 2011; David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2012). 18. Brooks, The Social Animal. 19. Hartnett, “The Perils of Parenting Style”; Lareau, Unequal Childhoods. 20. De Decker et al., “Influencing Factors of Screen Time.” 21. B. Hart and T.

Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers.” 28. Nicholas D. Kristof, “How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal,” New York Times, January 22, 2012. 29. Robert D. Putnam, “Requiem for the American Dream? Unequal Opportunity in America,” lecture presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, June 29, 2012; David Brooks, “The Opportunity Gap,” New York Times, July 9, 2012; Margaret Wente, “The Long Climb from Inequality,” Globe and Mail, July 14, 2012; Sean F. Reardon, “No Rich Child Left Behind,” New York Times, April 28, 2013; Sean F. Riordan, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations,” in Whither Opportunity?


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

Boko Haram Bombetoka Bay Bonde, Bob Bork, Les Boston Consulting Group Boston Globe Bourguiba, Habib Boys & Girls Clubs of America Brainerd, Mary “Brains & Machines” (blog) Braun, Gil Brazil breakers, super-empowered; degrading of; humiliation and; weak states and Brew “Brief History of Jews and African Americans in North Minneapolis, A” (Quednau) Brimeyer, Jim Brin, Sergey broadband Broadgate, Wendy Brock, David Brooks, David Brooks, Mel Brookview golf club Brown, John Seely Brynjolfsson, Erik Bucksbaum, Phil Buffett, Warren building information modeling buildings, energy efficient Burke, Edmund Burke, Tom Burnett, T Bone Burning Glass Technologies business: social responsibility and Business Bridge Business Insider Busteed, Brandon Bustle.com “Caddie Chatter” (Long and Seitz) Cairo calcium carbonate California, University of, at San Diego Cambodia campaign spending Campbell, James R.

In a world of super-empowered individuals we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that in as many ways as possible we are creating moral contexts and weaving healthy interdependencies that embrace the immigrant, the stranger, and the loner, and inspire more people in more places to want to make things rather than break things. There is no restraint stronger than thinking your friends and family will hate or disrespect you for what you do—and that can be generated only by a community. “All over the country there are schools and organizations trying to come up with new ways to cultivate character,” my colleague David Brooks noted in his November 27, 2015, column in The New York Times. “The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.” One way to reinforce and scale the character-building norms of healthy communities is by showing people the joys and the fruits that can come from joining hearts, souls, and hands—what happens when we don’t just not do unto others but actually do with others in ways that are big and hard and make a difference.

Some of that money is being used to build a school and an orphanage in East Africa.” Innovation Comes in Small Packages Time and again I saw proof just in little St. Louis Park of Gidi Grinstein’s dictum that social innovation is happening all over the country today at the local level. Nothing new has to be invented—all that exists just needs to be scaled, or as my colleague David Brooks observed in his June 21, 2016, New York Times column: “The social fabric is tearing across this country, but everywhere it seems healers are rising up to repair their small piece of it. They are going into hollow places and creating community, building intimate relationships that change lives one by one.”


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Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Some even predict that this trend may soon recede, as housing becomes less affordable for the very groups that powered the gentrification in the first place. Alan Ehrenhalt dubs this “the demographic inversion.”5 One of the many upshots of these two competing movements, according to leading demographers and political sociologists, is a new “sorting” of population by values, culture, and politics. This tension is perhaps best captured by David Brooks’s two iconic American characters, the cappuccino-drinking urban “bourgeois-bohemian” (“bobo” for short) and suburbia’s “patio man.”6 The Means Migration In 2006 I argued in The Atlantic that an even more significant demographic realignment is currently at work: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid people to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of traditional lower and middle classes from those same places.

Chapter 6 1 “The World Goes to Town,” The Economist, May 3, 2007. 2 Alfonso Hernandez Marin, “Cultural Changes: From the Rural World to Urban Environment,” United Nations Chronicle, November 4, 2006. 3 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, Oxford University Press, 1987; Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, University of Chicago Press, 2005. 4 Joel Garreau, Edge City, Anchor, 1992. 5 Alan Ehrenhalt, “Trading Places: The Demographic Inversion of the American City,” The New Republic, August 13, 2008. 6 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, Simon & Schuster, 2001; Brooks, On Paradise Drive, Simon & Schuster, 2004. 7 Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities, Harvard Institute of Economic Research, August 2005. 8 Richard Florida, “Where the Brains Are,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2006, p. 34. 9 Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 12355, July 2006.


pages: 283 words: 77,272

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

What is uncommon is for anyone to pay attention when it happens, let alone object on their behalf, because they typically are not people with powerful connections. Klein’s indignation over Libby’s unfair treatment was echoed by many in the establishment media. The former Time editor in chief Norman Pearlstine wrote a book denouncing Fitzgerald’s investigation, while the New York Times columnist David Brooks condemned the prosecution in multiple venues as a “farce.” But perhaps the most revealing pro-Libby defense came from the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, who—as we just saw—had gleefully celebrated the pardon bequeathed to his “Safeway buddy” Caspar Weinberger. Cohen’s June 2007 defense of Libby was a true tour de force of apologia, highlighting the function of our Beltway media stars when it comes to elite immunity.

ABC News Abrams, Elliott Abu Ghraib prison Abzug, Bella ACLU Adams, Abigail Adams, John Addington, David Afghanistan war African Americans Alexander, Michelle Algeria al-Qaeda Alter, Jonathan American Civil Liberties Union American Enterprise Institute American International Group (AIG) Andrews, Bruce Answers to Monsieur de Meusnier’s Questions (Jefferson) Anti–Drug Abuse Acts (1986, 1988) antitrust laws Arar, Maher Argentina Armey, Dick Armitage, Richard Ash, Mimi Ashcroft, John Assange, Julian assassination of American citizens AT&T Atlantic Australia Austria auto company bailouts Awlaki, Anwar al- Bagram prison Balko, Radley bank holding company Bank of America bankruptcy laws banks accounting practices and deregulation of financial crisis and foreclosure fraud and Geithner and retroactive immunity and Barclays Capital Barnes, Fred Barofsky, Neil Barr, William Barry, John Bear Stearns Bechtel Corporation Beckett, Katherine BellSouth Berenson, Brad Bethune, Brian Biden, Joe Bill Moyers Journal (TV show) Bill of Rights Black, Bill Black, Charlie BlackRock Blagojevich, Rod Blankfein, Laura Blankfein, Lloyd Bloomberg news Blow, Charles Blue Dogs Democrats Blumenthal, Paul Blumenthal, Sidney Boehner, John Boeing Boland Amendment (1982) Booz Allen Borger, Gloria Boston Phoenix Boumediene ruling Bradbury, Steven Brennan, John Britain British International Criminal Court Act (2001) Broder, David Brooks, David Brown, Roy BSKH & Associates Buffett, Warren Bunch, Will Bureau of Corporations Bureau of Justice Statistics Burger, Warren Burton, Bill Bush, George H. W. Iraqgate and Iran-Contra and Bush, George W. defense of, and shared guilt detainees and DOJ opposition to extra-legal power and financial crisis and foreign rule of law and Iran-Contra and Iraq war and Libby and media and memoirs of Michael McConnell and Obama fails to investigate Plame outing and public opinion on Spain and state secrets and telecom immunity and torture and U.S. attorney firings and warrantless eavesdropping and whistle-blowers and Bush, Jeb BusinessWeek Bybee, Jay torture memo of 2002 Byrne Formula Grant program C2 Group Caddo County, Louisiana California Cambodia campaign contributions financial industry and prison industry and telecoms and Canada “Can You Even Imagine How Bad It Must Have Been?”


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

When asked what would be extremely or very important to them as adults, 95 percent of teens surveyed by the Pew Research Center picked having a job or career they enjoy, which ranked ahead of anything else, including helping people in need, having a lot of money, or having children.9 A Gallup survey confirmed that finding purpose at work matters deeply to Millennials.10 This phenomenon goes way beyond the younger generations and also applies to those of us who are a bit older. Author David Brooks argues that life is often shaped like two mountains: early in their professional life, people chase professional and financial success as well as personal happiness—the first mountain—only to feel unsatisfied once they reach the summit. Later in life, they then embark on a second climb: one focused on finding meaning and purpose through commitment to family, vocation, philosophy or faith, and community.11 Back in 2004, it felt like I had reached the top of my “first mountain.”

Teens See Anxiety and Depression as a Major Problem Among Their Peers,” Pew Research Center, February 20, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/02/20/most-u-s-teens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-their-peers/. 10. Amy Adkins and Brandon Rigoni, “Paycheck or Purpose: What Drives Millennials?,” Gallup Workplace, June 1, 2016, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236453/paycheck-purpose-drives-millennials.aspx. 11. David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY: Random House, 2019). 12. Bill George, Discover Your True North: Becoming an Authentic Leader (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 13. Hortense le Gentil, Aligned: Connecting Your True Self with the Leader You’re Meant to Be (Vancouver, BC: Page Two, 2019).


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Jobs that require physical proximity or high levels of training are also unlikely to be outsourced. Another important consideration regarding earning to give is the risk of losing your values by working in an environment with people who aren’t as altruistically inclined as you are. For example, David Brooks, writing in The New York Times, makes this objection in response to a story of Jason Trigg, who is earning to give by working in finance: You might start down this course seeing finance as a convenient means to realize your deepest commitment: fighting malaria. But the brain is a malleable organ.

whether a job will be around in the future: For an in-depth analysis, see Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, September 17, 2013, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf. David Brooks, writing in The New York Times: Brooks, David, “The Way to Produce a Person,” The New York Times, June 3, 2013. GiveDirectly has raised more than $20 million: “Financials,” GiveWell, https://www.givedirectly.org/financials.html. Professor William Nordhaus at Yale University has estimated: William D.


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

We fear that if Trump were to confront a war or terrorist attack, he would exploit this crisis fully—using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today. — Even if President Trump does not directly dismantle democratic institutions, his norm breaking is almost certain to corrode them. President Trump has, as David Brooks has written, “smashed through the behavior standards that once governed public life.” His party rewarded him for it by nominating him for president. In office, his continued norm violation has expanded the zone of acceptable presidential behavior, giving tactics that were once considered aberrant and inadmissible, such as lying, cheating, and bullying, a prominent place in politicians’ tool kits.

President Trump’s foreign policy ineptitude: During the 2016 campaign, fifty Republican foreign policy experts, many of them former Bush administration officials, wrote a letter warning that Trump’s ignorance and recklessness would “put at risk our nation’s national security.” See “50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation’s Security ‘At Risk,’ ” New York Times, August 8, 2016. “smashed through the behavior standards”: David Brooks, “Getting Trump out of My Brain,” New York Times, August 8, 2017. “closed and armored limousine”: James Wieghart and Paul Healy, “Jimmy Carter Breaks Protocol at Inauguration,” New York Daily News, January 21, 1977. “an informal custom”: Christine Hauser, “The Inaugural Parade, and the Presidents Who Walked It,” New York Times, January 19, 2017.


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

Similarly, the juxtaposition of Utilitarian concern about ‘the poor of the world’ and denial of responsibility for family was less of a moral awakening than the easy pleasure of moral posturing: Dickens skewered such attitudes through the character of Mrs Jellyby, in Bleak House. More fundamentally, the triumph of individual fulfilment through personal achievement over meeting obligations to family is beginning to look psychologically flawed. In a profoundly subversive book, The Road to Character, David Brooks starts from the familiar celebration of fulfilment through achievement only to turn the tables on it, suggesting that the future trend will be towards a restoration of fulfilment through meeting obligations to others.13 The seductive proposition that we find ourselves through focusing on ourselves is opposed by a powerful counter-narrative, which is perhaps best expressed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters and Papers from Prison, his testimony while awaiting death at the hands of the Nazis: we find ourselves through ‘losing ourselves’ in the struggles of the other people in our daily lives.

THE CLASS DIVIDE 1.Wolf (2013), p. 240. 2.From the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study Fact Sheet: www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/publications. 3.See ‘Effects of social disadvantage and genetic sensitivity on children’s telomere length’, Fragile Families Research Brief 50, Princeton, 2015. 4.Philip Larkin, ‘High Windows’ (1974). 5.A proposition brilliantly explored by David Brooks in The Social Animal (2011). 6.Pause has a website. Visit it; join in. The data in the text are taken from http://www.pause.org.uk/pause-in-action/learning-and-evaluation. 7.Wolf (2013), pp. 51–2. 8.Brown and de Cao (2017). 9.Putnam (2016), p. 212. 10.Hanushek (2011). 11.Levitt et al. (2016). 12.If you find this as remarkable as I do, may I encourage you to contribute to Grimm and Co, which is a registered charity.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

The United States is gradually reaching the end of a cataclysm, economic rather than military, but a cataclysm nonetheless, and it is impossible not to wonder what ordinary American life will look like in the postrecession future. Some of the most intriguing questions this time are ones of culture, demographics, and the use of physical space. It is perfectly possible to argue, as critics such as Joel Kotkin and David Brooks do, that the rules are not about to change—that the auto-dependent existence, suburban expansion, and the urban decline of the late twentieth century will simply resume. It is also possible to argue, as do critics on the other side, such as Christopher Leinberger and Arthur C. Nelson, that the Great Recession will prove to be a cultural and demographic turning point.

., “Light Rail Packed for Grand Debut,” Arizona Republic, December 28, 2008, p. 1. 17 “Now that it’s up”: Carol Johnson, personal interview, November 2009. 18 “Our presence will be catalytic”: Michael Crow, quoted in Craig Harris, “Trio Frame Future for Downtown,” Arizona Republic, January 4, 2006, p. 1B. 19 “ASU downtown is more than a few nuggets”: Phil Gordon interview. 20 “People weren’t buying to flip”: Eric Brown, personal interview, December 2009. 21 “Life happens under five stories”: Ibid. 22 “The less frequently you use your car”: Grady Gammage interview. 23 “This isn’t an urban city”: Don Keuth interview. 24 “We have all these people”: Carol Johnson interview. 25 “When I think about Chicago”: Alicia Porter, quoted in The Arizona We Want (Phoenix: Center for the Future of Arizona, 2009), p. 32. 26 “There is something genuinely vital”: Grady Gammage interview. 27 “We’re not a global city”: Don Keuth interview. CHAPTER NINE: URBANIZING THE SUBURBS 1 77 percent of Generation Y: John McIlwain, Housing in America: The Next Decade (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2010), p. 15. 2 “Generation Y’s attitudes toward home ownership”: Ibid. 3 In a poll cited by The New York Times in 2009: David Brooks, “I Dream of Denver,” New York Times op-ed column, February 17, 2009, p. 33. 4 “Once the economy recovers”: McIlwain, Housing in America, p. 26. 5 The demographer Arthur C. Nelson calculated: Arthur C. Nelson, quoted in Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (New York: Wiley, 2008), p. 10. 6 “Stapleton was a significant proving ground”: Peter Park, personal interview, July 2010. 7 “People got married at Villa Italia”: Bob Murphy, personal interview, July 2010. 8 “It was a boarded-up mall”: Ibid. 9 “The most important part”: Mark Falcone, personal interview, July 2010. 10 “It didn’t take long”: Bob Murphy interview. 11 “the first project in Colorado”: City of Englewood, Colorado, website, http://englewoodgov.org/Index.aspx?


pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

More recently, economists have tried to discover why some Eastern European countries have made a successful transition to capitalism following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while others have not. After testing a litany of potential explanations, they concluded, in the words of the journalist David Brooks, “Finally, and most important, there is the level of values. A nation’s economy is nestled in its moral ecology. Economic performance is tied to history, culture and psychology.”27 This analysis creates a problem for those who try to describe economics in purely mathematical terms. The issue is not whether the Chinese or the observers of Eastern Europe are right in their conclusions.

Galbraith goes on to note, “One of the costs … [of mathematical economics] … was the removal of the subject several steps further from reality” (259). 24. Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School, in his private review and critique of this chapter, October 2014. 25. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 4, Introduction. 26. Quoted in Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Penguin 2011), 287. 27. David Brooks, “The Legacy of Fear,” New York Times, November 10, 2014. 28. Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School, in his private review and critique of this chapter, October 2014. 29. He went on, incorrectly, as it would later prove, to say that this propensity is to be “in no other race of animals.”


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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

For updates since then, see Ronald Inglehart, “Changing Values among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006”, West European Politics Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2, January–March 2008; also, the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). Many make sense of the shift to less materialistic values by referring to Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review Vol. 50, No. 4, 1943. Also, read about a generational shift to post-materialism in David Brooks, “The Experience Economy”, New York Times, 14 February 2011. Advertising agency research This research was conducted by an advertising agency called Euro RSCG Worldwide, which, in the time it’s taken me to write the book, has become Havas Worldwide. The research paper is called The New Consumer (www.thenewconsumer.com).

For a rigorous analysis of the millennials’ housing aspirations, read Nathan Morris, “Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century”, on the website of a design firm called Placemakers (www.placemakers.com), 9 April 2012. “Rather than owning a thing”: millennials not so interested in material objects Various sources, including Tammy Erickson, “Meaning Is the New Money”, HBR Blog Network, 23 March 2011; and David Brooks, “The Experience Economy”, New York Times, 14 February 2011. The rise of services like Zipcar, Spotify, and Netflix For excellent introductions to how these companies operate, read Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, “Beyond Zipcar: Collaborative Consumption”, Harvard Business Review, October 2010; and, for the rise of these services, read “All Eyes on the Sharing Economy”, The Economist, 9 Mar 2013.


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The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Again, the unique personalities and histories of our fifty states are some of America’s greatest strengths, but this individuality can and will bite back if not respected. Additionally, the broader localism movement is taking root in communities and neighborhoods across the country, a bottom-up movement that’s also the by-product of the self-interested and dysfunctional politics industry. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “Localism is also thriving these days because many cities have more coherent identities than the nation as a whole. It is thriving because while national politics takes place through the filter of the media circus, local politics by and large does not. It is thriving because we’re in an era of low social trust.

“Where Ranked Choice Voting Is Used,” FairVote, https://www.fairvote.org/where_is_ranked_choice_voting_used. 56. See USC Price, “Terminate Gerrymandering: Engineering Victories in Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Missouri and Ohio,” YouTube, January 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUXpMO3-88&t=102s. 57. David Brooks, “The Localist Revolution,” New York Times, July 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/opinion/national-politics-localism-populism.html. 58. Roger Davidson, “The Advent of the Modern Congress: The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1990): 360. 59.


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

The Crimea annexation enhanced Putin’s legitimacy, but the intervention in Syria has left most Russians indifferent, and Russia’s still small but growing (and costly) involvement in Africa and Latin America is not known or appreciated by the broader public. What cannot be doubted, though, is the Kremlin’s capacity to play a spoiler’s role, on the global stage. Admittedly, today relative power is frustratingly hard to measure, due to what columnist David Brooks has called ‘the revolt of the weak’.63 America’s overwhelming military superiority has driven its challengers not into docile submission but into adopting forms of asymmetrical warfare that effectively shift the battle to terrain where the US’s war-fighting pre-eminence is inconsequential. According to a remarkable Harvard study, the weaker side in asymmetric wars waged between 1800 and 1849 achieved their strategic goals only 12 per cent of the time.

This was Putin’s famously tearful ‘Election Victory Speech’ in Manezhnaya Square (4 March 2012); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6qLcDAoqxQ. 61. Anton Troianovski, ‘Putin Claims Russia Is Developing Nuclear Arms Capable of Avoiding Missile Defenses’, Washington Post (1 March 2018). 62. Putin’s first interview on assuming the Presidency, 2000; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjU8Fg3NFmo. 63. David Brooks, ‘The Revolt of the Weak’, The New York Times (1 September 2014). 64. Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (Basic Books, 2013). 65. Address by President of the Russian Federation (18 March 2014); http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603. 66.


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

Almost every strand of the American experience is there: the immigrant, the Midwest, the black childhood, the white parents, the Christian educated in a Muslim country, the Ivy League and the working class. “With his multi-ethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama,” gushed the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks. It was as though Obama embodied healing qualities for a divided nation, at war with the world, in his very DNA. To others, his “foreignness” was cause for suspicion or at the very least for encouraging suspicion. Fox News claimed Obama had been educated in an Islamist madrassa in Indonesia (which was untrue).

