David Brooks

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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.

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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.

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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.

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?

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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. . . .

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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., 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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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., “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?

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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

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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.

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?

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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.”

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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.

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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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?”

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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.”

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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.

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.

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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.

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●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).

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.

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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’.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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).

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.

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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.

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.

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., 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.

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., 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.

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.

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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.”

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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).

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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"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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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“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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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‘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.

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.”

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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.

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.”

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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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?”

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.”

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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).

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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., “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?

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.

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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.”

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).

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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.

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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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.”

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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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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).

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.”

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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?

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.

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.

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.”

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., “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.

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.

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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.

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.

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).

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.”

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., 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.

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."

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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.

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