Index Affirmative action African-Americans and the vote– See also United States: black Americans Aldrich, Liberty Ali, Ayan Hirshi Alienation Alito, Samuel American Anthropological Association (AAA) American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms Amis, Martin Anderson, Benedict Anderson, Viv Angelou, Maya Anti-capitalism Anticolonialism Anti-racism Apartheid transition to democracy Appadurai, Arjun Appiah, Kwame Anthony Arendt, Hannah Arnold, Gary Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA) Authenticity gatekeepers of inauthenticity fears/accusations Baldwin, James Ball, Edmund Banton, Buju Barbados Barber, Benjamin Barrett, Alan Barrier Williams, Fannie Barroso, José Manuel Basque language Bayart, Jean-François Beck, Glenn Belgium Ben-Dahan, Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer Berger, John Berlusconi, Silvio Besharov, Douglas Betto, Frei Biko, Steve bin Laden, Osama Black Power Blackwell, Kenneth Blair, Tony Blake, James Bluitgen, Kåre Blunkett, David Boal, Graham Borg, Björn Bositis, David Botha, Pieter Willem Boynatov, Eli Brass, Paul Brazil Britain – blackness in–, class in Jews in Muslims in national identity British National Party (BNP) Brock, David Brooks, David Broyard, Anatole Broyard, Bliss Bruni, Frank Brussels Buchanan, Pat Burke, Edmund Burqas Buruma, Ian Bush, George W. Cable, Daniel Calhoun, Craig Cape Town Capitalism Carlos, John Carr, E. H. Carter, Stephen Casey, Norah Cedarbaum, Miriam Cheney, Dick Childbirth birth rates Chisholm, Shirley Civil rights Civil Rights Act (1968) NAACP Clapham Class Cleary, Marie Clinton, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clyburn, Jim Colbert, Stephen Colonialism Colored identity Commission for Racial Equality Connolly, Linda Conservative Party (UK) Cooper, Carolyn Coulter, Ann Cox, Adam B.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

As important, that realism once formed the basis for a lot of bipartisan compromise and effective legislation. It was always the pragmatists on the left and on the right who found ways to work together on big issues, such as tax reform. And while pragmatism has been the first thing to suffer under brand politics in the Impulse Society, there are models for bringing it back. As David Brooks, another conservative voice at The New York Times, points out, conservative politicians of the nineteenth century—Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other Whigs—built powerful majorities by focusing on basic, nonpartisan issues such as social mobility and economic opportunity and, importantly, by “using the power of government to give marginalized Americans the tools to compete in a capitalist economy.”

Liz Kennedy, “Citizens Actually United: The Bi-Partisan Opposition to Corporate Political Spending and Support for Common Sense Reform,” Demos, Oct. 25, 2012, http://www.demos.org/publication/citizens-actually-united-bi-partisan-opposition-corporate-political-spending-and-support. 23. Chris Myers, “Conservatism and Campaign Finance Reform: The Two Aren’t Mutually Exclusive,” RedState, April 24, 2012, http://www.redstate.com/clmyers/2013/04/24/conservatism-and-campaign-finance-reform/. 24. David Brooks, “The Opportunity Coalition,” The New York Times, Jan 30, 2014. 25. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/. 26. In Robert Frank, The Darmn Economy: Liberty, Competition, and Common Good. 27. Brooks, “The Opportunity Coalition.”


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

Robert Rector, “How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the ‘Plague’ of Poverty in America,” Heritage Foundation, August 27, 2007, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/08/how-poor-are-americas-poor-examining-the-plague-of-poverty-in-america (accessed May 26, 2015). 55. David Brooks, “The Nature of Poverty,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/opinion/david-brooks-the-nature-of-poverty.html (accessed May 26, 2015). 56. Charles Murray, Coming Apart (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), pp. 226–27. 57. Lawrence M. Mead, From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2011), p. 34. 58.


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

Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York: Harper & Row, and Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1979), 38–39. 4. David B. Brooks, John B. Robinson, and Ralph D. Torrie, 2025: Soft Energy Futures for Canada, vol. 1, National Report of Friends of the Earth Canada to the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources and Environment Canada (Ottawa: 1983), italics added. Note to the reader: Robert Bott, David Brooks, and John Robinson, Life After Oil: A Renewable Energy Policy for Canada (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1983) is the most accessible of the several versions of the Canadian soft energy path study. 5. David B. Brooks, Another Path Not Taken: A Methodological Exploration of Water Soft Paths for Canada and Elsewhere, Report to Environment Canada (Ottawa: Friends of the Earth Canada, 2003). 6.

Stobaugh and Yergin, Energy Future. The original study was reported in the Demand and Conservation Panel of the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, “U.S. Energy Demand: Some Low Energy Futures,” Science, April 14, 1978. 8. See, for example, Brooks et al., Another Path Not Taken. 9. Ralph Torrie and David Brooks, with Ed Burt, Mario Espejo, Luc Gagnon, and Susan Holtz, 2025: Soft Energy Futures for Canada — 1988 Update (Ottawa: The Canadian Environmental Network, 1988). 10. $30 per barrel in 2000 and $55 per barrel in 2025. 11. Janet Shawin, “Charting a New Energy Future,” State of the World: 2003 (Washington, D.C.: The Worldwatch Institute, 2003). 12.


pages: 801 words: 229,742

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, David Brooks, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, invisible hand, low interest rates, oil shock, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Prominent neoconservatives include former and present policy makers like Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and David Wurmser; journalists like the late Robert Bartley, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Bret Stephens, and Norman Podhoretz; academics like Fouad Ajami, Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Bernard Lewis, and Ruth Wedgwood; and think-tank pundits like Max Boot, David Frum, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Daniel Pipes, Danielle Pletka, Michael Rubin, and Meyrav Wurmser.

Conversely, Alterman identified only five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions.2 Although some readers subsequently challenged Alterman’s coding of a handful of cases and a few of those he listed are now deceased, the disparity remains overwhelming and the challenges did not undermine his core claim.3 Consider the columnists who have covered the Middle East for the New York Times and the Washington Post in recent years. William Safire and the late A. M. Rosenthal were passionate defenders of Israel (and in Safire’s case, especially favorable toward Ariel Sharon); today, David Brooks consistently defends Israel’s position. Thomas L. Friedman is more moderate; he has been critical of some of Israel’s policies (and occasionally the lobby itself), but he almost never takes the Palestinians’ side or advocates that the United States distance itself from Israel. Nicholas D. Kristof is frequently critical of various aspects of American foreign policy and wrote one controversial column in March 2007 decrying the lack of serious public discussion of U.S. relations with Israel.

He believed that her concerns reflected “the views of somebody in the White House.”26 Neoconservatives in the media piled on Powell as well. Robert Kagan and William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on April 11 that Powell had “virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists.”27 The following day, David Brooks, then working for the Weekly Standard, described Powell’s trip on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as “a disaster as opposed to an unmitigated disaster.” He went on to say that Powell “hurt U.S. prestige … shredded U.S. policy in the Middle East … and most importantly, he hurt our moral clarity.”28 Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was making Israel’s case in the United States at the time, said even before Powell arrived in Israel that his trip “won’t amount to anything.”29 He was right: the balance of power inside the administration shifted against Powell so quickly and completely that his deputy in Washington called the secretary in Israel and told him, “I’m holding back the fucking gates here.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

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

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

Developed country societies became progressively more socially liberal, as the well-educated children of prosperous 1960s middle-class parents became the tolerant vanguard of movements that pressed for the rights of the historically downtrodden, benefiting women, minorities, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ+ community. In an insightful, satirical book, the New York Times commentator David Brooks labeled this new elite Bobos—bourgeois bohemians—because they had the work ethic of the single-minded Calvinist while retaining the social liberalism that only rebellious youth from a secure upper-middle-class background could have.7 Moderately educated male white workers, on the other hand, experienced the dwindling in decent job opportunities at the middle of the income distribution that we noted in the previous chapter.

As more leave, the mixed community becomes even less attractive for the remaining upper-middle-class parents, even those who harbor a strong sense of community. With the middle class and lower middle class left behind, it is not surprising that the middle class would also start leaving the original community. Soon, the classes sort into different communities, as the data suggest. Commentators like David Brooks, Christopher Lasch, Edward Luce, Charles Murray, and Robert Putnam have all noted such residential sorting in the United States, which greatly weakens less-well-off communities.21 Less central to their narratives are the economic forces that drive the sorting. Sorting does not seem to have occurred because of some breakdown in egalitarianism and growing elite distaste for the company of the rest but more likely because of parental concern for children and their success, an economic consequence of our more meritocratic and capability-demanding economies.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist papers (1788), available at https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers, especially Federalist 10, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” 6. Evidence available from the author based on analysis of World Value Surveys. 7. David Brooks, “Bobos in Paradise,” in The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender, ed. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007). 8. Mitchell Petersen and Raghuram Rajan, “Does Distance Still Matter? The Information Revolution in Small Business Lending,” Journal of Finance 57, no. 6 (December 2002): 2533–70. 9.


pages: 351 words: 100,791

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

In a study conducted in the summer of 2008, the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young American adults about their moral lives. What they found is nothing so exciting as depravity, but rather a depressing inarticulacy. Summarizing Smith’s findings, David Brooks wrote, “Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework … As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.’”1 It was Thomas Hobbes who first made the privatization of judgment a political principle.

In this popular essay James is giving practical advice that is based on the James-Lange theory of emotions, according to which feeling tends to follow action. 7. I owe this insight to a conversation with Talbot Brewer. 8. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 177. 9. Ibid., 10. 11. THE FLATTENING 1. David Brooks, “If It Feels Right,” The New York Times, September 12, 2011. 2. This point is made by Talbot Brewer in The Retrieval of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. I owe the argument of this paragraph, and some of the language, to conversations and email exchanges with William Hasselberger and Talbot Brewer.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

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

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

Experiments to determine the role of serotonin indicate that, as the phrase goes, optimists are genetically predisposed to see the world differently from pessimists and skeptics. It would surely be revealing to conduct experiments on avowed utopians or other persistently upbeat persons. Nevertheless, as New York Times columnist David Brooks reminded us in 2008, “Today, if you look at people who study how genetics shape human behavior, you find a collection of anti-Frankensteins. As the research moves along, the scientists grow more modest about what we are close to knowing and achieving,” contrary to earlier proclamations of the “discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene, or a depression gene.”49 Moreover, as the New York Times detailed in a 2010 article entitled “Awaiting the Genome Payoff,” in the ten years since the completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project and the identification of our roughly 22,000 human genes, few drugs have been developed.

See also Henry Petroski, The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010), ch. 11. See, for example, Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1977]), ix–xlii. See “Psychology: Sunny Side Up: Optimism, it Seems, is in the Genes,” The Economist, 390 (February 28, 2009), 85; and David Brooks, “The Luxurious Growth: What Our Genes Don’t Tell Us,” New York Times, July 15, 2008, A19. See also the letters in response to Brooks’ column, New York Times, July 17, 2008, A22; and Margaret Wente, “Optimism Is Highly Overrated,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 16, 2009, A21. Andrew Pollack, “Awaiting the Genome Payoff,” New York Times, June 15, 2010, B1, B5 (the quotation comes from B5).


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

For a lot of people, being “right” just isn’t worth picking a bitter fight with the people they care about. That’s particularly true in a place like Washington, where social circles and professional lives are often organized around people’s politics, and the boundaries of what those tribes believe are getting sharper. In an interview I did with David Brooks in 2019, the genially conservative New York Times columnist reflected on the social agony criticizing Trump had caused him. “I had been part of the conservative movement my whole life,” he told me. “The Weekly Standard. The Wall Street Journal National Review Washington Times. Suddenly, I wasn’t the kind of conservative all the other conservatives were, and so my social circles drifted away.”

Kahan, “Making Climate-Science Communication Evidence-Based—All the Way Down” (February 13, 2013), Culture, Politics and Climate Change, ed. M. Boykoff and D. Crow (Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press, 2014), available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=2216469 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2216469. 25 “The Disillusionment of David Brooks,” The Ezra Klein Show (podcast), May 2, 2019, listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/the-disillusionment-of-david-OnVcTGXr46D. 26 Qtd. in Klein, “Unpopular Mandate.” 27 Marc A. Thiessen, “Why Are Republicans So Awful at Picking Supreme Court Justices?,” Washington Post, July 2, 2012, washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-a-thiessen-why-are-republicans-so-awful-at-picking-supreme-court-justices/2012/07/02/gJQAHFJAIW_story.html?


pages: 123 words: 32,382

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

See the 2010 Harvard Magazine article “Networks, neolithic to now” for an overview. 5. For a great overview (with data) of Dunbar’s number and online games, see Christopher Allen’s post “The Dunbar number as a limit to group sizes” on his blog Life With Alacrity. 6. For lots of detail about group dynamics, see David Brook’s book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House, 2011). 7. For more information on Stanley Milgram’s experiments, including challenges to his methods, see the Wikipedia article on Small world experiment. 8. See the 2008 research paper “Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network” by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz (where they analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million MSN users). 9.


pages: 104 words: 34,784

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Having worked in both sectors, from the factory floor at Hiram Walker to the mall record store (and even my first Toronto job temping at a call centre), I see much in common with the relationship to work (being told what to do) and a wider class sensibility (feeling as if somebody else controls your destiny). As for lifestyle, Florida argues the creative class is not just a blending of bourgeois and bohemian values, as outlined in David Brook’s 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, an early look at what would inform Florida’s creative class, but transcends those two categories completely. ‘Spurred on by the creative ethos, we blend work and lifestyle to construct our identities as creative people,’ writes Florida.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

I don’t see any developments in big data that will change the old truism that machines are adept at things humans find difficult (such as working 24 hours straight or quickly solving a complex math problem) and humans are adept at things that machines find difficult (such as creativity or understanding social and cultural context). New York Times columnist David Brooks has pointed out that data has failed to analyze the social aspects of interaction or to recognize context: “People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes. Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.”

., “Marital Satisfaction and Break-Ups Differ across On-Line and Off-Line Meeting Venues,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 25 (2013), http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10135.full. Critics like writer Leon Wieseltier: Leon Wieseltier, “What Big Data Will Never Explain,” New Republic, March 26, 2013. As a response to this: http://openag.io/about-us/principals-use-cases/. Data analysis is pretty bad: David Brooks, “What Data Can’t Do,” New York Times, February 18, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/brooks-what-data-cant-do.html?_r=0. When Harvard University’s big data: Kalev Leetaru, “Why Big Data Missed the Early Warning Signs of Ebola,” Foreign Policy, September 26, 2014, http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/26/why-big-data-missed-the-early-warning-signs-of-ebola/#trending.


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Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

(Al Roth, an economist at Harvard, and one of the smartest people I know, has summarized this issue by saying, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is a great deal of difference.”) A few days after Greenspan’s congressional testimony, the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that Greenspan’s confession would “…amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.”3 All of a sudden, it looked as if some people were beginning to understand that the study of small-scale mistakes was not just a source for amusing dinner-table anecdotes.

It was only fitting that we worked together on procrastination. Klaus is currently a professor at INSEAD. Notes 1. James Choi, David Laibson, and Brigitte Madrian, “$100 Bills on the Sidewalk: Suboptimal Saving in 401(k) Plans,” Yale University, working paper. 2. Steven Levitt and John List, “Homo economicus Evolves,” Science (2008). 3. David Brooks, “The Behavioral Revolution,” New York Times (October 27, 2008). 4. Jodi Kantor, “Entrees Reach $40,” New York Times (October 21, 2006). 5. Itamar Simonson, “Get Closer to Your Customers by Understanding How They Make Choices,” California Management Review (1993). 6. Louis Uchitelle, “Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices,” New York Times (November 27, 2006). 7.


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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

They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention spans. They can’t remember their own phone numbers. They spend more time on social media than they did with their friends irl (that’s “in real life,” my daughter tells me). They are becoming zombies, robbed of ambition and free will! New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to the Wired article with a droll account of how he was giving in to the outsourced brain. “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.…” Continuing, “You may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality.

Cory Doctorow, “My Blog, My Outboard Brain,” May 31, 2002, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html. “we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon.” Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, September 25, 2007. “It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.” David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,” New York Times, October 26, 2007. His tone is derisive here, or at least resigned, although Brooks has in the past been an accurate chronicler of American cultural foibles. His book Bobos in Paradise describes the search for fake authenticity by the entitled, and a similar attitude decries the new technology we need for supplanting an obsolete analog past.


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On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

British Empire, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, invisible hand, joint-stock company, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway

My colleagues Charles Hill, Paul Kennedy, and I began as a troika, attending all classes, arguing with one another in front of the students, and individually advising them (not always consistently) outside of class. Remarkably, we’re still neighbors and close friends. The 2006 establishment of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy allowed us to add practitioners: they’ve included David Brooks, Walter Russell Mead, John Negroponte, Peggy Noonan, Victoria Nuland, Paul Solman, Jake Sullivan, and Evan Wolfson. The course has also attracted other Yale faculty: Scott Boorman (Sociology), Elizabeth Bradley (formerly School of Public Health, director of the Brady-Johnson program in 2016–17, now president of Vassar College), Beverly Gage (History and, from 2017, Brady-Johnson program director), Bryan Garsten (Political Science and Humanities), Nuno Monteiro (Political Science), Kristina Talbert-Slagle (Epidemiology and Public Health), and Adam Tooze (formerly History, now at Columbia University).

Augustine, Confessions, pp. 45–53. 10. For a recent (and controversial) answer, see Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), especially pp. 522–39. 11. Augustine, Confessions, p. 36. 12. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 431–37. 13. Ibid., pp. 131–33. 14. I owe this point to David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), p. 212. 15. I’ve relied chiefly, as a guide, on G. R. Evans’s introduction to St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, translated by Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. ix–lvii, but also on notes prepared by Michael Gaddis, shared with me in a valiant effort to explain City. 16.


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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

While America grapples with double-digit unemployment, the Obama administration has added hundreds of thousands of jobs around Washington. What you make of this depends on your politics. Armchair sociologists with a local’s bias and conservative bent—like Joel Garreau or the New York Times columnist David Brooks—see a shining, privately owned and publicly financed city on a hill. A liberal polemicist like Thomas Frank, on the other hand, finds a starched-and-pressed Sodom: When you drive among these wonders, northern Virginia appears as a kind of technicolor vision of prosperity, American-style; a distillation of all that is mighty and righteous about the American imperium: the airport designed by Eero Saarinen; the shopping mall so vast it dwarfs other cities’ downtowns; the finely tuned high-performance cars zooming along an immaculate private highway; the masses of flowers in perfectly edged beds; the gas stations with Colonial Williamsburg cupolas; the street names, even, recalling our cherished American values: Freedom, Market, Democracy, Tradition, and Signature drives; Heritage Lane; Founders Way; Enterprise, Prosperity, and Executive Park avenues; and a Chivalry Road that leads, of course, to Valor Court.

The nascent aerotropolis is making the same, albeit less fatal, mistakes of a Schaumburg or Fairfax at warp speed, spreading across so many cities, counties, and assorted municipal entities that no one is in a position to fill in everyone on the bigger picture, which is how Cal Fulenwider was able to sell his own in the first place. Denver may be squandering its best chance to avoid a repeat of the urban planning (or lack thereof) on the city’s south side. “We don’t even have words to describe these places,” David Brooks wrote. “Over the past few decades, dozens of scholars have studied places like Arapahoe County,” where exurban Cherry Hills, Centennial, and much of Aurora are located. “They’ve coined terms to capture the polymorphous living arrangements found in these fast growing regions: edgeless city, major diversification center, multicentered net, ruraburbia, boomburg, spread city, technoburb, suburban growth corridor, sprinkler cities.”

The notion of Denver and the Front Range as a “megapolitan” and one of several “mountain megas” including Phoenix, Las Vegas, and northern New Mexico was advanced by Robert E. Lang and Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution in their 2008 report “Mountain Megas: America’s Newest Metropolitan Places and a Federal Partnership to Help Them Prosper.” David Brooks reflected on the exurban fringe of Arapahoe County in On Paradise Drive. A copy of the Stapleton “Green Book” was given to me by Forest City Stapleton’s Tom Gleason. Gleason, who was once Mayor Federico Peña’s press secretary, also supplied background on Peña’s decision to shutter the airport in the first place.


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How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

My objective is only to draw attention to the crucial significance of action patterns at the micro-level compensating for institutional deficiencies during the end-of-capitalism interregnum. 71These include precarious employment, to be celebrated as a positive incentive for competitive self-improvement and the building of an optimized entrepreneurial identity. 72On this see, among many others, David Brooks on the so-called ‘millennials’, under the title of ‘The Self-Reliant Generation’, New York Times, 8 January 2016, nytimes.com last accessed 21 January 2016. Brooks summarizes the results of survey of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old Americans. To quote: ‘You see an abstract celebration of creative transformation but a concrete hunger for order, security and stability … Another glaring feature of millennial culture is they have been forced to be self-reliant and to take a loosely networked individualism as the normal order of the universe.

Something is going to change.’ 73‘The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.’ David Brooks, ‘The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest’, New York Times, 12 January 2003, nytimes.com, last accessed 31 December 2015. 74Although underclass drug users are kept desirably apathetic and politically incapacitated by their habit, they are the target of harsh law enforcement measures, and so are their suppliers.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

By the same token, rundown nineteenth-century houses and small shops are appealing to many people with middle-class cultural tastes because they embody the aesthetic distinction of objects that are, on the one hand, simple, handmade tokens of craftsmanship and, on the other, living history. As Thorstein Veblen said more than a hundred years ago, these quirky marks of distinction are cast into relief by the sameness of mass production. And as the journalist David Brooks says today, the “gentry” don’t want “opulent, luxurious, … magnificent and extravagant,” they want “authentic, natural, warm, … honest, organic, … unique.” To the use-values of longtime residents and the exchange-values of real estate developers, bohemians and gentrifiers add aesthetic values.28 Although gentrification was just beginning in the United States and England when Jacobs wrote Death and Life and still lacked an American name, Herbert Gans had some idea of what the next stage of modernity would bring.

Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003). 27. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris (New York: Viking, 1986); Robert Darnton, “Finding a Lost Prince of Bohemia,” New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008, pp. 44–48. 28. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 83, emphasis added. Also see David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticization and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40 (2003): 2527–44; Mike Featherstone, “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life,” in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), pp. 65–82. 29.


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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

See also Bruce Resnick and Timothy Smunt, “Good to Great to …?” Academy of Management Perspectives 22, no. 4 (2008): 6–12. 25. correlation between extroversion and leadership: Timothy Judge et al., “Personality and Leadership: A Qualitative and Quantitative Review,” Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 4 (2002): 765–80. See also David Brooks, “In Praise of Dullness,” New York Times, May 18, 2009, citing Steven Kaplan et al., “Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 14195, July 2008, a study finding that CEO success is more strongly related to “execution skills” than to “team-related skills.”

., Traders: Risks, Decisions, and Management in Financial Markets (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142–43. 26. delaying gratification, a crucial life skill: Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t,” The New Yorker, May 18, 2009. See also Jacob B. Hirsh et al., “Positive Mood Effects on Delay Discounting,” Emotion 10, no. 5 (2010): 717–21. See also David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011), 124. 27. scientists gave participants the choice: Samuel McClure et al., “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,” Science 306 (2004): 503–7. 28. A similar study suggests: Hirsch, “Positive Mood Effects on Delay Discounting.” 29.


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Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

business process, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

"It was very clear to us from Bremer's leadership that he thought it would take the Iraqis a long time before they were going to be able to take over," said a CPA strategist. Bremer's plan had one huge flaw: It lacked essential support both in the United States and in Iraq. "Bremer hadn't cleared the piece with his higher-ups in the Pentagon or the White House, and here he was describing a drawn-out American occupation," columnist David Brooks reported ten months later in the New York Times. "Iraqis would take their time writing a constitution, and would eventually have elections and take control of their country. For some Bush officials, this was the lowest period of the entire Iraq project. They knew they couldn't sustain an occupation for that long, yet they had no other realistic plan for transferring power to Iraqis."

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman, probably the most influential writer on foreign affairs in the United States, and one of the more prominent journalistic supporters of going to war in Iraq, sounded the alarm in early May. "This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy," he wrote. "Otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all." A week later, his Times colleague David Brooks, who had been even more hawkish back in 2002, when he argued that "Bush has such an incredibly strong case to go in there," sounded even more chagrined. "This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq," Brooks wrote. "The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true.

NOTES 453 240 "They shot at us for about an hour": The Stars & Stripes article quoting Iraqi police about being shot by U.S. troops near Fallujah was by Terry Boyd, and was published on September 13,2003. 240 "It was the deadliest friendly-fire incident": Bing West's book No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (Bantam, 2005). 244 "Then all hell broke loose": Wallen was quoted in an article by the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, "Combat Heroine: Teresa Broadwell Found Herself in the Army—Under Fire, in Iraq," that ran on November 23, 2003. 249 "We think the insurgency is waning": Hertling was quoted by Ron Jensen in "Iraqi Insurgency Is Waning, General Says," Stars & Stripes (November 9,2003). 253 "the means toward the strategic goal": This T. E. Lawrence quotation isfromhis essay "The Evolution of a Revolt," which appeared in the October 1920 edition of the British Army Quarterly and Defence Journal. This entire book was influenced by Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Dell, 1962). The David Brooks column on Bremer's surprising the White House appeared in the New York Times edition of July 3, 2004. 254 "declared it unacceptable": Greenstock's article appeared in the Economist issue of May 8, 2004. 255 "The decision on 15 November": This Synnott comment is from his article cited in the previous chapter.


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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

So at the funeral, here was this man who had spent years as Speaker of the House and as Senate president, but there was little mention of his time in politics. Rather, those eulogizing Stan remembered him, as they did my uncle Jake, for his character, his decency, his humor, and his sense of fair play. The New York Times columnist David Brooks speaks of the desirability of “eulogy virtues” versus “résumé virtues.” I’ve been given wonderful examples of the former all my life. I can only hope to be so remembered. — What is a conservative, exactly? And what is a conservative not? Growing up, I didn’t consider myself to be very political, nor did I expect that I would end up in politics.


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Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

From my standpoint, the controversy over Obama's decision to offer more assistance, contingent on the automakers' meeting strict deadlines, was more expected. Senator Corker, still smoldering over supplier assistance, called it a "major power grab." The Journal's editorial page started referring to GM snarkily as "Obama Motors" and "Government Motors." David Brooks on the Times op-ed page dismissed the deadlines as empty threats and concluded: "It would have been better to keep a distance from GM and prepare the region for a structured bankruptcy process. Instead, Obama leapt in. His intentions were good, but getting out with honor will require a ruthless tenacity that is beyond any living politician."

My extraordinary friend Mike Bloomberg was on Martha's Vineyard to play golf with the President and invited me to join him beforehand to hit some balls and catch up. When the President arrived at the driving range, he greeted me with a smile so big it seemed to make his prominent ears protrude even more. "I was just telling Mike that I was bragging about you," he said, and described a recent meeting in which he'd gotten New York Times columnist David Brooks to admit that his March 2009 column criticizing Obama's intervention in the auto crisis had been wrong. We exchanged laughs about how Brooks, whose pieces are generally exceptional, had been far off target in this case. After a few more pleasantries, the President stepped into position on the range and began hitting.


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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

We humans underestimate some risks (obesity) and overestimate others (flying); we let emotion cloud our judgment; we overreact to both good news and bad news (rising home prices and then falling home prices). Most of this was obvious to Shakespeare, but it’s relatively new to mainstream economics. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted, “Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models. This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis—how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once. The crisis has delivered a blow to classical economics and taken a body of psychological work that was at the edge of public policy thought and brought it to front and center.”4 Of course, most of the old ideas are still pretty darn important.

Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” American Economic Review, September 2000. 3. Charles Himmelberg, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals and Misperceptions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005). 4. David Brooks, “An Economy of Faith and Trust,” New York Times, January 16, 2009. CHAPTER 1. THE POWER OF MARKETS 1. M. Douglas Ivester, Remarks to the Economic Club of Chicago, February 25, 1999. 2. Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years, Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 364 (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, December 15, 1999). 3.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The flood of data about biology ought to be churned by cloud-based algorithms into an antidote to mortality in no time at all. That’s the expectation. The culture of power on the ’net is so different from what people everywhere else are used to that I wonder if it’s even possible to convey it. For instance, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote1 about Thiel’s arguments based on a student’s notes,2 posted online. What he didn’t comment on was the headline on the student’s offering: Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it. What most outsiders have failed to grasp is that the rise to power of ’net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal.

See http://www.fellowgeek.com/a-US-security-firm-hacked-by-Anonymous-ix1113.html and http://www.esecurityplanet.com/hackers/panda-security-hacked-lulzsec-is-your-website-safe.html. 2. http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html. 3. See http://totalrecallbook.com/. Seventh Interlude: Limits Are for Mortals 1. David Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” New York Times, April 23, 2012. 2. http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay. 3. http://www.dailydot.com/society/facebook-mourning-jenna-ness-death/. 4. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2009/01/night_of_the_living_dad.html. 5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/tupac-hologram-elvis-presley-marilyn-monroe_n_1818715.html. 6.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

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

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

Having imbibed sociological accounts about the pervasive injustices that define modern society and learned to deconstruct the “problematic” values of the Enlightenment, teachers and principals have become much less likely to teach civics in a way that encourages their students to become proud defenders of liberal democracy.34 Many conservative thinkers have suggested a simple remedy to these complex ills. As David Brooks put the point in a recent column, the history of western civilization should be taught in a “confidently progressive” manner: “There were certain great figures, like Socrates, Erasmus, Montesquieu and Rousseau, who helped fitfully propel the nations to higher reaches of the humanistic ideal.”35 Brooks is right to emphasize the importance of civic education.

See David Randall with Ashley Thorne, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics,” National Association of Scholars, January 2017, https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_makingCitizens_fullReport.pdf; as well as the response by Stanley Fish, “Citizen Formation Is Not Our Job,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/article/Citizen-Formation-Is-Not-Our/238913. 35. David Brooks, “The Crisis of Western Civ,” New York Times, April 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/opinion/the-crisis-of-western-civ.html?mcubz=0. Conclusion 1. On Athens, see Sarah B. Pomeroy, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Robert Waterfield, Athens: A History, From Ancient Ideal to Modern City (New York: Basic Books, 2004).


Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens. One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus NEW YORK TIMES columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder. That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.”


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

SSRN ID: 979648 Conclusion ‘Debunking the myth of Kitty Genovese’, New York Post, 16 February 2014 Further reading The Social Animal [Elliot Aronson, 1972] First, make sure you buy the right book – confusingly there are two psychology books called The Social Animal, one by David Brooks the other by Elliot Aronson. Aronson’s book is out of print and currently second-hand copies cost £40 on Amazon. However, if you’re patient you should be able to get your hands on one for £20. Aronson’s own research covered cognitive dissonance and the pratfall effect but this book covers a far broader range of biases.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

New York’s five boroughs are of course far more intensely settled, but the average density of the tri-state metropolitan region is actually 25 percent lower than the density of Greater Los Angeles—a landscape whose every nook and canyon is packed with houses, mostly on small lots, giving it densities high enough for rapid transit. 3. The Highway to Hell Phoenix, Arizona This nation has achieved a paradoxical and inexplicable condition: suburban greatness. — David Brooks, The Atlantic, 2002 I’ve changed my view of suburbia. In my last book, I was pretty pro-urban/suburban sprawl. Now I’m much more skeptical. Now I believe, the more contact with other people, the better. — David Brooks, New York, 2010 The future, as envisioned by America’s greatest architect, was supposed to look so much better than this. By this point in the twenty-first century, we were meant to be living in flat-roofed houses distributed over the countryside, each with its own carport and acre of cultivated land.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

“Women CEOs of the Fortune 1000,” Catalyst, July 1, 2013, www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-fortune-1000. “Women in the U.S. Congress 2013,” Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, November 11, 2012, www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/documents/cong.pdf. 25. Philip N. Cohen, “Fact-Checking David Brooks, Citing Hanna Rosin Edition,” Family Inequality (blog), September 11, 2012, http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/fact-checking-david-brooks-citing-hanna-rosin-edition/. Cohen, a sociologist who studies gender and income inequality at the University of Maryland, quotes a Bureau of Labor Statistics July 18, 2012, news release on “Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, Second Quarter 2012.”


pages: 460 words: 131,579

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

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

Western companies will continue to find CSR a useful tool in one of their most important “wars,” the war for talent. Many of the most desirable job-seekers, particularly in the millennial generation, are motivated by “meaning” as well as money. They want to make a good living, to be sure, but they also want to help to improve the world. (David Brooks has coined the phrase “bourgeois bohemians” to capture the mixture of capitalist and countercultural values that are common in professional circles.)17 An imaginative CSR program can be a deal-maker for some people. Stony indifference to CSR can be deal-breaker. Emerging-market companies will find CSR a useful tool in an even more vital war: the war against chaos.

David Vogel, The Market for Virtue (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006), p. 135. 14. Darrell Rigby and Barbara Bilinear, Management Tools and Trends, (Bain & Company, 2009). 15. John Browne, Beyond Business (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), pp. 194–96. 16. Ed Crooks, “Man in the News: Tony Hayward,” Financial Times, April 30, 2010. 17. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 18. Daniel Isenberg, “Keggfarms (India): Which came first, the Kuroiler or the KEGG,” Harvard Business School Case Study. 19. Daniel Isenberg, “Lapdesk company: A South African FOPSE,” Harvard Business School case study. 20.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

John Rawls, Harvard’s leading political philosopher, argued that people should set aside their religious views before they could participate in the public square.2 Religion was even out of favor in schools of religion: a report by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1976 found that fewer than half of the graduates of the country’s top five divinity schools—Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Vanderbilt and New York’s Union Theological Seminary—went on to work for the church or engage in further study of religion, down from four-fifths a couple of decades earlier.3 In 1988, fresh from his triumph with The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe told students at Harvard, not entirely happily, that they lived in an era of “freedom from religion.”4 Now God is returning to intellectual life. The revival was supercharged by September 11. After the terrorist attacks large numbers of what David Brooks of The New York Times has diagnosed as “recovering secularists”5 went back to church, and religious courses in universities swelled dramatically. Al Qaeda inevitably focused intellectual inquiry on both Islam and religion in general. But even before the twin towers fell there were growing signs that faith was reviving as a force for the mind as well as the soul.

CHAPTER SEVEN: EMPIRES OF THE MIND 1 Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, 107. 2 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1. 3 Amy Sullivan, The Party Faithful, 40-1. 4 Dorothy McInnis Scura, Conversations with Tom Wolfe (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 284 . 5 David Brooks, “Kicking the Secularist Habit,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2003 . 6 Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review, March-April 2004 . 7 Stanley Fish, “One University Under God,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2005 . 8 Irving Kristol, “Christianity, Judaism and Socialism,” in Neoconservatism: Selected Essays: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Ivan Dee, 1999). 9 Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), 154 . 10 Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 14 . 11 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Wm.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

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

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

Time magazine found in a 2000 survey that 19 percent of Americans thought they were in the top 1 percent of wage-earners, and another 20 percent expected to be in the future. “So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top i percent, he was taking a direct shot at them,” wrote David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.3 When self-delusion distorts behavior at the polls, it has damaging consequences for those of low income. Voting is the basic building block of democratic government, and government is the instrument best positioned to make a difference to the working poor.

Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, February 2002, Table B, pp. 6–7. 2. Los Angeles Times, Apr. 7, 2003, p. A20 and New York Times, Apr. 23, 2008, p. Ai. Of the total inmate population, which reached 2.3 million in 2006, nearly 143,000 were non-citizens and over 90,000 were minors. 3. David Brooks, “The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 2003, Section 4, p. 15. 4. Liana Fox, “What a New Federal Minimum Wage Means for the States,” Economic Policy Inst., June 1, 2007. 5. The ACORN Living Wage Resource Center, http://www.livingwagecampaign.org/shortwins.php. 6.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

This category comprises semiskilled workers, many of whom are employed in factories or in the service sector (as clerks and sales associates, for instance), where their responsibilities involve routine, mechanized tasks requiring little skill beyond basic literacy and a brief period of on-the-job training.10 Members of the upper-middle class are often thought to have achieved the American Dream; unlike many in the upper class, however, most members of the upper-middle class must work for a living. Early in the twenty-first century, two best-selling books offered new concepts about the upper-middle class. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks suggests that many people in the upper-middle class are now “the new upper class,” a well-educated elite 9781442202238.print.indb 165 2/10/11 10:47 AM 166 Chapter 6 that he calls “Bobos” (bourgeois bohemians).11 Based in part on information in the New York Times wedding section about brides, grooms, and their families, Brooks argues that the “white-shoed, Whartonized, Episcopalian establishmentarians with protruding jaws” are long gone from the ranks of the privileged upper class, having been replaced by “mountaineering-booted overachievers with excellent orthodontia and impressive GRE scores.”12 However, Brooks’s description of the future prospects of the so-called Bobos gives them the appearance of being upper-middle class at best: But members of today’s educated class can never be secure about their own future.

“Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life,” Pew Social Trends, April 9, 2008, http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/706/middle-class-poll (accessed July 29, 2010). 8. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 13. 9. Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. 10. Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. 11. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 12. E. J. Graff, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” American Prospect, May 22, 2000, 52, quoting Brooks, Bobos in Paradise. 13. Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, 52. 14. “It Would Never Work Out . . .”


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

“Individually, boomers might be as selfless and as interested in the future as anybody else,” says Svante Myrick. “As a body politic, they’ve made a series of choices that increase their short-term prosperity and shortchanged us. At every opportunity, they decided instead that they wanted a short-term tax cut.” Even many boomers themselves don’t think they did so great. New York Times columnist David Brooks gives his generation a C minus for its political contributions. “During the years of boomer dominance—from Bill Clinton through Donald Trump—America’s political institutions have become dysfunctional, civic debate has crumbled, debt has soared and few major pieces of legislation have passed,” he wrote.

is still hard at work: Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths (New York: Hachette, 2017), 130. doubled since the 1970s: “Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S. “During the years of boomer dominance”: David Brooks, “Your Baby Boomer Report Card,” The New York Times, August, 8, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opinion/baby-boomers-report-card.html. “In the world that boomers”: Michael Kinsley, “The Least We Can Do,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2010, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/the-least-we-can-do/308228/.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

These suburbs, built on white flight, are only going to become more conservative and more powerful. New York has been deposed.” Revenge was in the air. The conservatives of America could see the changes coming, and they were gleeful. In the spring 1995 issue of City Journal, a publication of the neoliberal, neoconservative Manhattan Institute, David Brooks published a critique on “out-of-step New York,” scolding snobbish city folk for looking down on Middle America. “Over the longer term,” he wrote, “New Yorkers might—dare I say it?—change. New York liberalism will gradually dissolve; cultural attitudes will drift toward the mainstream.” Looking back from a post-9/11 and post-Bloomberg position, these words offer an eerily prophetic message.

Cranky is a word the press has used to describe me. I embrace it. If New York is to survive with its soul intact, it needs all the cranky people it can get. Those in power want us to shut up and leave town. We are flies in their imagined ointment. Back in 1995, writing in the free-marketeering City Journal, David Brooks said, “It would be a shame if New York dragged on through the next decades as a wayward home for cranky, marginalized dissenters.” But that was the city! Remember? New York of agitators and nonconformists, of creation and disruption, of people who were awake and worked to wake the rest of America with writing, art, politics, and social justice.


pages: 190 words: 53,409

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Laboratory studies by psychologists support the popular wisdom that liberals are more likely than conservatives to embrace the importance of luck in life.25 But there are numerous exceptions to this pattern, and the differences between opposing views are often far more nuanced than popular accounts suggest. David Brooks, the right-of-center op-ed columnist at the New York Times, captured the middle ground nicely in a piece published during the 2012 presidential campaign. He began by quoting from a letter he said he’d received from an Ohio businessman: Dear Mr. Opinion Guy, Over the past few years, I’ve built a successful business.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

It is far easier now for each of them to stumble across divergent views—the Manhattan leftie can accidentally follow a link to National Review Online or surf past Sean Hannity on the way to Keith Olbermann, and the midwesterner can come across Ellen DeGeneres talking about her wedding plans, or follow a link to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. As David Brooks described it, “This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide, looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal.” — Like any historic disruption, the transition in journalism—from big media institutions and quasi-monopolies to a more diverse and interconnected peer network—will inevitably be painful to those of us who have, understandably, come to cherish and rely upon the old institutions.


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

Conspiracy theories about Bones have blamed them for funding Adolf Hitler, infiltrating the CIA, controlling American media (including, notably, owning publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux), choreographing the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Kennedy assassination, and generally running the United States. David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, has a slightly different take on the intrinsic power of the group: My view of secret societies is they’re like the first-class cabin in airplanes. They’re really impressive until you get into them, and then once you’re there they’re a little dull.

Bush was presented Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 126. 261 “Skull and Bones is not some ordinary” Ron Rosenbaum, “Skull and Bones, Denying Its Rite, Suckers AOL-TW,” New York Observer, July 14, 2002. 261 David Brooks, a conservative columnist “Skull and Bones: Secret Yale Society Includes America’s Power Elite,” 60 Minutes, June 13, 2004. 261 the Carlyle group, which manages more than $56 billion Company profile, www.carlyle.com. 262 its roster of prominent employees Melanie Warner, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” Fortune, March 18, 2002. 262 Even the younger Bush had a stint Jamie Doward, “Ex-Presidents Club Gets Fat on Conflict,” Guardian, March 23, 2003. 262 “Conspiracy theorists that obsess” Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2003), 158. 263 newspaper articles and business magazine cover stories For example, a Carlyle feature by Emily Thornton et al., “Carlyle Changes Its Stripes,” made the cover of BusinessWeek, February 12, 2007. 263 in 1990 Carlyle started buying up defense-related assets Doward, “Ex-Presidents’ Club.” 263 took the company public Mark Fineman, “Arms Buildup Is a Boon to Firm Run by Big Guns,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2002. 263 Its $73 million purchase Terence O’Hara, “Carlyle Shows It’s Still Tops in Defense,” Washington Post, February 13, 2006. 263 He purportedly made a phone call Warner, “Down the Rabbit Hole.” 263 “The problem comes when” Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The Ex-Presidents’ Club,” Guardian, October 13, 2001. 263 One of Carlyle’s cofounders told The Nation Tim Shorrock, “Crony Capitalism Goes Global,” Nation, April 1, 2002. 263 “Since 9/11, USIS’s acquisition” Briody, Iron Triangle, 152. 264 Shafig bin Laden, one of Osama’s numerous brothers Warner, “Down the Rabbit Hole.” 264 As one top-level Carlyle employee Ibid. 266 One antiglobalist website, NewsWithViews Available at www.newswithviews.com. 266 “Business leaders go to Davos” Available at www.foe.co.uk. 266 “Davos is … the most visible symbol” Jeff Faux, “The Party of Davos,” Nation, February 13, 2006. 266 now generating more than $85 million a year World Economic Forum, “Annual Report 2005/06,” www.weforum.org. 267 The facts about the meeting are well known “About Us,” WEF website, www.weforum.org. 267 As Henri Schwamm, former vice president Jean-Christophe Graz, “How Powerful Are Transnational Elite Clubs?


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

William Gibson, “The Art of Fiction No. 211,” interviewed by David Wallace-Wells, Paris Review, Summer 2011, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson. 30. See Carolyn Kellogg, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith,” LA Times, April 4, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-zombies4-2009apr04-story.html. 31. In July 2015 New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote what many readers took to be a condescending review addressed to Ta-Nehisi Coates for his recent nonfiction book Between the World and Me (2015). Brooks had unselfconsciously arrogated the device of the open letter that Coates had used to frame his own work, and this may have exacerbated online reaction.

One of the best-known of the parodies has Brooks writing a review of a Thai restaurant on Yelp: “Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change. In any case, Pad Basil has filled my belly unforgettably. Three stars,” it concludes, bitingly. See http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2015/07/17/david-brooks-writes-a-yelp-review-of-the-new-thai-restaurant/. The point, once again, is that the facility with which the underlying textual operations can be conducted—copying and pasting from an electronic source, then modifying the prose locally throughout by working directly from the original base text—encourages distinct forms of textual expression, in this case in the service of parody and critique.


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

In that vein, Beverly Hills psychologist Lee Hausner notes that one of the main worries afflicting the new rich is that they will fail to pass on middle-class values to their children. Not for them the over-the-top spending of Larry Ellison or of Bill Koch, who built his son a two-acre playground complete with a dozen jungle gyms. Writer and New York Times columnist David Brooks christened this new affluent class—children of the 1960s who have melded capitalist success virtues with countercultural values—bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos for short. According to Brooks, in his tongue-in-cheek sociological study Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, while these new billionaires have no problem spending their hard-earned dollars on beautiful homes and yachts, woe betide anyone who flaunts his riches egregiously.

Wynn, who suffers from a rare disease: Nick Poumgarten, “The $40-million Elbow,” The New Yorker, Oct. 23, 2006. 84. In the late 1990s: Michaels, “The Mass-Market Rich.” 85. “Theirs is not old wealth”: Dinesh D’Souza, “A Century of Wealth: The Billionaire Next Door,” Forbes, Oct. 11, 1999. 86. “Earlier this century”: David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 47. 10. Heirs Sources interviewed for this chapter: Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., author, Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America (1988); Natalie A. Black; Peter Buffett; Susie Buffett; Sara Hamilton of Family Office Exchange; Dr.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

They’re opposing it because “Why should we dedicate ourselves to solving other people’s problems and waste our own resources?” They’re literally asking, “Who’s going to defend us when we’re attacked, because we’re devoting ourselves to helping people overseas?” That’s the ultra-Right. If you look at the “moderate” Right, people like, say, David Brooks of the New York Times, considered an intellectual commentator on the right. His view is that the US effort to withdraw its forces from the region is not having a “moderating effect.” According to Brooks, when US forces are in the region, that has a moderating effect; it improves the situation, as you can see in Iraq, for example.


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

McWilliams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 27. INTRODUCTION 1. Adrian Vermuele, Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 2. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), 7. 3. From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a member of Notre Dame class of 2018, in my course Political Philosophy and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession. 4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 107–8. 5.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

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

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

O’Rourke River Town, by Peter Hessler Novels I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe Reading in the Dark, by Seamus Deane Dubliners, by James Joyce The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card Disgrace, by J. M. Coetze Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe Saturday, by Ian McEwan Random On Paradise Drive, by David Brooks How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris Clinton & Me, by Mark Katz What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace 181 Acknowledgments I am lucky on many levels, and it’s most evident if I think about the people who have entered my life.


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

Many other nonprofit advocacy groups, like Public Notice, the 60 Plus Association, the Independent Women’s Forum, and American Commitment, also chimed in for the drastic spending cuts. The clamor seemed multitudinous, but beneath the surface each of these groups shared a common aquifer—the pool of cash contributed by the Koch donor network. A number of opinion writers also embraced Ryan as oracular. David Brooks, a moderately conservative New York Times columnist whose opinion Obama valued, declared Ryan’s plan “the most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes…His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee.”

According to a New York Times analysis: These projections of the fallout from cuts in Ryan’s budget refer to its 2012 iteration and appeared in Jonathan Weisman, “In Control, Republican Lawmakers See Budget as Way to Push Agenda,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 2014. “Robin Hood in reverse”: See Jonathan Chait, “The Legendary Paul Ryan,” New York, April 29, 2012. “the most courageous”: David Brooks, “Moment of Truth,” New York Times, April 5, 2011. “The right had succeeded”: See Freeland, Plutocrats, 265. She writes, “In April and May of 2011, when unemployment was 9 percent,…the five largest papers in the country published 201 stories about the budget deficit and only sixty-three about joblessness.”


A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

Was he really wiser, or was he encouraged to be prudent? I can imagine his father advising him: “I’ll help you, Frederick, but this time don’t rush into it. Spend a few months on a farm. See how you like it. Then decide.” There was no shortage of relatives who were farmers. His mother’s sister Linda had married David Brooks, whose farm, in nearby Cheshire, Frederick and John had walked to as children. He decided to start by working on his uncle’s farm. He spent the fall and winter of 1844—almost five months—in Cheshire. Once the harvest was in, he had plenty of free time and resumed his social life. Undoubtedly, the Cheshire girls were even more susceptible to the charms of the young “sailor.”

He was relatively young—thirty-seven. His father had been a prominent engineer who had surveyed the course of the Erie Canal. Although George had studied law, he, too, had been engaged in civil engineering: railroad construction, coal mining, and land drainage. Olmsted had never met anyone like him. David Brooks and Joseph Welton had been accomplished farmers, but Geddes was a true gentleman farmer. That is, he combined scientific farming with a gentlemanly way of life. The latter involved maintaining genteel standards at home—tea was served each afternoon, and “silver forks every day,” Olmsted boasted to his father.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

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

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

The endorsements kept rolling in, and so did the cash. Maybe it was a consequence of Clinton’s scandals, which had tested the bounds of behavior Americans would accept from their leaders. Or maybe it was just Bush’s charm, or his poll numbers against Gore. The stampede only accelerated. In Newsweek, columnist David Brooks wrote: “Right now, the GOP is so scared of total meltdown that it’s going to do whatever it takes to win. Even if it means imitating Bill Clinton.” At the start of July, the Bush team told reporters to gather around. The candidate had news he wanted to deliver himself. The second quarter of the year had just ended, and campaign finance reports from the campaigns were due.

Will, “Government as Therapist,” Washington Post, February 7, 1999. “We wouldn’t have”: Richard L. Berke, “California, Here Bush Comes, a Moderate on Immigration and Racial Quotas,” New York Times, June 30, 1999. “When I was young”: Jim Yardley, “Bush, Irked at Being Asked, Brushes Off Drug Question,” New York Times, August 19, 1999. In Newsweek: David Brooks, “Clintonizing the GOP,” Newsweek, February 8, 1999. “I am humbled”: Dick Polman, “Bush Reports a Record Haul, $36 Million, in Just 6 Months,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 1999. “George Bush’s term”: Tribune News Services, “Kasich Gives Up Race, Endorses Bush,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1999.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

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

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

Putnam, Philip Oreopoulos, Lisa Tetrault, Daniel Wasserman, Harry Wiland, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Scott Winship, and Gavin Wright, though as always we alone are responsible for the remaining errors. That last caveat also applies to a number of friends who were big-hearted enough to offer advice on the entire manuscript, including Xavier de Souza Briggs, David Brooks, Peter Davis, Angus Deaton, Robert O. Keohane, Michael Meeropol, and Bernard Banet. Bernie, in particular, deserves special mention for sending us, virtually every day over three years, an unending flow of press clippings and academic studies relevant to the full scope of our interests, an extraordinary act of friendship.

In the now twenty years that we have known one another, through all the various roles I have played in his projects, and through the two books on which we have now collaborated, he has been one of the most important influences in my professional life. And he and his wife Rosemary are shining examples of personal grace, generosity, and kindness. I am also indebted to David Brooks and his team at the Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project for giving me the opportunity to travel the country during my writing of this book to see firsthand the challenges facing American communities today as well as the myriad grassroots solutions well underway in every corner of our nation.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

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

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

The self-proclaimed democrats who run our states will suddenly become fans of a ‘pro-democracy’ military coup if it overthrows an elected government they don’t like, as happened in Egypt in 2013. That overthrow of democracy was backed by Western governments and given legitimacy by Western intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, who opined that Islamists ‘lack the mental equipment to govern’ themselves. ‘Incompetence,’ declared Brooks, ‘is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam’, rendering radical Islamists ‘incapable of running a modern government’.21 The political problem of democracy is thus reduced to the failing ‘mental equipment’ and damaged ‘intellectual DNA’ of the Islamist government – and, by extension, of the voters who elected them.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

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

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

His own examinations of the challenges of institutional decay and reformation—in his writing and in his podcast, The Long Game—have constituted some of the most important and creative journalistic work in Washington over the past several years. April Lawson was an invaluable sounding board for me from the very beginning of this work, and she devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to reading the manuscript at an early stage and providing wise comments and suggestions that proved very helpful. Pete Wehner and David Brooks also read the lectures from which this book began and offered characteristically valuable insights and advice. Pete also read the final manuscript and gave me very helpful comments, as did Adam Keiper, Nicole Penn, Emily MacLean, Devorah Goldman, and Daniel Wiser. Along the way, I benefitted immensely from conversations about the themes of this book with Reihan Salam, Jonah Goldberg, Michael Gerson, Ben O’Dell, Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, J.


pages: 225 words: 70,180

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

Nicolas Shumway, Dean of Humanities at Rice, deserves a special mention for his untiring belief in what I do. I’m forever in his debt. So many people shared thoughts and suggestions, kindness and support. Among them were Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Heitham Al-Sayed, Ian Balfour, Andrew Battaglia, Anna Bernagozzi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ian Bogost, Tanya Bonakdar, Marcus Boon, Dominic Boyer, David Brooks, Alex Cecchetti, Stephen Cairns, Eric Cazdyn, Ian Cheng, Kari Conte, Carolyn Deby, Nigel Clark, Juliana Cope, Laura Copelin, Annie Culver, Sarah Ellenzweig, Olafur Eliasson, Anna Engberg, Jane Farver, Dirk Felleman, João Florêncio, Mark Foster Gage, Peter Gershon, Hazel Gibson, Jóga Jóhannsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Kathelin Gray, Sofie Grettve, Lizzy Grindy, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Zora Hamsa, Graham Harman, Rosemary Hennessy, Erich Hörl, Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Cymene Howe, Edouard Isar, Luke Jones, Toby Kamps, Greg Lindquist, Annie Lowe, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Karsten Lund, Boyan Manchev, Kenric McDowell, Tracy Moore, Rick Muller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judy Natal, Patricia Noxolo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Genesis P-Orridge, Solveig Øvstebø, Andrea Pagnes, Albert Pope, Asad Raza, Alexander Regier, Ben Rivers, Judith Roof, David Ruy, Mark Schmanko, Sabrina Scott, Nicolas Shumway, Solveig Sigurðardóttir, Emilija Škarnulytė, Gayatri Spivak, Haim Steinbach, Verena Stenke, Samuel Stoeltje, Susan Sutton, Jeff VanderMeer, Lucas van der Velden, Teodora Vikstrom, Jennifer Walshe, Sarah Whiting, Clint Wilson, Tom Wiscombe, Susanne Witzgall, Cary Wolfe, Annette Wolfsberger, Hyesoo Woo, Martyn Woodward, Els Woudstra and Jonas Žukauskas.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

Kett, Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013), 1–14. 32. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks portrays the formation of a new upper class of highly educated professionals who, he says, have a hybrid culture because they have “one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.” David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 11. Although I also employ the term “hybrid” to describe a comparable elite group, I am concerned about a different matter than Brooks is, namely, elites’ ability to move seamlessly between upper- and middle-class worlds that remain discrete and the uses to which they put that capability. 33.


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

I colluded in perpetuating my own ignorance by denying the value of any aspect of culture from which I felt distanced. To embark on the Sisyphean task of educating oneself into the dominant, posh, culture – of which this book inevitably forms a part – not only requires you to know that it’s there in the first place, but also to not feel terror and shame when confronted with its power. The American writer David Brooks describes highly educated ‘bourgeois bohemians’, most often working in journalism, academia and the creative industries, as forming part of a new industrialized-world elite.21 This, he says, is because the accumulation and application of knowledge have become valued over almost all other economic activity: knowledge is a hoardable commodity, like gold or oil, and can be withheld from others who need it but who both lack the means to accumulate it at the same rate and constantly find that they apply it in the ‘wrong’ way to satisfy this new ruling class.


pages: 254 words: 72,929

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

Brenner, S. Bond, and S. Rich, “A Follow-Up Study of High-Functioning Autistic Children,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 19, no. 2 (1989), 213–25. This issue remains unresolved. On The New York Times, see for instance Liesl Schillinger, “Who Do You Love?” July 13, 2008, and also David Brooks, “The Rank-Link Imbalance,” March 14, 2008. I nonetheless remain very much a fan of both of these excellent writers. The Ganz essay is in Steven O. Moldin and John L. R. Rubenstein, eds., Understanding Autism: From Basic Neuroscience to Treatment (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006). The Bainbridge book is Beyond the Zonules of Zinn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); see p. 283.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

While informational index funds can help, reading omnivorously is still important, and we have already been given some help with this. The Atlantic has begun running a series called Media Diet, which asks influential thinkers what they read and how they get their facts and news. These influential people, from Gay Talese and the newspapers he carefully reads to David Brooks and the blogs he frequents, give their informational diets to help guide others. But when it comes to being aware of facts, there’s actually an even better solution: Stop memorizing things and just give up. That sounds terrible, but it’s not. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud.


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

The political, media, and business establishments raged at populist politicians who would risk a depression rather than disappoint their voters. This gave vent to a feeling that the Paulson Plan was the obviously right way to go and that anyone who failed to accept it right away was on the verge of imbecility. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post labeled its opponents "wing nuts," and conservative columnist David Brooks called them "nihilists." A science article in the New York Times tried to pin down the evolutionary bug that had caused the population to resist Paulson's bailout plan.54 But the "nihilists" were soon annihilated. Once the Senate had voted through a revised version of the Troubled Assets Relief Program on that Wednesday, the House got a second chance on Friday, October 3.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

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

FIGURE 5.9 Number of laws passed by Congress The line is a loess curve. Data source: Tobin Grant, personal communication. Another push toward Republican moderation could come from the growing importance of working-class whites as a constituency for the party. Some thoughtful and prominent voices on America’s right—David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David Frum, Charles Murray, Ramesh Ponnuru, Reihan Salam—have noted that this group is struggling economically and could benefit from government help.55 Finally, clear thinkers on the right will eventually realize that the key question isn’t how much government should intervene but how it should do so.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

Snowden could have spent all day and night on the most influential television shows, with the world watching him, had he wanted to do that. But he was unmovable. I conveyed the requests and he declined them, to avoid taking attention away from the revelations. Strange behavior for a fame-seeking narcissist. Other denunciations of Snowden’s personality followed. New York Times columnist David Brooks mocked him on the grounds that “he could not successfully work his way through community college.” Snowden is, Brooks decreed, “the ultimate unmediated man,” symbolic of “the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.”


The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

We’ve come a long way from the days of doctors telling the parents of autistic children that the situation was hopeless and that the only humane option was a life sentence in an institution. We have a lot farther to go, of course. Ignorance and misunderstanding are always difficult to overcome when they’ve become part of a society’s belief system. For instance, when the movie The Social Network came out, in 2010, the New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote this assessment of the onscreen character of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook: “It’s not that he’s a bad person. He’s just never been house-trained.” The “training” of the fictional character, however, would have had to somehow accommodate a brain that can’t process facial and gestural cues that most people easily assimilate and that finds its greatest fulfillment not in the fizzy buzz of forming a personal relationship but in the click-clack logic of writing code.


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

While the counterculture movement collapsed in the mid-1970s, and remained dormant through the heady days of the neoliberal revolution of Reagan and Thatcher, its spirit resurfaced in a curious way in the twilight of the twentieth century. In his insightful and entertaining 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, New York Times journalist David Brooks coined the term ‘bobo’ – or bourgeois bohemian – to describe an emerging breed of educated elite that blended the aesthetic of the counterculture with the economic advantages bestowed on them by the transition to a knowledge economy. This is the type of person for whom it would seem vulgar to spend $15,000 on a home cinema, but perfectly natural to spend the same amount on a rustic-looking kitchen.28 Today you might identify bobos by an integrated suite of Apple products or an Instagram feed full of pictures of yoga retreats in hard-to-reach places.


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

One index of rising bohemianism was the explosion in the number of artists in New York, from a few thousand in the 1960s to 100,000 by the early 1970s.28 Meanwhile, the share of single households in Manhattan had surged to a third of the city’s population by 1980. In the 1980s, upwardly mobile professionals, or ‘yuppies’, came to adopt aspects of bohemianism, combining economic self-interest with social liberalism. This is nicely explored by David Brooks’s sardonic social commentary on the bohemian affectations of the American bourgeoisie, Bobos in Paradise (2013). One ‘bobo’ hotbed was the emerging tech hub of Silicon Valley, where countercultural values fused with venture capitalism and big science to form a new social ecosystem. Techies, hippies, hipsters and yuppies represent different facets of the fragmentation of identity among young, well-educated modernist whites.

Importantly, the left-modernist form of positive liberalism has come through the major crises of the twentieth century with shining colours, meshing extremely well with global capitalism. The term ‘work hard, play hard’ encapsulates Bell’s ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’, combining a bourgeois puritanism at work with a bohemian consumerism at play. David Brooks’s Rise of the BoBos, published in 2001, echoes Bell’s bohemian-bourgeois synthesis, which underpins modern capitalism.25 The rise of an adversary culture is one of the most distinctive aspects of the modern West. This self-critique is an asset which has unlocked cultural creativity and advanced the struggle for freedom and equality.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

In the case I’m most familiar with, the New York Times, I saw that editors not only wanted to get the news right; they tried to achieve a balance in the stories they edited. If there was a bunch of news that seemed to appeal to the left—say, Dreamers being deported or big chunks of Antarctica breaking off and melting—they’d try to get some conservative balance, maybe a David Brooks column attacking Obamacare. Now people can argue forever about whether the shrinking ranks of responsible media actually achieve balance and get it “right.” Still, they try. When the editors are debating which stories to feature, they at least consider their mission to inform. Not everything is clicks and dollars.


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

For the one-in-three-Internet-users figure, see Patrick Thibodeau, “Amazon Cloud Accessed Daily by a Third of All ’Net Users,” Computerworld.com, April 18, 2012, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226349/Amazon_cloud_accessed_daily_by_a_third_of_all_Net_users. On Apple’s valuation see Susanna Kim, “Apple Is World’s Most Valuable Company Again,” ABCNews.com, January 25, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/apple-is-worlds-most-valuable-company-again/. 30. David Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” New York Times, April 24, 2012, A23; and Ryan Mac, “Ten Lessons from Peter Thiel’s Class on Startups,” Forbes.com, June 7, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/06/07/ten-lessons-from-peter-thiels-class-on-startups/. 31. Slavoj Zizek describes this issue succinctly in his essay “Corporate Rule of Cyberspace,” InsideHigherEd.com, May 2, 2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/05/02/slavoj_zizek_essay_on_cloud_computing_and_privacy. 32.


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

Information in the Internet age is newly accessible, we conclude, but is also politicized in unfamiliar ways.” 33 Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2010), http://www.nber.org/papers/w15916. NBER Working Paper No. 15916. See also David Brooks, “Riders on the Storm.” New York Times, April 19, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/opinion/20brooks.html. 34 Gentzkow and Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” p. 4. 35 Ethan Zuckerman, in his blog: “The Partisan Internet and the Wider World,” May 24, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/05/24/the-partisan-internet-and-the-wider-world/. 36 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Bernstein, Elizabeth best sellers See also publishing Bezos, Jeff See also Amazon Big Brother See privacy Big Data Big Pharma Big Tech disappearance of competition impact on intelligence innovation and loss of privacy and overview Bing Bird, Larry Bitcoin Black, Leon BlackBerry Blackstone blockchain Bloxham, Eleanor Blue Cross/Blue Shield brand loyalty Brexit Brin, David Brooks, Nathan bubbles, financial sector Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber) Burger King cable TV cable companies cable news Capital One capitalism “creative destruction” and Friedman on logic of market churn and media and public’s view of short-termism venture capitalists workers and young people and See also crony capitalism Capitalism for the People, A (Zingales) Carr, Nicholas Carrier CEOs deaths of increases in salary overview pay for creating value short-termism and skill set China American manufacturing and Apple and facial recognition technology financial innovations financial institutions multinational corporations and productivity retail and tech companies and See also Alibaba Cialdini, Robert Cisco Citibank Citizens United decision See also Supreme Court Civil War Clark, Andrew E.


pages: 286 words: 79,601

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

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh

A New York Times/CBS poll released in mid-December 2007, as the primary presidential season intensified, revealed that Americans have an overwhelmingly unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party (33–59 percent), while their opinion of Democrats is favorable (48–44 percent)—a bulging 15-point advantage for Democrats. In early 2008, this mountain of anti-GOP polling data led conservative David Brooks, in the New York Times, to conclude: “The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years.*1 Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy, and Iraq by double-digit margins.”


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

Although inarguably elitist, the parties (and the old-boy systems that comprised them) made sure candidates for major office deserved to be leaders—that they possessed some essential mettle or fitness for office. Bad apples aside, most of party rank and file evinced a strong sense of morality and social responsibility born of a class-based mentality—quite a shift from what we see today. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks has observed: Today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Acknowledgments For useful discussions and comments I wish to thank Nelson Hernandez, Anson Williams, Kenneth Regan, Jason Fichtner, Erik Brynolfsson, Andrew McGee, Don Peck, Derek Thompson, Michelle Dawson, Peter Snow, Veronique de Rugy, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, Natasha Cowen, Garry Kasparov, Vasik Rajlich, Stephen Morrow, David Brooks, Peter Thiel, Michael Mandel, and Larry Kaufman, with apologies to anyone I may have left out. Index The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

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

See finance sector “Barbadosed” Bayh, Birch Bayh, Evan Beame, Abe Beck, Glenn Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Begala Berman, Ari Beyond the Melting Pot (Moynihan, Glazer) Biden, Joe “big government” Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, The (Bishop) “birthers” Bishop, Bill Bishop, Tim Black Power movement Blaming the Victim (Ryan) Blitzer, Wolf “Blue Dog” Democrats Boehner, John Boss Tweed corruption scandal Bowers, Chris Bradlee, Ben Branch, Taylor Brazile, Donna Breaux, John Breitbart, Andrew Brennan, Peter Broder, David “Brooks Brothers riot” Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Brown, Edmund G. Brown, Pat Brown, Willie Buchanan, Pat communism and on New Haven fire department case in Nixon administration in Reagan administration Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive until 2025? on Tea Party 2000 election and Buchanan, William Buckley, William F., Jr.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Bradley ✸ What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise? “If you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have to worry about privacy, and that we must sacrifice our privacy in order to have security.” ✸ Three people or sources you’ve learned from—or followed closely—in the last year? David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List.” Nir Eyal, Hooked. Anything by Kevin Kelly, most recently The Inevitable. Spirit animal: Honey badger * * * Samy Kamkar Samy Kamkar (TW: @samykamkar, samy.pl) is one of the most innovative computer hackers in the United States. He is best known for creating the fastest-spreading virus of all time, a MySpace worm named “Samy,” for which he was raided by the United States Secret Service.

(Budd Schulberg), The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal (Julia Cameron), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Libin, Phil: The Clock of the Long Now (Stewart Brand), The Alliance (Reid Hoffman), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), A Guide to the Good Life (William Irvine) MacAskill, Will: Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit), Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Mark Williams and Danny Penman), The Power of Persuasion (Robert Levine), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) MacKenzie, Brian: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Dan Millman) McCarthy, Nicholas: The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir (Graham Norton), I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (Nina Simone) McChrystal, Stanley: Once an Eagle (Anton Myrer), The Road to Character (David Brooks) McCullough, Michael: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha), Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (David Allen), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Stephen R.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

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

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

Trump was discovering that politics is more complicated on the inside. Parties are often divided and must somehow or other be bound together. In addition, proclaiming an aspiration is much easier than putting together a detailed policy that will work, when implemented. Democratic politics is demanding. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in the aftermath of Trump’s failure to secure support from Congress for scrapping Obamacare: ‘The new elite is worse than the old elite – and certainly more vapid.’1 Brooks was not a supporter of Obamacare, but in suggesting that Trump and his entourage were part of the Washington ‘elite’, he has wounded Obama’s successor with a near-fatal blow.


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

Hundreds of ingredients: what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, how to act, what to believe, and, of course, what kind of spiritual practices to perform. But out of that entire list, there’s only a fraction of “active ingredients” that reliably impact brain function and alter consciousness. Neurotheology lets us validate which ingredients actually make a difference. “In unexpected ways,” writes David Brooks in the New York Times, “science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. . . .


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

Also, in no particular order, all the people who have helped more or less directly, in conversation, writing or ideas: Penny Rimbaud, Matt ffytche, Matthew De Abaitua, Damien and Maia, Billy Childish, James Parker, Marcel Theroux, my mum, my dad, Neil Boorman, John Moore, Bill Drummond, Mark Manning, Louis Theroux, Fiona Russell Powell, Chris Yates, John Cooper Clarke, Pete Loveday, John Hull, Jason Skeet, lain Aitch, David Brook, Simon Jameson, Will Hogan, Tom Shone, Josh Glenn, Greg Rowland, Will Self, John Michell, Charles Handy, Nick Lezard, Tony White, Arthur Smith, Keith Allen, Alan Porter, Sally Agarwal, Jock Scot, the readers of the Idler . . . there are many, many others. At the Idler I am always, constantly, grateful to my partner and friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney, and to co-workers Dan Kieran and Clare Pollard, and at home thanks to Claire Jordan and, last and most, Victoria Hull.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

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

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

And what I missed in the meta narrative, of course, is that Goldman Sachs, while perhaps corrupt, and too closely tied to government, and the recipient of far too much taxpayer support, was nonetheless not an appropriate target for anger because we just need them so badly to keep our ship afloat. Once this argument was out there it was only a matter of time before it was institutionalized in the New York Times in a column by the archpriest of American conventional wisdom, David Brooks. Brooks argued that the problem with critiques like mine was that while the financial crisis had many causes (including, he insisted with a straight face, the economic rise of China), we were just taking the easy way out—“with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.” Again, Brooks never at any time took issue with any of the facts in the case against Goldman Sachs.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

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

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

A July 2014 New Republic article by William Deresiewicz, “Don’t Send Your Kids to an Ivy League College,” summarizes his excellently titled book Excellent Sheep and shows the level of violent disagreement that the topic of education’s purpose can spark. The author argues that the main purpose of college should be to help students in “building a soul.” This article generated over two million online hits and more readers, comments, and controversy than any article in the New Republic’s one-hundred-year history. New York Times columnist David Brooks was compelled to weigh in on the debate, offering the view that moral education is “largely abandoned ground” as universities focus on career and cognitive issues. Brooks’s column received six hundred reader comments, reflecting a level of emotion more often associated with debates on gun control than education.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Quoted in Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, Fiat Lux: The University of California (New York: McGraw-Hill 1967), p. 192. 23. See, for example, Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Decline and Fall of the English Major,” op-ed, New York Times, June 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html; and David Brooks, “The Humanist Vocation,” op-ed New York Times, June 21, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/opinion/brooks-the-humanistvocation.html. 24. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, pp. 191, 193, 273. 25. See Plato, Crito, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, trans. F. J. Church (New York, 1956). 26.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

—Mark Athitakis, Chicago Sun-Times “Gladwell brilliantly illuminates an aspect of our mental lives that we utterly rely on yet rarely analyze, namely our ability to make snap decisions or quick judgments....Enlightening, provocative, and great fun to read.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist “Blink moves quickly through a series of delightful stories....He’s always dazzling us with fascinating information and phenomena....If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you’ll be delighted.” —David Brooks, New York Times Book Review “Compelling....Blink satisfies and gratifies....It features the fascinating case studies, skilled interweavings of psychological experiments and explanations, and unexpected connections among disparate phenomena that are Gladwell’s impressive trademark.” —Howard Gardner, Washington Post “What Stephen Hawking did for theoretical physics Malcolm Gladwell is doing for social science....Gladwell uses a series of fascinating examples to support his views, weaving scientific data into page-turning prose.”


pages: 316 words: 91,969

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

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

The rejection of assimilation comes down to earth in reporting on the customs and values, attitudes and practices of various immigrant communities. While celebrating cultural difference, the Times does not scrutinize the implications of those differences for immigrants or for Americans generally. David Brooks, one of the paper’s two house conservatives, has written about “cultural geography,” a term used by sociologists to explain “why some groups’ values make them embrace technology and prosper and others don’t,” which, Brooks adds, is “a line of inquiry” that P.C. piety makes it “impolite to pursue.”


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

WILDERNESS VOLUNTEERS protect america’s wild places WILDLANDS ACROSS THE COUNTRY It feels great to get out and do some good honest physical labor. You work in beautiful places, meet interesting people, get relief from the hustle-bustle of daily life—and fresh perspective on what’s really important. —David Brooks, Wilderness Volunteers team leader 38 | If you have a thing about America’s wild places, like to backpack, and could pass a Marine physical (well, almost), consider a volunteer vacation with Wilderness Volunteers. This organization sends vigorous volunteers (mainly in their 20s to 40s) into America’s national and state parks to repair the damage done by heedless visitors.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

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

Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp .158–87; Will Dobbie & Roland G. Fryer Jr., ‘The medium-term impacts of high-achieving charter schools’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 123, no. 5, 2015, pp. 985–1037. 53Quoted in David Brooks, ‘The Harlem Miracle’, New York Times, 7 May 2009, p. A31 54Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, Paul Brookes: Baltimore, MD, 1995. Among the limitations of the study was that it only focused on 42 families, each of whom were observed for an hour per month over a 30-month period.


pages: 299 words: 92,782

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

Meinz, “Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (October 2011): 275–279; and David Z. Hambrick and Randall W. Engle, “Effects of Domain Knowledge, Working Memory Capacity, and Age on Cognitive Performance: An Investigation of the Knowledge-Is-Power Hypothesis,” Cognitive Psychology 44, no. 4 (June 2002): 339–387. 16. See David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), 165; and Gladwell, Outliers, 78–79. 17. Kimberly Ferriman Robertson, Stijn Smeets, David Lubinski, and Camillia P. Benbow, “Beyond the Threshold Hypothesis: Even Among the Gifted and Top Math/Science Graduate Students, Cognitive Abilities, Vocational Interests, and Lifestyle Preferences Matter for Career Choice, Performance, and Persistence,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, no. 6 (December 2010): 346–351. 18.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

In this class, no one escapes the requirements of self-discipline and self-directed labor; they are visited, in each generation, upon the young as they were upon the parents.”13 The son of a lawyer must work just as many years as his father did, for example, to sustain the same position in society. The middle-class boomers who refused that path were perceived as neglecting that lifelong slog to stay in the middle class. Or at least that was the view of a handful of jaundiced conservative critics writing the 1970s equivalent of a David Brooks or Bret Stephens op-ed bemoaning the state of kids these days. But that sentiment was just part of a much larger, creeping societal anxiety, one that boomers would internalize as they came of age. The postwar expansion and solidification of the American middle class—which had lasted just long enough for people to believe that it could last forever—was over.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

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

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

Despite a surprisingly large contingent of extremists, Nazis, anarchists, antivaxxers, and Trump death cultists, there seems to be a fairly common desire across the political spectrum to rein in the jerks. One of the key things about all these efforts is the role that in-person, analog conversation plays in them. “We are really trying to rebuild our nation’s social trust,” said Frederick Riley, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Weave project, created in 2018 by New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks. The basic concept is to work with groups, individuals, and communities across America to repair the social fabric frayed by politics. Though Brooks later stepped down from the project (partly due to a conflict of interest around its funding by Facebook), Weave has continued. “When social trust is high, people are innovative, people pay taxes, and they vote.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

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

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

These include Giacomo Corneo, Felix Koch, Bertram Lomfeld, Christoph Möllers, Frauke Peter, Friedbert Rueb, and Jürgen Schupp at the Freie Universität Berlin; Oriana Bandiera, Lucy Barnes, Thorsten Bell, Richard Blundell (who suggested the book’s title), Jeff King, Julian LeGrand, George Letsas, Philippa Malmgren, Claire Maxell, Avia Pasternak, Prince Saprai, and Paul Segal at University College London; Bruce Ackerman, David Brooks, Michael Graetz, Anthony Kronman, Rick Levin, Meira Levinson, Alec MacGillis, Jennifer Nedelsky, Alan Schwartz, John Witt, Portia Wu, and Gideon Yaffee at Yale Law School; and Emily Bazelon, Nicholas Dawidoff, Jacob Hacker, and Annie Murphy Paul at the New Haven reading group on inequality. The Yale Law Library and its unmatched staff—including in particular Julian Aiken and Michelle Hudson—provided astonishing research support.

accords to the industrious: Conservatives especially disdain progressive intellectuals—including writers and professors—whose incomes do not match their educations and who moralize loudly but enviously against the wealth of a commercial class that they (clinging to the wreckage of aristocratic values) regard as inferior. See, e.g., David Brooks, “Bitter at the Top,” New York Times, June 15, 2004, accessed November 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/bitter-at-the-top.html. Edward Conrad, a former venture capitalist and conservative writer, calls the type “art-history majors,” which he uses as a “derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life.”


Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, clean water, David Brooks, disinformation, failed state, Farzad Bazoft, guns versus butter model, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Middle East scholar Augustus Richard Norton observed that “As fantasies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon,” the media even more enthusiastically. There were, it is true, some discordant voices. Conservative commentator David Brooks warned that “people in the Middle East don’t always act rationally,” so democracy has its perils. Iraqis confirmed his proposition with their reaction to the new messianic mission. A Gallup poll in Baghdad found that 99 percent refused to join in the celebration. 1 percent of Iraqis felt that the goal of the war was to bring democracy, while 5 percent thought the goal was “to assist the Iraqi people.”


pages: 296 words: 98,018

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

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

A billionaire came up and thanked me for voicing what has been the struggle of her life. Some in the leadership of the Aspen Institute began frantically asking who had allowed this outrage to occur. That evening at the bar, some cheered me, others glared at me icily, and a private-equity man told me I was an “asshole.” Later that evening, beside a fireplace, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, asked if he could write about my talk. I hadn’t planned for my words to leave the room, but I agreed. He wrote his column. People began demanding to see the speech. I posted it online. It stirred many pots and conversations. I hadn’t planned to write a book on this topic, but the topic chose me.


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

Lewis: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 306. 115 she had some cartographic training: “Pauline Baynes,” obituary, The Daily Telegraph, Aug. 8, 2008. 115 he doodled the map first: David and Lee Eddings, The Rivan Codex (New York: Del Rey, 1998), p. 10. 117 Baldwin Street in Dunedin: Simon Warren, 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs (London: Frances Lincoln, 2010), p. 10. 117 “The achievement of”: The Romance of the Commonplace (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Morgan Shepherd, 1902), p. 91. 120 “Nothing seems crasser”: Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977/2000), p. 125. CHAPTER 7: RECKONING 133 “Rote memorization must be emphasized”: “National Geography Bee?,” FOCUS on Geography 38, no. 2 (Summer 1988), pp. 33–36. 135 the old record had been shattered: David Brooks, “Mount Washington Gust Record Gone with the Wind,” Nashua Telegraph, Jan. 27, 2010. 136 the second best design: “The Great British Design Quest,” The Culture Show, BBC Two, Mar. 2, 2006. 136 “removing the smile”: Mark Easton, “Map of the Week: London without the Thames,” BBC News, Sept. 16, 2009. 136 “Can’t believe that the Thames disappeared”: @MayorOf London, Twitter status, Sept. 17, 2009. 136 The Swedish crown jewels: Peter Barber and Christopher Board, Tales from the Map Room: Fact and Fiction About Maps and Their Makers (London: BBC Books, 1993), p. 74. 138 an elaborate farm system: Ben Paynter, “Why Are Indian Kids So Good at Spelling?


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model—and this should come as no surprise—is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that “our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context”; neuroscientists, that we have “permeable minds” that function in part through a process of “deep imitation”; psychologists, that “we are organized by our attachments”; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by “the power of social networks.”


pages: 377 words: 97,144

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

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

Intelligence 38 (6): 605—10. Sahakian, Barbara, and Sharon Morein-Zamir. 2007. “Professor’s Little Helper.” Nature 450 (7173): 1157—59. Salamon, Anna. 2009. “How Much It Matters to Know What Matters: A Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation.” Talk given at the Singularity Summit. Sanandaji, Tino. April 1, 2011. “David Brooks and Malcolm [Gladwell] Wrong about I.Q., Income and Wealth.” Super-Economy. http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/04/iq-income-and-wealth.html. Segal, Nancy L. 1999. Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior. New York: Dutton. Shulman, Carl. November 23, 2008. “‘Evicting’ Brain Emulations.”


pages: 307 words: 96,543

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

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

What we saw was a tragedy not just for one family, for the country cannot achieve its potential when so many citizens are not reaching theirs. Mary Mayor, after a great recovery from alcohol, drugs and homelessness, with one of the birdhouses she makes and sells for a living (photo by Nicholas Kristof) This is not an exclusively liberal or conservative issue. Conservative writers like Charles Murray and David Brooks have explored these chasms, with Brooks arguing that “the central problem of our time is the stagnation of middle-class wages, the disintegration of working-class communities and the ensuing fragmentation of American society.” On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats have made similar arguments.


pages: 376 words: 101,759

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Hines, “A ‘Random Chemistry’ Algorithm for Identifying Collections of Multiple Contingencies That Initiate Cascading Failure,” IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 27, No. 3, August 2012, http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~meppstei/personal/IEEEPES2012.pdf. 90 Scott DiSavino, “New England grid can function without Vermont Yankee reactor,” Reuters News Agency, December 10, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/utilities-entergy-vermontyankee/new-england-grid-can-function-without-vermont-yankee-reactor-idUSL1E8NA50O20121210. 91 David Brooks, “Northern Pass died — but the debate didn’t,” Concord Monitor, December 28, 2018, https://www.concordmonitor.com/story-of-year-energy-northern-pass-22403247. 92 Mike Polhamus, “TDI New England approved for $1.2 billion transmission project,” VTDigger, January 6, 2016, https://vtdigger.org/2016/01/06/tdi-new-england-approved-for-1-2-billion-transmission-project/. 93 “Order No. 1000 — Transmission Planning and Cost Allocation,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, updated August 22, 2019, https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/trans-plan.asp. 94 “Electricity Transmission Cost Allocation,” EveryCRSReport.com (website), December 18, 2012, https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R41193.html. 95 “Order No. 1000 …” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 96 Federal Register, Volume 76, Number 155, August 11, 2011, https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/trans-plan/fr-notice.pdf. 97 “Our Work,” VELCO (website of Vermont Electric Power Company), undated, https://www.velco.com/our-work. 98 “Final Minutes,” VELCO Operating Committee, October 17, 2013, https://opcom.velco.com/library/document/download/1335/Final%252520Minutes%25252010-17-13.pdf. 99 “Tragedy of the commons,” Wikipedia, last update November 10, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons. 100 Jason Marshall, “Order 1000 in New England,” New England States Committee on Electricity, September 7, 2017, https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2017/09/clg_meeting_marshall_panelist_presentation_september_7_2017_final.pdf. 101 “About NESCOE (web page),” NESCOE: New England States Committee on Electricity, undated, http://nescoe.com/about-nescoe/. 102 Herman K.


pages: 916 words: 248,265

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, David Brooks, Etonian, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, loose coupling, low cost airline, oil shale / tar sands, period drama, pneumatic tube, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, work culture

Nesbit, 1858–1924 (1987) Brindle: Steven Brindle, Paddington Station: Its History and Architecture (2004) Brodie et al.: Allan Brodie, Jane Croom and James O. Davies, English Prisons: An Architectural History (2002) Brogden: W. A. Brogden, Aberdeen: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (1986) Brooke 1: David Brooke, ‘The “Lawless” Navvy: A Study of the Crime Associated with Railway Building’, JTH 10/2 (1989), 145–65 Brooke 2: David Brooke, ‘The Railway Navvy – A Reassessment’, Construction History 5 (1989), 35–45 Brown, F. A. S.: F. A. S. Brown, Nigel Gresley: Locomotive Engineer (1961) Brown, F. M.: The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (1981) Bryan: Tim Bryan, The Great Western Railway: A Celebration (2010) Bryson: Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1996) Buchanan: R.


pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

He became addicted to rallies, where he excited crowds with his hypomanic charisma, and where they in turn threw gasoline on the fire of his hypomanic grandiosity. This culminated in the Republican National Convention, at which Trump made a grandiose statement that encapsulates it all: “Only I can fix it.” David Brooks (2016) is not a mental health professional, but he astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trump’s increasing hypomania: He cannot be contained because he is psychologically off the chain. With each passing week, he displays the classic symptoms of medium-grade mania in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression and a compulsion to offer advice on subjects he knows nothing about.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

The grades they gave us were not always the highest, especially with modern standards of grade inflation, and our research assistants have then patiently explained why those low grades were deserved, and in conversations have led us out of the hole we were in. Each of these three research assistants is truly exceptional. Victoria Buhler, who accepted the job when she was a junior, was so exceptional that David Brooks wrote a New York Times column lauding her for an essay she wrote in a class at Yale. When Victoria graduated and went on to a graduate year at Cambridge, she continued work on Phishing for Phools. That was the year when Bob won the Nobel Prize, which for at least a few months is an all-absorbing state, and she played an especially important role in filling the vacuum.


pages: 403 words: 105,431

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education by Diane Ravitch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, confounding variable, David Brooks, desegregation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

However, by June 2003 every state plan was approved, even though many did not have challenging academic standards. Lynn Olson, “All States Get Federal Nod on Key Plans,” Education Week, June 18, 2003. 12 Josh Patashnik, “Reform School: The Education (On Education) of Barack Obama,” New Republic, March 26, 2008, 12-13. 13 David Brooks, “Who Will He Choose?” New York Times, December 5, 2008; Washington Post, “A Job for a Reformer,” December 5, 2008; Chicago Tribune, “Obama and Schoolkids,” December 9, 2008. Republicans recognized that President Obama was embracing some of the GOP’s core beliefs, including school choice, merit pay, and accountability.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

More than 60 percent of us: Jason DeParle, “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,” New York Times, January 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html. Instead of “disordered money behavior”: Bradley Klontz, Alex Bivens, Paul T. Klontz, Joni Wada, Richard Kahler, “The Treatment of Disordered Money Behaviors. There’s Eldar Shafir at Princeton: David Brooks, “The Unexamined Society,” New York Times, July 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/opinion/08brooks.html. There’s Roy Baumeister: Roy F. Baumeister, C. Nathan DeWall, Natalie J. Ciarocco, Jean M. Twenge, “Social Exclusion Impairs Self-regulation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005. vol. 88, no. 4, 589. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/7938685_Social_exclusion_impairs_self-regulation.


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

-style capitalism, I’ve actually been embarrassed at how well Germany is doing. Here’s a headline from the Financial Times, April 4, 2011: “German spirits rise sky high as industry soars.” Even some of our right-of-center types have observed that a high-tax social democracy seems to be outcompeting us. (I could mention New York Times columnist David Brooks as one of several examples.) Of course they try to explain it in American terms. They claim it’s a result of the German emphasis on “consensus,” without mentioning how this “consensus” comes from the most socialist aspects of the German model, like workers being half of the directors on corporate boards.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

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

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

The mainstream media quickly picked up: Jack Nicas and Yoree Koh, “At Google, Memo on Gender and Diversity Sparks Firestorm,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 9, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/memo-sparks-firestorm-at-google-1502246996. Pichai issued a harshly worded rebuke: Sundar Pichai, “Note to Employees from CEO Sundar Pichai,” Google, Aug. 8, 2017, https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-sundar-pichai. calling for Pichai’s resignation: David Brooks, “Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sundar-pichai-google-memo-diversity.html. “It’s really a shame”: James Damore, “Fired Google Engineer Says Company Executives Smeared Him,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Aug. 9, 2017, video, 3:51, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/fired-google-engineer-says-company-smeared-him-video.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

In return, they got inside access to the big media organizations the right has always demonized, and which—while often smugly liberal—rarely resembled the left-wing conspiracies they imagined. There was nothing about the new style of social media journalism that suggested it would make it harder than before for conservatives and liberal journalists to discipline themselves to focus on a core of shared facts. I thought perhaps Benny could be the David Brooks or George Will of the meme generation, a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country, and a check on our own biases. I sent our Washington bureau chief, a towering, tattooed ex-bouncer and veteran Capitol Hill reporter named John Stanton, to meet him. They sat for two and a half hours of what Benny enthusiastically told me was “the best interview of [his] short life,” while Stanton told Benny how much fun it was to work for BuzzFeed, and Benny counted how many skulls his prospective boss was wearing (two rings, three on his belt buckle, one tattoo, and one on a necklace).


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

Edward was one of four children, all boys, born to the peripatetic automotive executive Henry Lansdale and his homemaker wife, Sarah, whose own family had arrived from England far more recently and had settled in the West. The oldest of the siblings was Henry Philips (later simply Phil), who was born in 1906, eighteen months before “Teddy” (Ed’s childhood nickname).3 The younger boys were Benjamin Carroll, born in 1909, thirteen months after Ed, and David Brooke, the baby of the family, born in 1916, eight years after Ed. A major influence on their development was their maternal grandfather, Edward Philips, a legendary, Horatio Alger–type figure in the family. Born in England in 1850, he left home around age nine following the death of his father, a physician.

“Brute,” 406 on EGL, xli interagency committee chaired by, 431 Vietnam trip of, 408 Kunming, China, 175–76 Kwajalein, 39 Kyes, Roger M., 190 labor leaders, 379 La Guardia, Fiorello, 21, 138 La Guardia Airport, 22 Langguth, A. J., 508 Langley, Va., 392, 587 Lansdale, Benjamin Carroll, 5, 6, 12, 17, 20, 34, 54, 559 Lansdale, Carol, xlix, 534, 559 Lansdale, Carolyn, xlix, 594 Lansdale, David Brook, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 24, 27 Lansdale, Edward Geary, 27–30, 45, 531 acknowledging lack of effectiveness of, 540–41 added to group of Vietnam liaison officers, 190 agenda for Nixon worked on by, 537–38 Air Force role of, 36, 81, 101, 314 as allegedly present at JFK assassination, 422, 423 ambassadorship to Philippines desired by, 586–87 appearance of, 23, 218–19, 221, 595–96 at Army Civil Affairs School, 299 asked to return to Philippines by Magsaysay, 191 attempt to reconcile with Helen, 116–17, 155 background of, 4–5 Bay of Pigs invasion opposed by, xliv, 376–77, 380 birth of, 4, 7 book considered by, 433–34 buildup of South Vietnam desired by, xxiv, xliv called Elimination by Illumination, 385, 584 and Cambodian coup, 329–30 Canbo euthanized by, 591 chores done by, 11 CIA’s mocking of, 383 classified memos leaked to Times regarding, 545–46 clerical work of, 22, 28 collapse of, 591–92 on committee to study military assistance programs, 327–30, 415 concept of operation on Cuba by, 383–84 contempt for bureaucrats of, 311–12 as counterinsurgency expert, 6, 16, 168, 318–19, 362, 368, 380, 412, 594, 599 and creation of special forces, 322–23 in Cuban Missile Crisis, 395, 396 Cuban survey made by, 380–82 D.C. house sold by, 535–36 death of, 593–94 and death of Diem and Nhu, 414–15, 454, 456 desire to go back to Philippines, 87, 92–93, 99–100, 102, 103 desire to topple Castro, xlii, xliv, xlviii, l, 38, 382, 384–86, 387, 388, 398 disregarding of advice of, xxxix dubious about Castro assassination plots, 391 Dulles’s advice to, 153 Durbrow criticized by, 336–37 educational institute proposal of, 434 education of, 10, 16–21 embellished accounts by, l enlarged thyroid of, 33–34 and Executive Action capability, 390–91 and father’s affair, 26–28, 90 fire in study of, 549–50 first wedding of, 23–24, 111 at Food for Peace, 435–36, 443, 446, 455 Foreign Affairs article of, 447 foreign languages unknown to, xliv, 17–18, 199, 325, 476, 605–6 free land given to Vietcong desired by, 359 funeral of, 595, 596–97 in Great Depression, 21, 22 grief over failures in Vietnam of, 572–73 grief-stricken at JFK’s assassination, 423 guerrilla wars seen as future by, 316–17 as guru to Wilson, 320–21 harassed by RFK, 381–82, 423 harmonica played by, 12, 54 and Helen’s death, 555–56 Helen’s refusal of divorce from, 89–90, 188 Helen’s romance with, 23, 27, 71–72 Helen’s separation from, 91 on home leave wth sons, 188 at Honolulu Summit, 417, 486–87 on humor magazine, 18–19 Humphrey introduced to, 440–41 Humphrey’s memorandum to LBJ on ideas of, 442–43 on impossibility of Operation Mongoose, 382, 423 impressed with JFK, 349 independence learned by, 11–12 indoctrination of American personnel desired by, 317 informal style of, 5, 34, 65 as instinctive, 603 interest in history, 10 on investigations of CIA, 578 Japan studied by, 57–61 and JFK assassination, xlii, xliv JFK introduced to Harvey by, 388–89 JMWAVE visited by, 392 Joint Chiefs’ opposition to, 356 lethargy of, 592–93 made assistant to secretary of defense for special operations, 358 made brigadier general, 338 made operations officer of Vietnam task force, 360 Magsaysay aided by, 112, 113–14 Magsaysay pushed for defense minister by, xlix, 113–14, 208 and Magsaysay’s death, 308 Magsaysay’s fight with, 141–42 Magsaysay’s moving in with, 120–21 Manahan supported for 1957 election by, 309 Mao read by, 127 McNamara’s dislike of, 367–68, 409, 410, 414, 582 McNamara’s meeting on Vietcong weaponry with, 364–65 memoir of, 116–17, 536–37, 550–52, 589 memorandum on Vietnam policy by, 359 in Military Intelligence Service, 34, 36, 38, 42 ministroke suffered by, 591 misgivings about exposure of intelligence secrets, 584–85 Mission Liaison Group chaired by, 471–72, 475 as misunderstood, xli–xliii, xliv–xlv, l as model for fictional characters, xli, xlii, xliii–xliv, 12, 325–26, 421, 462 and mother’s death, 191–92 neutral in domestic politics, 435 1963 coup against Diem opposed by, 407, 563, 573–74 Nixon’s differences with, 538–39 offered ambassadorship to South Vietnam, 355–56, 362 Office of Special Operations run by, 315–16 Operation Bounty rejected by, 386–87 Operation Mongoose run by, see Operation Mongoose at OSS, 34–35, 36, 38–41 Oval Office talk on Vietnam by, 354–57 painting and drawing by, 12, 19, 22, 293 Pat’s marriage to, 558–60 peripatetic childhood of, 8–9 personality of, 5, 6–7, 10, 19, 24 promoted to full colonel in Air Force, 145 promoted to major general, 406 propaganda coups of, xliv proposal to Kelly, 90 on Prouty, 421 racism opposed by, 5, 14–15 rejected from army, 33–34 rekindling of romance with Pat, 556–58 religious views of, 12–13, 14, 15, 22, 24, 259, 467, 537, 538, 596 representative governments desired by, 281 retirement of, 413–14 RFK’s desire to fire, 398–99 in ROTC program, 17, 18, 20 Senate questioning of, 578–79, 581–82, 586 sinecure for Nhu at Harvard desired by, 407–8 soft power pushed by, 317–18 South Vietnamese refugees helped by, 569–70, 572 Soviet economy lectures of, 92, 102 Special Group’s lack of confidence in, 394 speeches given by, 587–88 speeches to government officials by, 318–20 on starting Cuban revolt, 384–85 State Department’s differences with, 356, 364, 374 strategic listening by, 605 strategic studies taught by, 91–93 suspicious of covert action, xliv sympathy for South Vietnam, 565 three L’s of, 603–5 troubled first marriage of, 24–25, 243–44 university talks of, 534–35 at Vann’s funeral, 555 Vietnam strategy papers of, 436–38, 441, 442, 443, 447 views on Communism, 95–96 warning of Vietnam bloodbath, 562–63 worried about army’s lack of focus on counterinsurgency, 412 worried about Diem’s overthrow, 406–7 on “X factor,” 366–67, 441, 605 Yale speech on Vietnam victory by, 448 Lansdale, Edward Geary “Teddy,” advertising career of, xlii, xlvi, 1, 28, 29, 43, 127 in disputes with boss, 31–32 Levi Strauss account of, 31–32 Livingston’s firing of, 34 salary of, 31 at Segall’s agency, 30–31 Lansdale, Edward Geary “Teddy,” as CIA operative, 28, 33, 36 in clash with mainstream CIA view, 312–13 denial of, 191 Filipino friends made by, 108–9 hired to, 100 lack of Ivy League credentials, 101–2 secretiveness of, 102 severing of relationship with, 31 Soviet affairs worked on by, 102–3 Lansdale, Edward Geary “Teddy,” in Philippines: accused of bribing Thé, 258–59 airborne assault teams desired by, 130–31 backlash against, 146–50 beginning of Magsaysay’s friendship with, 119–20 booby-trapped ammunition provided to Huks by, 133–34 bored by social events in, 84–85 Christmas spent in, 241 desire to bring Filipinos to Vietnam, 242–43 desire to democratize, 54 desire to meet Taruc, 76, 77 desire to understand country, 55–56, 61–62, 72–74, 85, 131–32 desire to win over population in press by, 83–84 disappointed in Magsaysay, 306–7 in dispute with OPC, 114 Eisenhower’s congratulations on Philippines election to, 163 fame of, 146 and figure how to break down, 48, 52–64 Filipino army studied by, 77–78 Filipino officers’ visits to, 121–22 housing of, 118 and Huk Rebellion, xlv, l, 104, 106–7, 109–10, 112, 118–19, 126–35, 145, 168, 178, 294, 422, 485 as local celebrity, 85 love affair with Kelly, 67, 69, 81, 85, 86, 88–90, 92–93, 100, 103, 116, 155, 188, 200, 243, 284, 301, 303–6, 330, 339, 456, 495–97, 596, 605 made public information officer, 82–83 Magsaysay advised in presidency by, 192 Magsaysay advised on putting government together by, 185 and Magsaysay’s presidential campaign, 140, 142–44, 148, 149, 159–64, 165, 180, 183, 274–75, 285, 422 in move to Air Force, 81 National Security Medal received by, 163–64, 296 in negotiations with Negritos, 63–64 O’Daniel’s meeting with, 180 OPC entourage of, 114–16 OPC’s sending to, 114 Pan-Am flight to, 117 patrols ordered to photograph casualties by, 131 on possible fall of Vietnam, 193 praised by Cowen, 134 praise for work of, 85–86 Quirino’s desire to kick out, 147–48 robbed by bandits, 74–76 scheme for 1951 election by, 138, 139, 140, 161 Spruance taken on inspection trips by, 153–54 in surprise field inspections, 123, 133 tailed by intelligence, 155–56 Time article on, 164 in typhoon, 165 vacation in, 284–85 vampire rumor started by, 132, 133 World War II destruction seen by, 52–53 Lansdale, Edward Geary, in Vietnam (Indochina): Abrams requested to avoid formalities with Vien by, 524–25 airdropping weapons on North Vietnam considered by, 480 as allegedly responsible for North Vietnamese refugees, 226–27, 234, 255, 296 and An’s spying, 231 anti-French sentiment of, 247–48 assassination attempt against, 278–79 attempt to befriend Thieu, 478 attempt to convince Diem to become democratic, 281, 283, 287–88, 289, 298, 337, 573–74 attempt to kidnap, 270 and Battle of Saigon, 265–71, 275, 277 Binh Xuyen’s threat to, 270 Bunker welcomed to Vietnam by, 505 cables on Diem from, 268–69, 275 called “spook deity,” 466 Carbonel’s dislike of, 247 car given to, 198 civic action by, 251–52, 287, 369, 442, 594 and Collins’s departure, 274 Collins’s disagreement with, 238–39 and Collins’s plan to make Diem ceremonial figure, 265 Conein called “the Thug” by, 217 considering retiring, 494–95 desire to learn about country, 201 desire to use music as propaganda, 480–82 and Diem’s call for Constituent Assembly election, 288–89 Diem’s request for return of, 337, 408 and Diem’s return to Vietnam, 208–10 on Diem’s vacation, 294 diminished size of team of, 506 diminished status of, 287–90, 506–7, 526, 548 doubts about Diem, 209 duplex of, 466 elections in Vietnam desired by, 497–500 Ellsberg criticized for leaking Pentagon Papers by, 546 Ellsberg’s love for, 469–70 Ellsberg’s work for, 467 and enmity between Diem and Hinh, 234, 235–36 expected to orchestrate agencies by Lodge, 472 failure of North Vietnam operations of, 231–32 first meeting with Thé, 255, 256–57 first visit to, 171–73, 180–81, 182–83 Free Vietnam desired by, 215 French abandonment of, 198–99 grenades kept by, 204 guerrilla warfare recommended by, 183 Hanoi police chief aided by, 226 and Heath’s recall, 237, 238 Heath’s relationship with, 236–37 and Hinh’s proposed coup, 235–36, 253, 255 on Hong Kong trip, 496–97 in hotels, 463–64 house parties hosted by, 475–76 Humphrey shown Saigon by, 487–88 instruction to Diem, 210 insulted by Americans, 483–84, 507 and integration of Thé’s troops into military, 255, 256–58 invited to Ngo family gatherings, 212–13 journalists’ criticism of, xli–xlii, xliii, 473–74, 488 Kissinger on dislike of, 471 Kissinger on gifts of, 484–86 Lodge’s desire for return of, 409–10 loneliness of, 199–200 made adviser to Diem, 374 made head of National Security Division of TRIM, 246, 269 made minister, 488 in meeting with religious groups, 202–4 memorandum for Diem by, 209, 210 national consultative council desired by, 479–80 nature of Diem’s relationship with, 210, 211–12, 213, 239, 341–42 on need for pacification minister, 486 Nguyen Cao Ky’s relationship with, 477, 489 1954 coup against Diem opposed by, xlix–l not averse to U.S. troops in, 372 official title of, 471 pacification organized by, 245–46, 252–53, 360 parties thrown by, 240–41 pay of, 469 predictions for 1968 by, 514 propaganda considered by, 480 psychological warfare recommended by, 182, 205, 216, 218, 225, 359, 369–70, 437 and refugee journalist’s propaganda, 226 relationship with influential leaders cultivated by, 479 report to JFK from, 346, 350–53 return of, 410–11, 453–56, 460, 463 Rostow’s relationship with, 370 Saigon Military Mission report on Ca Mau ordered prepared by, 251 on Saigon trip with Rostow and Taylor, 369–74 on Sea Swallows, 345 semi-open manner of, 220–21 sent to Vietnam, 190–91, 194–95 stress of, 239–40 study on South Vietnam’s convoluted politics by, 527 Taylor’s relationship with, 370 in Tet Offensive, 517, 518, 519 and The Quiet American, 290–94 and The’s death, 272–73 at Thé’s son’s wedding, 508 and threat to Ellsberg, 482 travel of, 201–5 troop education suggested by, 182–83 twelve-man team assembled by, 215–17, 218–20, 226, 227–30 twenty-second anniversary of, 464 on United Front uprising, 260 and uprising against Diem, 260–61, 262, 263 Vietcong investigated by, 345–46 on Vietcong traps, 345 Vietminh pamphlets forged by, 225 Vietnamese seeking guidance from, 507–8 visits to Diem, 210–11 Williams’s outbursts at, 286–87 as workaholic, 24 Lansdale, Edward Russell, 32, 302, 518, 555 birth of, xlix college graduation of, 455 education of, 186–87 and EGL’s death, 594 EGL’s visit to, 534 as “hooligan,” 187–88 in Philippines, 80 wedding of, 456 Lansdale, Ethel Dow, 26–27 Lansdale, Helen Frances Batcheller “Fanny,” xlvii, 100, 140, 144–45, 146, 155, 173, 192, 193, 199–200, 205, 243–44, 291, 293, 302, 456, 463, 534, 587 appearance of, 23, 69 beginning of EGL’s friendship with, 119–20 birth of, 25 D.C. house sold by, 535–36 death of, 555–56, 596 EGL refused divorce by, 89–90, 188 EGL’s romance with, 23, 27, 71–72 EGL’s separation from, 91 ELG’s attempt to reconcile with, 116–17, 155 and fire in EGL’s study, 549 first wedding of, 23–24, 111 lack of interest in foreign affairs, 69–70 personality of, 24, 69–70 in Philippines, 79–81 Phil resented by, 29 psychological warfare used by, 11, 33, 126–28, 132–33, 182, 296 troubled marriage of, 24–25, 243–44 trouble raising sons, 187–88 twenty-second anniversary of, 464 Lansdale, Henry “Harry,” 3, 5, 7–8, 11, 12–13, 20, 191 affair of, 26–28 Lansdale, Henry Philips “Phil,” 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 24, 29, 497, 593 Lansdale, Pat, see Kelly, Patrocinio Yapcinco “Pat” Lansdale, Peter Carroll “Pete,” xlvii, xlix, 302, 535, 554, 555, 559, 588 birth of, 32 education of, 186–87 and EGL’s death, 594 and EGL’s ministroke, 591 as “hooligan,” 187–88 military career of, 455–56 in Philippines, 80 wedding of, 456 Lansdale, Sarah “Sadie,” 5, 7, 12–13, 14, 15, 24, 91 death of, 191–92 and husband’s affair, 26, 27 Lansing, Robert, 150 Laos, 341, 346, 353, 427, 491, 503, 542, 543, 547 Communist infiltration from, 371 creation of, 215 fall of, 569 Ho Chi Minh Trail in, 334 refugees from, 572 LaRouche, Lyndon, 421 Larteguy, Jean, 334, 462 Latin America, 38, 589, 603 Lattre de Tassigny, Jean de, 179 Laurel, José, 142 Lawrence, T.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

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

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

Political psychologists still do not understand why—the sheer number of proposed explanations suggests that they are all wrong or incomplete. Be this as it may, the narcissistic megalomaniac did win the White House. Once there, he acted like the French kings whose narcissistic megalomania was structurally induced. The description of Louis XVI as “sulking” matches the common characterization of Trump as “petulant.” On May 15, 2017, David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “When the World Is Led by a Child.” Although he does not mention the aspect of childishness that I cited from the French writers, his colleagues Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman (New York Times, May 17, 2017, p. A 16) nailed it down: There is a fear among some of Mr.


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Confidentially, industry representatives inquire with Luz Marina Calle, the director of the Corrosion Technology Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, regarding their rust woes. Privately, Americans call John Carmona, the proprietor of the Rust Store, and ask for advice. Thanks to New York Times political columnist David Brooks, the threat of moral corrosion instills more fear than the threat of physical corrosion. But from those who ascribe no shame to talking about rust, stories emerge in the manner of scars and broken bones. People talk about the bottoms of their wells, their barbecue grills, their bicycle chains.


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

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

Back in the era of the “organization man,” traits such as creativity and initiative were often less valued than conformity. Success in the knowledge economy, in contrast, often comes by challenging existing systems, thinking outside the box, and taking risks. Here, bourgeois and bohemian values have seamlessly fused—a trend seen elsewhere, too, as David Brooks argued in Bobos in Paradise. Entrepreneurs who strike out on their own to “monetize ideas” are heavily represented among the new rich, while certain major knowledgeeconomy companies are set up to accommodate creative individuals. Google, for instance, has a “20 percent rule,” which allows its engineers to devote a fifth of their time to whatever they are passionate about.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

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

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

It was said that the Americans who’d supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. “We simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,” David Brooks would write in The New York Times. “If you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.” This strikes me as perfectly logical.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

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

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

But they can be wired for so much more—more depth and beauty and empathy. And everyone, physicians and patients alike, deserves for them to be wired for more.60 In The Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik interpreted two distinct portrayals of Adam in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. More recently, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, presented an updated description of these two Adams in his book The Road to Character. Adam 1 is oriented externally and is ambitious, goal-oriented, and wants to conquer the world. In contrast, Adam 2 is internally anchored, with high moral fiber and a willingness to sacrifice himself to serve others.


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

Beyond vague clichés (which, like “fiscally responsible,” have no connection to reality), most Americans identify with identities, not policies; with tribes, not truth.81 Political parties are attitudes, not collections of party platforms. They are social meanings, as Yale law professor Dan Kahan frames it, that define identity and membership.82 And when Trump rewrote the policies that were considered to be Republican, only the wonks even noticed, and certainly, only the wonks cared. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, David Brooks—these were the deeply principled policy Republicans who were astonished to discover that the loyalty of their fellow travelers had very little to do with the ideas in the Republican platform. This is not a point about Trump supporters. It is a point about America. We don’t know—in a nonpolarized, sustained way—jack shit about policy, and we ought to be more open and honest—and proud—about what we don’t know.


pages: 372 words: 117,038

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

According to the right-wing American Spectator, the problem is not too much T, but too little, among some prominent conservatives: “There is also a low-testosterone, dilettantish strain of conservatism that has overdeveloped in the ‘mainstream’ media … to create such sterile hybrids as Michael Gerson and George Will and David Brooks,” who were, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, “sipping tea” while Trump’s base was “fighting a war.” And in another piece from Psychology Today, the author describes the “testosterone curse” in which high T induces “a biological urge that sooner or later demands expression.” According to him, while we can’t forgive the sexual transgressions of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and other male celebrities, we should understand that “men are just animals who, when under T’s influence, have great difficulty perceiving females other than one-dimensionally, as objects for lascivious gratification.”


pages: 602 words: 120,848

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

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

It has done so, moreover, in an era in which, over the entire electorate, economic issues divide the parties more sharply along class lines than in the past, with Democrats favored by less affluent voters and Republicans by more affluent voters. Yes, you heard right: Evangelicals notwithstanding, economic issues divide the parties more sharply along class lines than in the past. If you listen to political pundits—particularly those on the right—you would think the exact opposite. David Brooks, Tucker Carlson, and others have expended much ink and airtime arguing that American politics had realigned around social and consumer values, rather than material issues: a less affluent red America filled with NASCAR-loving, gun-toting GOP traditionalists who oppose gay marriage versus a richer blue America filled with sushi-loving, New Yorker–reading Democratic cosmopolitans who want abortion on demand.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

See National Center for Education Statistics, “Trend in NAEP Reading Average Scores for 17-year-old Students” (2008), available at link #62 (documenting change in average scaled reading score of 285 in 1971 to 286 in 2008); National Center for Education Statistics, “Trend in Mathematics Average Scores for 17-year-old Students” (2008), available at link #63 (documenting change in average scaled mathematics score of 304 in 1973 to 306 in 2008). 3. William Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer, Jr., “Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Bold Social Experiment in Harlem,” Harvard University (2009), available at link #64. See also David Brooks, “The Harlem Miracle,” New York Times, May 7, 2009, at A31, available at link #65. 4. Eric A. Hanushek, “Teacher Deselection,” in Creating a New Teaching Profession, Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2009), 168, 172, 173. 5. See Steven G. Rivkin, Eric A.


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

I know because I read an article about the Reagan appointee who made it a showplace of outsourcing. John Rees, interview with Danford Sawyer, Review of the NEWS, July 7, 1982, pp. 39–50. 5. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 351. Washington seems to exert a magnetic attraction on celebrators of suburbia. David Brooks’s rosy meditations on suburbia in his 2004 book, On Paradise Drive, instantly mark him as an inhabitant of the D.C. metro area. The latest priest of this faith is Richard Florida, a professor at a university located in the Virginia suburbs, who finds the city “a booming, far-flung region that’s a key node in what [he] call[s] the Creative Economy.”


pages: 401 words: 119,488

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

., “Forecasting Tournaments Tools for Increasing Transparency and Improving the Quality of Debate,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 23, no. 4 (2014): 290–95; David Ignatius, “More Chatter than Needed,” The Washington Post, November 1, 2013; Alex Madrigal, “How to Get Better at Predicting the Future,” The Atlantic, December 11, 2012; Warnaar et al., “Aggregative Contingent Estimation System”; Uriel Haran, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers, “The Role of Actively Open-Minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration,” Judgment and Decision Making 8, no. 3 (2013): 188–201; David Brooks, “Forecasting Fox,” The New York Times, March 21, 2013; Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Seeing Further (New York: Random House, 2015). A group of At various points during the GJP, the precise number of researchers involved fluctuated. questions as the experts In response to a fact-checking email, Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock, another of the GJP leaders, wrote: “We had two different types of training in the first year of the tournament.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

This raises a prospect that has exhilarated many of the digerati. Perhaps the Internet can serve not merely as a supplement to memory but as a replacement for it. “I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything,” says Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, “because I can instantly retrieve the information online.” David Brooks, in his New York Times column, writes, “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants—silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

Simple: Natural selection favored this behavior and, in time, it became hardwired into chimp brains. But the moment this conversation turns to human brains and actions, people get uncomfortable. The idea that much human thought is unconscious, and that evolutionary hardwiring is its foundation, is too much for many to accept. “I am not willing to assume,” wrote David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, “that our brains are like computers. . . . Isn’t it just as possible that the backstage part of the brain [meaning unconscious thought] might be more like a personality, some unique and nontechnological essence that cannot be adequately generalized about by scientists in white coats with clipboards?”


pages: 493 words: 133,564

Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'N' Roll Survivor by Al Kooper

cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, gentrification, haute couture, Maui Hawaii

Boston Herald “Both Sides Now” Bottom Line, The Bowie, David “Boy Crazy” Boyd, Joe Boyle, Peter Bramblett, Randall “Brand New Day” Brass, Bob Brecker, Michael Brecker, Randy. Briggs, David Brill Building (1619 Broadway) Broadway, New York City: 1619 Broadway (Brill Building) 1650 Broadway 1697 Broadway Bromberg, David Brooks, Harvey (ne Goldstein) Brovsky, Michael Brown, James Brown, Savoy “Brown Sugar” Bruce, Honey Bruce, Jack Bruce, Kitty Bruce, Lenny Buckley, Tim Buddy Miles Express Buffalo Springfield, The Bundrick, Rabbit “Burn Down the Mission” Bums, Bob Burton, Gary Burton, James Bush, Sam Butterfield, Paul Buttrey, Kenny Byrds, The Cactus Cafe Au Go Go Cafe Interlude Cale, J.


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

Regis Debray warns that “An American monoculture would inflict a sad future on the world, one in which the planet is converted to a global supermarket where people have to choose between the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.” Cited by Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes, France Rallies,” The New York Times, January 2, 1994, p. H 1. Afterword 1. Cited in David Brooks, “Buchananism: An Intellectual Cause,” The Weekly Standard, March 11, 1996, p. 18. Buchanan, with his penchant for “cultural war” (see his 1992 Republican National Convention Speech), is as close to an official (respectable) leader of American Jihad as we have. 2. Phil Patton, “Now It’s the Cars That Make the Characters Go,” The New York Times, Sunday, April 21, 1996, H 13. 3.


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

Wolin, ‘Hume and Conservatism’, American Political Science Review, 48.4, 1954, who describes Hume’s as ‘a conservatism without benefit of mystery’, arising from a desire to dissolve the claims of natural law and natural science independent of human nature, by means of reason itself A humane and moderate conservatism: this is at least the ambition of my book The Big Society, University of Buckingham Press 2010; and, in Smithian style, Compassionate Economics, Policy Exchange 2008, online at www.jesse norman.com ‘That insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician’: WN IV.ii.39 Rewards and status vs. norms and character: for a rather Smithian exploration of public and private virtue, and the beautifully named ‘résumé’ and ‘eulogy’ virtues, see David Brooks, The Road to Character, Allen Lane 2015 INDEX Act of Security, of 1706, 14 Act of Settlement, of 1701, 13 Act of Union, 1707, 11, 14–15, 89, 91, 118 actual markets, 243 the Adam Smith problem, 178–181 Addison, Joseph, 8 The African Queen, 63 agriculture, 86, 90, 112, 279 algorithmic consumers, 285 altruism, 178–179 America, xi–xii campaign finance law of, 258 colonies, xiii, 100–103, 115, 161, 279–280 companies of, 280–282 corporate lobbying in, 264 corporations in, 257 free-market in, 276–277 government of, 257–258 militias in, 120 modern, 257–258 taxation in, 101–102 American Revolutionary War, 104, 235 Anderson, John, 72 animal spirits, 241 Anne (queen), 13, 32–33 Annual Register, 66 anti-government, Smith, A., as, 186–190 anti-social morality, 308–311 anti-social norms, 308 Apple, 282 Argyll, Duke of, 33 Aristotle, 42–43, 163–164, 166 army.


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

Leipold, “Army Changes Tattoo Policy,” Army News Service, March 18, 2006. For more on the body as billboard, see Frank Eltman, “Your Ad Permanently Tattooed Here, There, and Everywhere on New York Man’s Body,” Associated Press, January 29, 2005; and Melanie Wells, “Hey, Is That an Advertisement on Your Arm?,” USA Today, July 23, 1999. Another useful article was David Brooks, “Nonconformity Is Skin Deep,” New York Times, August 27, 2006. Snowed-Under Slobs How much Americans spend on getting organized comes from Penelope Green, “Saying Yes to Mess,” New York Times, December 21, 2006. The PSB poll of slobs was conducted online on April 5–6, 2007. The book is Eric Abrahamson and David H.


pages: 480 words: 138,041

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

It’s not entirely clear to me if she is on board with that idea. Since June, Frances has mostly been quiet about the DSM. He is still blogging for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today and the Psychiatric Times, where he has weighed in on gun control and the presidential election and offered “to stop being an amateur columnist” if David Brooks would “stop being an amateur psychologist.” But the DSM has never been far from his mind, and as soon as the lights are on and the camera is running, he is back to it and drawing me into his explanation of all that has gone wrong with the DSM-5. I may be an upside-down Jesuit and he a world-weary rationalist, but for the moment, we’re just a couple of friends on the inside of the same joke.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

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

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

But Stanford was not Thiel’s intended audience. peter thiel, university-hater, heads to campus was the Reuters headline. “If I do my job right,” a spokesman boasted on Thiel’s behalf to the newswire, “this is the last class you’ll ever have to take.” There was lots more media attention, including a 60 Minutes segment and an essay by the New York Times columnist David Brooks. He had even more success on social media. Once the classes started, detailed transcripts appeared on the internet, written by a young protégé, Blake Masters. He was a Stanford Law student who’d worked at Founders Fund the previous semester and was a typical Thiel acolyte—handsome, extremely conservative, verbose, ambitious.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

They underscore the hard-drinking image of the Duke lacrosse team—which some residents say is a super-sized version of the university’s elitist, party-hearty ethos.” On the same day, the New York Times, as part of its increasingly blanket coverage of the lacrosse story, published two opinion pieces: one by its columnist David Brooks and the other by bestselling novelist Allan Gurganus, a resident of Hillsborough, North Carolina, just outside of Durham, and an occasional Duke professor. Neither piece was particularly straightforward but both men raised serious questions about Duke’s campus culture of privilege and elitism and how it could possibly have produced anything like the events that allegedly occurred on the night of March 13.

But it was a good question: Where was Coach K in all this? Truth be told, more than two months after the alleged incident inside 610 North Buchanan and three indictments of Duke players on the charges of rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping, there was still very little clarity about what had really happened on the night of March 13. But, argued David Brooks in his New York Times column—the Times took the story to heart—whatever had occurred was not what people assumed originally. “Witch hunts go in stages,” Brooks wrote. “First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don’t know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in.


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

Today, through campaigns being waged by the Center for Media and Democracy and Common Cause, ALEC is being challenged, its tax status is in peril, and its corporate members are in flight, although some fear the IRS scandal (involving the targeting of Tea Party NGOs applying for 501c4 tax status) in the spring of 2013 may blunt the attack on ALEC’s suspect tax status. On ALEC, see Bill Moyers, Schumann Media Center, The United States of ALEC, a documentary film, 2012. 8. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2013. David Brooks is fascinated by what he calls an inversion of national and local politics in his discussion of the Katz/Bradley book in his “The Power Inversion,” New York Times (op-ed), June 7, 2013. 9. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1947, p. 78. 10.


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

We need to knock them back to give us space to go after al Qaeda. As the review ground on, the public pressure on Obama shifted from making the case for more troops to something more primal, a criticism that would persist for seven years: He was, Washington concluded, dithering. Nothing bothered Obama more than one column by David Brooks in The New York Times. Brooks, a temperamentally moderate guy, announced that he had spoken to the nation’s “smartest military experts,” people “who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan.” These people, according to Brooks, “are not worried about his policy choices.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

For example, humans are much better at identifying—from everything out in the world—small sets of relevant aspects of the world from which to gather data in support of a particular task. Computers are much better at sifting through a massive collection of data, including a huge number of (possibly) relevant variables, and quantifying the variables’ relevance to predicting a target. Tip New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has written an excellent essay entitled “What Data Can’t Do” (Brooks, 2013). You should read this if you are considering the magical application of data science to solve your problems. Data science involves the judicious integration of human knowledge and computer-based techniques to achieve what neither of them could achieve alone.


pages: 499 words: 152,156

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

conceptual framework, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, financial independence, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, land reform, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, Mohammed Bouazizi, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rolodex, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

In 1998 a local publisher translated Paul Fussell’s 1982 cultural satire, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which makes such observations as “the more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.” In Chinese, the satire fell away, and the book sold briskly as a field guide for the new world. “Just having money will not win you universal acclaim, respect, or appreciation,” the translator wrote in the introduction. “What your consumption reveals about you is the more critical issue.” David Brooks’s book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There was translated into Chinese in 2002, and it became a best seller. It describes a distant world—one of American bourgeois bohemians, who mix sixties counterculture with Reagan-era economics—but, in China, it captured the strivers’ self-perception, and “Bobos,” or “bubozu,” became one of the year’s most-searched-for terms on the Chinese Internet.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

San Francisco newspaper publisher and full-time big mouth Sam Brannan lets word out, and the Gold Rush is on. 1850 With hopes of solid-gold tax revenues, the US hastily dubs California the 31st state. 1849–51 San Francisco’s waterfront ‘Sydney-Town’ area becomes an increasing target of resentment and attacks; Australian boarding houses are torched six times by arsonists in two years. 1851 Gold discovery in Australia leads to cheering in the streets of Melbourne and panic in the streets of San Francisco as the price for California gold plummets. 1861–65 While US Civil War divides North from South back East, SF perversely profits in the West as industry diverted from factories burdened by the war effort heads to San Francisco. May 10, 1869 The Golden Spike completes the first transcontinental railroad. The news travels via San Franciscan David Brooks’ invention, the telegraph. 1873 When a nervous driver declines to test the brakes of Andrew Hallidie’s ‘wire rope railway,’ aka cable car, Hallidie jumps in and steers the car downhill as crowds cheer. 1882 The US Chinese Exclusion Act suspends new immigration from China. These racially targeted laws remain until 1943. 1882–1924 The Exclusion Act spurs the passage of parallel Japanese exclusion laws, with ordinances limiting citizenship, marriage, immigration and property rights for Japanese San Franciscans.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

I should particularly mention Jim Markwick, Caroline Marland, Bob Phillis, Amelia Fawcett, Jeremy Bullmore, Paul Myners, Bob Gavron, Carolyn McCall, Tim Brooks, Andrew Miller, Marc Sands, Paul Naismith, Darren Singer, Brent Hoberman, Adam Freeman, Stuart Taylor, John Paton, Shaun Williams, Jo Murray, Camilla Nicholls, Derek Gannon, Joe Clark, Richard Furness, Eamonn Store, David Pemsel, Alan Hudson, Stella Beaumont, Dave Kirwan, Pippa Prior, Gennady Kolker, Caroline Little, Helen Bird, Nick Hewat, Steve Folwell, Ronan Dunne, Simon Fox, David Magliano, Chris Wade, Ian McClelland, Nick Castro, David Brook, Dave Boxall, Neil Berkett, Claire Enders, Douglas McCabe, Olly Purnell and Tony Danker. Graeme Wood was an exemplary philanthropist. I have been supported better than I deserved by Pauline Willis, Doreen Pallier, Helen Walmsley-Johnson, Keren Levy, Janet Wardell, Carla Betts and Casey Charlesworth.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 344–365. Prentice, M., Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2018). Openness to experience predicts intrinsic value shifts after deliberating one’s own death. Death Studies, 42(4), 205–215. 51. Yalom, Existential psychotherapy, p. 45. 52. Yalom, Existential psychotherapy, p. 45. 53. David Brooks refers to this as the Second Mountain: Brooks, D. (2019). The second mountain: The quest for a moral life. New York: Random House. 54. Krippner, The plateau experience, p. 119. 55. Lowry, The journals of A. H. Maslow, p. 1306. 56. Becker, Denial of death; Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015).


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

On another occasion, I casually asked a neighbour if he’d seen the comedy The Death of Stalin (2017), to which he replied there was nothing funny about it because Stalin was ‘really up against it’ and ‘tried his best’. Another word for SWPL might be ‘Bobo’ – bohemian bourgeois, the term coined by David Brooks for the new middle class who were immersed in a bohemian culture in their music and fashion tastes, while actually living pretty bourgeois lives. Among London Bobos, as with their American equivalents, most are in pretty conventional and usually married relationships; in most cases, the man commutes each day, while the wife more likely works in an office part time or at home, and this arrangement is still largely taken for granted.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

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

Howard Berkes and Robert Benincasa, “Mines Not Safe Despite $1 Billion in Fines, Federal Audit Says,” NPR, August 22, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/08/22/752868484/no-link-between-fines-and-safety-in-mines-government-audit-says; and Department of Labor, Office of the Inspector General, “MSHA Did Not Evaluate Whether Civil Monetary Penalties Effectively Deterred Unsafe Mine Operations,” August 16, 2019, https://www.oig.dol.gov/public/reports/oa/viewpdf.php?r=23-19-002-06-001&y=2019. 29. Berkes and Benincasa, “Mines Not Safe”; and Department of Labor, Office of the Inspector General, “MSHA Did Not Evaluate.” 30. Kirstin Downey, The Woman behind the New Deal (New York: Doubleday, 2009). 31. David Brooks, “How the First Woman in the U.S. Cabinet Found Her Vocation,” Atlantic, April 14, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/frances-perkins/390003/. 32. Joseph Berger, “Triangle Fire: A Half-Hour of Horror,” New York Times, March 21, 2011, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/triangle-fire-a-half-hour-of-horror/. 33.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

San Francisco newspaper publisher and full-time big mouth Sam Brannan lets word out, and the Gold Rush is on. 1850 With hopes of solid-gold tax revenues, the US hastily dubs California the 31st state. 1849–51 San Francisco’s waterfront ‘Sydney-Town’ area becomes an increasing target of resentment and attacks; Australian boarding houses are torched six times by arsonists in two years. 1851 Gold discovery in Australia leads to cheering in the streets of Melbourne and panic in the streets of San Francisco as the price for California gold plummets. 1861–65 While US Civil War divides North from South back East, SF perversely profits in the West as industry diverted from factories burdened by the war effort heads to San Francisco. May 10, 1869 The Golden Spike completes the first transcontinental railroad. The news travels via San Franciscan David Brooks’ invention, the telegraph. 1873 When a nervous driver declines to test the brakes of Andrew Hallidie’s ‘wire rope railway,’ aka cable car, Hallidie jumps in and steers the car downhill as crowds cheer. 1882 The US Chinese Exclusion Act suspends new immigration from China. These racially targeted laws remain until 1943. 1882–1924 The Exclusion Act spurs the passage of parallel Japanese exclusion laws, with ordinances limiting citizenship, marriage, immigration and property rights for Japanese San Franciscans.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

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

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

On the deployment of the broken windows theory by then New York City police commissioner William Bratton, see William Bratton and Peter Knobler, Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (New York: Random House, 1998). 104.For an early and influential (and mocking) portrait of Yuppies, see David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 105.For a sampling of these attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton, see David Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (New York: Free Press, 1996). Brock later recanted his own attacks and turned his partisan fury on his former GOP allies.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

I never succeeded in overcoming the nausea produced by the smell of the oil.”22 Andra’s experience as a bobbin boy, boiler attendant, and soaker of bobbins in vats of oil was sufficient to convince him that to prosper at business he would have to move off the factory floor into the backroom offices. He set his sights on becoming a full-time bookkeeper. Those plans were put on hold when, after less than a year with John Hay, he was presented with another opportunity by yet another Scotsman. His uncle Hogan regularly played draughts (or checkers as it was known in the United States) with David Brooks, the manager of the Pittsburgh office of the Atlantic & Ohio Telegraph Company, also known as the O’Rielly Telegraph Company, after its founder, Henry O’Rielly.* When, one evening over the draughts board, Brooks asked “if he knew where a good boy could be found to act as messenger,” his uncle mentioned Andra’s name and volunteered to inquire whether his parents would let him take the job.

“Although I cannot say sow crae as broad as I once could, I can read about Wallace, Bruce and Burns with as much enthusiasm as ever, and feel proud of being a son of Old Caledonia and I like to tell people when they ask ‘Are you native born?’ [They would not have asked had his accent remained.] ‘No, sir, I am a Scotchman,’ and I feel as proud I am sure as ever Romans did when it was their boast to say, ‘I am a Roman citizen.’”24 For his interview for the telegraph messenger position, Andy wanted to appear as American as possible. David Brooks who managed the Pittsburgh office was a Scotsman, and his immediate superior, James Reid, the company’s general superintendent, was not only Scots but from Dunfermline; but Andy was convinced that he “could make a smarter showing if alone with Mr. Brooks than if my good old Scotch father were present, perhaps to smile at my airs.”


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

The Christian Zionists’ entire political focus is on lobbying for U.S. support of the hardest possible Israeli hard line—in order to be in sync, as they see it, with the Bible’s apocalyptic prophecies. These beliefs are an important source of the Republicans’ policy toward Israel, and thus of America’s, which is disturbing to me. Is that unfair? In a New York Times column opposing the nuclear deal with Iran, the right-leaning David Brooks argued that the United States should mistrust the Iranian regime specifically because of its religious beliefs about the end-time—because undoubtedly “Iranian leaders are as apocalyptically motivated…as their pronouncements suggest they are.” I’m reminded of one of Mencken’s dispatches from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.


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

the United States is an outlier: Gretchen Livingston and Deja Thomas, “Among 41 countries, only U.S. lacks paid parental leave,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/16/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/. 8. UNLUCKY GENERATIONS Only 3 percent came from the poorest: David Brooks, “Who Is Driving Inequality? You Are,” New York Times, April 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/income-inequality.html. “unluckiest generation”: Andrew Van Dam, “The unluckiest generation in U.S. history,” Washington Post, June 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

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

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

When they were soul-searching young adults, the culture experienced a fascination with the mystical in the 1970s. When they were building careers and families in the 1980s and 1990s, the country favored stability and stoking the economy. By the 2000s, well-off Boomers in their 50s and 60s were melding hippie instincts with yuppie ones, finding moral meaning in what they consumed. As David Brooks (b. 1961) put it in his 2001 book, Bobos in Paradise, food became “a barometer of virtue” as Boomers “selectively updated” hippie values: “Gone are the sixties-era things that were fun and of interest to teenagers, like Free Love, and retained are all the things that might be of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains.”


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

They could adopt poses, try on styles, and immerse themselves in seedy cultural genres without taking any of them too seriously. (In this regard they were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.) Today this discernment is exercised by much of Western society. In his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, the journalist David Brooks observed that many members of the middle class have become “bourgeois bohemians” who affect the look of people at the fringes of society while living a thoroughly conventional lifestyle. Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process.

bin Laden, Osama bioethics biological weapons Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing birthday paradox Black, Donald Black Death Blackwell, Aaron Blair, Tony blank slate blasphemy blood and soil blood feuds; see also revenge blood libel blood money (wergild) blood sports Bloom, Paul Bluebeard bobbies Bobo, Lawrence Bokassa, Jean-Bédel Boleyn, Anne bonobos (pygmy chimps) book production Boone, Daniel Borat (film) borderline personality disorder border wars; see also territory Bosnia Boston crime in homicides in police Public Library revolutionary and social identity TenPoint coalition Boston Strangler Bradford, William brain and aggression amygdala anterior cingulate cortex cerebral cortex cerebrum Dominance circuit dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and empathy Fear circuit forebrain frontal lobes gray matter hindbrain hypothalamus insula Intermale Aggression circuit, see brain, Dominance circuit limbic system maturation of midbrain motor strip orbital cortex damage to and emotion and empathy and Equality Matching and psychopathy and revenge and self-control and violence orbitofrontal cortex, see brain, orbital cortex parietal lobes periaqueductal gray prefrontal cortex; see also brain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; brain, frontal brain (cont.) lobes; brain, orbital cortex; brain, ventromedial prefrontal cortex Rage circuit rat Seeking circuit; see also striatum and self-control striatum, ventral Sylvian fissure temporoparietal junction ventromedial prefrontal cortex Brazil Brecke, Peter Bridges, Ruby Nell Bright, John Brisson, Jacques-Pierre Britain/United Kingdom animal rights in colonies of and Declaration of Human Rights as great power and homophobia and IQ and Long Peace opium wars political apologies by and Roman Empire slave trade violence in in war see also England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales British Empire Broca, Paul Broken Windows theory Bronner, Ethan Brooke, Rupert Brooks, David Brooks, Mel Brophy, Brigid Brown, Donald Brown, Harold Brown, Jeffrey Browning, Christopher Brownmiller, Susan Broyles, William Bruno, Giordano Brunswick, Duke of Buckley, William Buhaug, Halvard Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists bullfighting bullying Bundy, Ted Buñuel, Luis Burger, Jerry Burke, Edmund Burks, Stephen Burr, Aaron Burundi, genocide in Bush, George H.


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

The AEI then threw its weight behind the Freddie/Fannie story, with Wallison as point man, and the trusty echo chamber was revved up. Professional economists were recruited to bolster the narrative. The public-choice crowd was quick to chip in. Mark Calabria from Cato was brought in to fluff up the numbers. Dependable fellow travelers such as David Brooks, George Will, and Tyler Cowen chimed in in the columns and blogs. Douglas Holtz-Eakin signed on, in a way to soon become important in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Edward Pinto at AEI was brought on board to crunch some numbers. Raghuram Rajan promoted a more fuzzy-tinged and humanized version of the story in his Fault Lines.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

The aggressiveness and design of our response helped us end the panic and exit those programs remarkably quickly, with a positive return to the taxpayer as well as a tremendous boost to the economy. Sources: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve Board, and U.S. Treasury Department. We began to see a few cracks in the relentless media negativity about our work. Axelrod once emailed to say that the right-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks had just told him I was the “unsung hero” of the administration. “Start singing!” Axelrod wrote. Brooks did write a nice column that chronicled some of the greatest hits from earlier in the year—a New Republic essay titled “The Geithner Disaster,” a Wall Street Journal survey of forty-nine economists who gave me a failing grade—before concluding that “the evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong.”


pages: 612 words: 187,431

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

[Bolinger-Bronson] Dan Bolinger and Tan Bronson. Applying RCS and SCCS. O'Reilly & Associates. 1995. ISBN 1-56592-117-8. Not just a cookbook, this also surveys the design issues in version-control systems. [Brokken] Frank Brokken. C++ Annotations Version. 2002. Available on the Web. [BrooksD] David Brooks. Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows. 2000. Available on the Web. [Brooks] Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month. 20th Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley. 1995. ISBN 0-201-83595-9. [Boehm] Hans Boehm. Advantages and Disadvantages of Conservative Garbage Collection. Thorough discussion of tradeoffs between garbage-collected and non-garbage-collected environments.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

Speakers differ in how easily they stomach the various generalizations that other speakers make, depending perhaps on their age, birthplace, subculture, or even personality. I can swallow the foregoing sentences with give a headache to (barely). But I draw the line at a similar stretching—kiss it goodbye—that must have sounded fine to the columnist David Brooks and his copy editors at the New York Times, seeing as how he used it no fewer than three times in the course of a single essay on the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah crisis:77 You can kiss goodbye, at least for the time being, to some of the features of the recent crises. You can kiss goodbye to the fascinating chess match known as the Middle East peace process. . . .


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 37. Hans Moravec, Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books, http://www.kurzweiltech.com/Searle/searle_response_letter.htm. 38. John Searle to Ray Kurzweil, December 15, 1998. 39. Lanier, "One Half of a Manifesto." 40. David Brooks, "Good News About Poverty," New York Times November 27, 2004, A35. 41. Hans Moravec, Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books, http://www.kurzweiltech.com/Searle/searle_response_letter.htm. 42. Patrick Moore, "The Battle for Biotech Progress—GM Crops Are Good for the Environment and Human Welfare," Greenspirit (February 2004), http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

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

{635} Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Book, 2009), p. 42. {636} “Five-Fingered Discounts,” The Economist, October 23, 2010, p. 81. {637} William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 80. {638} David Brooks, “The Culture of Nations,” New York Times, April 13, 2006, section 4, p. 11. {639} Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, p. 143. {640} “Red Tape and Blue Sparks,” part of a survey on India’s economy, The Economist, June 2, 2001, p. 9. {641} Renée Rose Shield, Diamond Stories: Enduring Change on 47th Street (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter 5


George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, Defenestration of Prague, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fear of failure, invisible hand, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, one-China policy, one-state solution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

It would be his life’s work to manage individuals, groups, armies, crises, government officials and departments, and an almost infinite variety of situations. What was it about Marshall that caused cadets at VMI, and generals, admirals, and political leaders in later years, to allow themselves to be managed and led by him? David Brooks said it was because Marshall knew “how to exercise controlled power.”21 Mark Stoler wrote that Marshall’s natural “austerity, discipline, and distance from his peers” was seen as a “form of charisma.”22 Both explanations bring us closer to answering the question, yet neither is wholly satisfactory.


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

Only the waters of the occupied territories are subject to Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Washington’s “Peace Process” 912 discussion, consistent with the general framework of capitulation.27 The Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty has provisions on “achieving a comprehensive and lasting settlement of all the water problems between [Israel and Jordan].” They are outlined by David Brooks of Canada’s International Development Centre, a specialist on water resources of the region and a member of Canada’s delegation to the Middle East Multilateral Peace Talks on water and the environment. He observes that the terms are not “particularly remarkable as water agreements go,” with one exception: “what is omitted, or, more accurately, who is omitted.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

Stern, 7/10/67, Stern Papers, JFKL; George Boas to Alice Smith, 11/28/76, Smith correspondence, Sherwin Collection; Smith and Weiner, Letters, p. 138). Julius acquired Van Gogh’s First Steps (After Millet) in 1926, and Frank Oppenheimer inherited it in 1935. For the provenance of the Oppenheimer family’s Van Gogh collection, see “Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Works,” a CD-ROM database, copyright David Brooks (Sharon, MA: Barewalls Publications, 2002). Julius bought Picasso’s Mother and Child in 1928, and Frank Oppenheimer sold it in 1980 for $1,050,000 (see Dr. Joseph Baird, Jr., to Frank Oppenheimer, 4/12/80, folder 4–46, box 4; Jack Tanzer to Frank Oppenheimer, 5/13/80, folder 4–46, box 4, Frank Oppenheimer Papers, UCB). 12 “My mother didn’t”: JRO, interview by T.


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

* * * OUR READERS Many thanks to the travellers who used the last edition and wrote to us with helpful hints, useful advice and interesting anecdotes: James, Lucy Alexander, Paul Anderton, Peter Arcus, Pamela Ashby, John Baker, Sophie Bannister Martin, Molly Blackburn, Yves Blavet, Rosy Blockley, K Bridges, David Brooks, Francis Cagney, Jenny Connolly, Jim Conwell, Paul Costello, Bob Cromwell, Emma-Jane Crozier, Simon Curtis, Bill Darcy, Catherine Deleplace, James Dunn, Waltraud Englefield, Annalena Erlenbach, Elizabeth Fox, Liz Gammie, Richard Gammie, Ross Geach, Tom Griffiths, Bob Hart, Andy Hellis, Jenny Hinson, Kirsty Hughes, Ruth Hunt, James Irvine, Reka Kozalek, Wendy Lawrence, Anne Leroy, Robert Loaring, Maria Luk, Glenys Lunt, Graham Lupp, Marilyn Marston, Trevor Mazzucchelli, William McCartney, Kim Moody, Anthony Moore, Sophie O’Donnell, Rob Olston, Saw Ai Ooi, Rita Packford, Suzanne Parry, Clare Power, Ana Ramos, Jen Randall, Frances Rein, Cynthia Rignanese, Walter Sassard, Greg Slade, Jo-Anne Smetherham, Judy Smith, Bas Van Der Maat, Jason Vaughan, Mitzi Waltz, Susan Weiss, Silvia Woodier, Ann Young, Summer Zeh ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to the following for the use of their content: London Underground Map © Transport for London 2006.